Super Smash Bros. Brawl -- 6 September 2012, Friends Matches #02
Hopefully, even if you don't seem to care for ages-old brawly action, the accompanying brand new content will give you something to enjoy anyway. Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving to those of you living where it's recognized! For the rest... happy Thursday, Novemer 22nd, 2012! --- As often happens, you can see more matches from this session if you go here: • Super Smash Bros. Brawl - Sep 5 12 A --- Match #1 -- Lylat Cruise Wolf (Joou) vs. Samus (EEL) I tried very hard to make sure that there wouldn't be any more one-on-one action going on in a game that's clearly designed around the idea that there should be as much chaos as possible going on at once, but I simply couldn't let this one pass by. As usual, it's full of the usual excessive amounts of insanity that the two of us are always leaving in our wake (or are we in fact pursuing it, rather than the other way around?), but with a little bonus that I'll just let you enjoy. It's not quite up to scratch with the quality of the source material being aped at, but it's pretty neat all the same. I honestly can't believe I remembered how to initiate it, but it must've been fresh in my mind at the time... and completely absent from it now, so I guess I'll have to re-remember. Anyway, the only other thing I want to point out here while I've got my soapbox out... notice how the match itself is conducted with all due manner of care and proper "seriousness" (for lack of a better word, as I'm clearly anything but serious about this sort of thing) even with the intrusion of several instances of weapons of mass destruction. Once the poster child for perceived balance-busting items, the original all-powerful hammer is glad to demonstrate that all items are manageable in such circumstances, up to the act of picking it up (which isn't "free" by any means, as you'll note) as well as the drawback to being stuck holding it and the new trait of them being failure prone, even the newer and more powerful variant. Oh, and of course we see far more than that, including two Smash Balls, the new poster child which is unique among items for being especially non-gimme and a game in and of itself to bust it for yourself without giving it to an opponent. Just to reiterate, the items didn't break the balance, the balance was broken in each critical juncture when one player made a punishable action and it's as simple as that. ...whew, glad to have that off my chest, but once in awhile, people griping about the items being wholly unmanageable and "unfair" just gets my goat. (Graaahhh!) --- Match #2 -- Mario Bros. Ice Climbers (Joou) vs. Bowser (EEL) vs. Luigi (Snivy) Of course, I never pass up the opportunity to have a good visit to the Mario Bros. stage, although obviously that would be a little difficult anyhow, seeing as how the randomizer picks for us. Anyway, I'm a little bothered once again by the extreme bias against this stage in the name of assumed "fairness"... but there's nothing intrinsically unfair about equal-opportunity obstacles of unreasonable power. Either that or I'm an agent of chaos and I need to dress up in a purple suit and chase a caped crusader around just to "prove" something about the best civil order being disorder... or something. I'm not really sure what I want, but I'll be sure to run an unreasonable scheme just to prove how serious I am. --- Match #3 -- WarioWare, Inc. Ike (Joou) vs. Bowser (EEL) vs. Ice Climbers (Snivy) I also won't pass up the opportunity to visit WarioWare, because in fact we ended up being here twice. The thought that the uneven distribution of microgame rewards if a major violation of fair play has long been an interesting sticking point in my thoughts that chaos is only ever a good thing for the game... and then I got to thinking (and presumably haven't re-thought what I'd already realized before, otherwise I'd just be agreeing with myself, and that'd just be plain weird!) that perhaps it's just another layer of the game that's afoot. I mean, whoever said that succeeding at a microgame entitled you to a "reward" per se? In fact, what you get is another layer of the microgame's influence doled out in what would naturally be regarded as one... but the natural occurrence of great disparity between the effects and the fact that they have nowhere near close to the usual full effective magnitude says to me that they're actually a test to see how you respond when all but one character is invulnerable or if one grows big and the others only get minor damage recovery. To wit, it's a wordless "microgame" itself to "get that guy!" or something to that effect. --- Match #4 -- Smashville Ganondorf (Joou) vs. Pikachu (EEL) vs. Marth (Snivy) Okay, okay, we'll have a properly "fair" stage to round out the group, but the items are staying (as already "demonstrated" to be "perfectly fair" by and to myself) and there's no way you can forbid us from having the chaos we crave anyway. (So nya!)
