Getting the Brawl Rolling

For the first post of this, yet-another-video-game-type blog, I'm going to say some nice things and some not so nice things about Super Smash Brothers and Nintendo in general. Consider this a stream of conscienceness post while I'm still trying to find the voice of this blog.

First of all, I've played every iteration of SSB and have on the whole, been fairly impressed. I remember originally thinking SSB would more along the lines of a traditional fighter a la Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. When I was met with the pseudo-platformer, 4 player (ahem) melee I was pleased. However one thing stuck in my mind. I couldn't shake the feeling that out of the probably hundreds of Nintendo games I had played as a kid, this one was only using characters from 9 of them. Really that's all you got?

In the original SSB you had:

• Captain Falcon - F-Zero
• Fox - Starfox
• Donkey Kong - Donkey Kong
• Pikachu - Pokemon
• Jigglypuff - Pokemon
• Mario - Super Mario Bros.
• Luigi - Super Mario Bros.
• Yoshi - Super Mario Bros.
• Samus - Metroid
• Ness - Earthbound
• Kirby - Kirby
  
• Link - Zelda

So let me get this straight Nintendo - after the entire run of both the NES and the SNES, not to mention a good ways into the N64's life span, the best 12 characters (created by you) that you can come up with includes Jigglypuff AND Kirby. Was the one round pink blob not enough?

Now I understand the whole thing is to include only 1st or 2nd party characters, but are you kidding me? 12 characters from 9 games is all they could come up with after utterly dominating video games for 14 years? Does anyone else find that a bit depressing? They all don't have to be the same level of popularity as a Mario or Pikachu, but jeez, can we get a few more names in there? Where the hell is Little Mac?

Don't worry Mac you'll appear as a fucking
item in the 3rd one... Hey did you get that
Goddamned Nintendo Power subscription I
mentioned earlier?

As it turns out, this was my first, sad reminder that Nintendo has 9 good franchises (arguably, as I've never been a Metroid fan), 2 of which still haven't seen full sequels in North America since the SNES, if at all. That's 7 - ok, we'll add the SSB series and make it 8 now. But the fact remains: Since 1985 Nintendo has probably 10 good game franchises under it's belt. That's 23 years of repeating the same 10 games every few months.

Considering 3rd party developers haven't received much support since the N64 era, Nintendo has a long way to go to reclaim their popularity with, let's be honest here, Me - whether or not Nintendo cares about that, I guess I'll just have to wait to find out.

Coming soon: Part 2: Why SSB Brawl is a good sign and why the Wii is a piece of true garbage.