6/8/2007 - Super Smash Bros. Brawl Trailer: RETRO Version

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is perhaps the third most anticipated game behind Metroid Prime 3 (what should be the best FPS with the Wiimote) and Super Mario Galaxy (I'm not sure about the control scheme on this one, but Shigeru Miyamoto's behind it!). The first Super Smash Bros. was a big hit late in the Nintendo 64's lifespan. The Nintendo 64 wasn't known to be a system for fighting games mainly because the controller wasn't designed for them. Nintendo wanted to correct that problem with their own fighting game based on their mascots.

It was no ordinary fighting game, though... special moves weren't pulled off by keypad sequences, instead each character had their own set of special moves that were easily accessed with the combination of just one button and the direction of the analog stick. Yes, you would be using the analog stick to control the movements of the characters. This was a new concept for a fighting game as it was the first (I believe) to add how fast the character would move based on how hard you're pressing on the control stick.

Another thing that made Super Smash Bros. different was that there was no health meter. Your goal in the game is not to "kill" the opponent by taking away all their health. Instead the goal is to knock the opponents out of the arena during the fight. There is a damage counter for each player, though, and that determines how far your character moves on a single blow from the opponent.

The game started out on the Nintendo 64 as a 3-D game, and although it had a fairly low polygon count (compared to today's games of course), it was very playable and fun. I do have to wonder, though, if it would be possible to make a Super Smash Bros. completely in 2-D. That's because even though the characters and backgrounds are fully rendered 3-D objects, the gameplay itself was two-dimensional. Apparently, one person took this thought and ran with it, taking old 2-D mascot sprites and using them to remake the Super Smash Bros Brawl preview in glorious 8-bit and 16-bit graphics!



Now wouldn't it be awesome if Nintendo did something like this and release it on the Virtual Console?