We ordered pizza toward the end of the tournament, and when it arrived sometime after 7:00 in the evening, a lot of people were starting to realize how hungry they were. Five hours of non-stop Smash Bros. can work up an appetite. Making an executive decision, I mandated everyone take a little break (fifteen minutes rest per hour of play, right?) while the hungry people chowed down. Not to break the Super Smash Bros. mood, I hopped over to the sound test menu started playing back some of the music we'd managed to unlock throughout our playtime in the evening.
In my time with the game before the party, I had skimmed across most of the 128 starting music tracks and found some kick-ass remixes of old songs (Super Mario Land) and songs completely out of left field that were also kick-ass (Tetris Type-A). But having everyone else listen in on the music and see if they could remember which game it was from was really cool. (Just like playing Radio Trivia in the comfort of your home!) Ears perked at the sounds of Star Fox, Zelda, Mother, and especially at the fantastic vocalized versions of the three Wario Ware games. The really cool thing about the Wario Ware music is how both the English and Japanese versions of the song are in the game, something I'm really hoping the North American version will have when it hits in a few weeks.
Two more Kirbys and the Dragoon appear on the Pikmin stage, and R.O.B. and Sonic go crazy on the Wario Ware stage.
With some people still eating pizza, I decided to try out some of the game's online features. Since I still hadn't been able to find any players to play online against, for whatever reason, I did the only thing I really could do: watch matches in spectator mode. Selecting the option took us to a screen showing the character lineup and stage for the next battle. It also gave the option to place a wager on which character you think will win, using the coins earned throughout the game to use in the Coin Launcher.
Being the conservative, patient gambler, I bet the farm—100 coins max bet—on three straight matches, winning more and more coins back with each successive victory. The choices I was faced with were not easy ones. The hardest decision of the night was a battle between a yellow Kirby and a pink Kirby. We decided to go with the pink Kirby, figuring its handler didn't need a gimmicky color to prove their skills. With such awesome logic, we won the bet. Though I dropped a few matches (lesson learned: Always bet on Ness!), I still came out ahead. Hooray for easy money!
It didn't take long for the fighting action to start back up again. At this point, everyone had a lot of playtime and watch time behind them, so the pace of the evening changed. Before, everyone was excited to see Brawl and play it for the very first time. That initial shock and awe had dissipated for most people. I noticed people being more deliberate with all of their actions, learning the ins and outs of the game (particularly what to do when a smash ball appears), and most importantly of all, picking favorites.
Final Smashes abound on Lylat Cruise and Sonic's Green Hill Zone in action with Ganondorf.
With 34 characters in the game to choose from (I hadn't yet unlocked Jigglypuff at that point), I thought that most people would have been most comfortable with the characters they knew from Melee. I was proven wrong with the character choices in the tournament earlier in the evening. However, at this point in the night I was starting to get feedback as to why some of the new characters were better than the old ones.
Ike was popular among a handful of people. Despite his relative slowness, his big, booming attacks won their hearts. A friend of mine who had been a die-hard Ness user played as the Earthbound character initially, but then, almost the instant he picked up Lucas, he liked him better in every imaginable way. Zero Suit Samus was a pretty popular choice for many people (myself included) due to her revealing outfit quick movement. Selecting her over regular Samus is as easy as holding down a shield button (shoulder button on our controllers) as the game loads.
It looked like regular Samus wasn't the greatest hit with people. This was evident when Zero Suit Samus activated a final smash, which sucks everyone into a big bright light before launching them away. When it's over, Samus is back in her regular suit, much to the dismay of the player in control of her. Samus has been made a little bit slower and floatier than she was in Melee. But when you compare her against Zero Suit Samus, it's very difficult to jump back and forth between fast and slow. Perhaps she was designed this way. But instead of being able to freely decide which form you want to be in, as with Zelda and Sheik, it's reliant on the Smash Ball, a critical gameplay element. We tried to do the up-down-up taunt code to shake off the armor, but it didn't work for us, instead providing an easy target for the opposition. Something about the two-character thing with the smash ball doesn't seem quite right.
DK wins at Port Town despite his horrible Final Smash, and a spirited match at Pokémon Stadium 2.
While everyone was trying out all the different characters, we were also trying out all the different stages. I don't remember how many stages I had unlocked at this point in the evening, but I know there are more stages than characters. I noticed that we hadn't played on all of the stages until around 8 p.m. or so, when someone selected Smashville. This wasn't because people didn't want to play on the stage—remember, everyone playing the game had never done so before this party—it's just that with all of the stages available, everyone forgot about what stages they had played on previously. With all the random browsing, random stage selecting, and between the Brawl, Melee, and custom stages, there was still one stage that didn't manage to get picked after six hours of playtime. That's a lot of stages!
The stage variety is incredible, too. All the dynamic stage types in Melee are back for Brawl, but changed for the better. The fighting platform in Melee's Mute City moves around the track and stops in different areas, but they aren't very different from place to place. Brawl's Port Town features the same moving platform around the track, but each stop has a very different layout. In fact, there are places where you aren't even fighting on the stage, but rather on structures around it. It feels like five stages in one, as does Isle Delfino, whose entirely different situation and platform layouts make it a unique stage despite the same idea of a moving platform from location to location.
The Pictochat stage is a personal darling of mine, and one that happened to appear a lot when we went with random stage selection. I think it has one of the best original music tracks of the game, a jazzy piano rag with Pictochat sounds mixed in. The stage action is pretty cool too. Drawings rotate in and out and create different obstacles. The drawings can cause damage based on what they are (spikes, fire) or cause interference (water, wind gusts). For a stage that looks as simple as they come, it's actually one of the craziest ones, and certainly, one of the most fun.
