Come the launch of Nintendo's latest baby, GameCube, the world finally saw the sequel to this classic - Super Smash Bros. Melee. Disregarded by some as a kiddish party-game, it didn't sell as well as, say, Star Wars Roque Squadron II: Rogue Leader (Editor's Note: Rogue Leader was outsold 2:1 by SSBM). Fortunately I wanted to give the title a try, and after 80 hours of pure entertainment, I am psyched up enough to write this review.
Once you boot up the disc, you are introduced to the game with a nice title-sequence, displaying the characters whom are up-and-ready from the very beginning. There's Mario, your favourite potato-nosed plumber from the world of greasy moustaches, Donkey Kong, the hairy gorilla whom has a banana for a brain, Link, the greatest blue-eyed swordsman ever, Samus Aran, the ultra-cool babe whom equips nice bo... ballistic missiles and many, many characters left for you to discover. 15 colourful personalities are selectable from the get-go, while 10 can be unlocked via playing the game on single-player and / or multi-player modes. A large part of the fun is to discover these secret characters one by one, and 'thus I won't spoil any of them away ( with the exception of our pill-loving Dr. Mario - my apologies
).
You are now past the exhaustingly beautiful intro-movie. Your eyes meet the intro-screen, screen which recommends you to push the 'start' -button. If you are feeling ignorant, and decide to rebel against the recommendation, you will be treated with a tutorial - a short demo of how things work out. The controls themselves are quite basic - and once you get the hang of them, the real fun begins. I do not like to introduce the control-schemes in reviews, as you will probably read the manuals through anyway, and learn them much better given that you will be aided with a picture of the controller. Let me just say that they work. Even those friends of mine whom had never touched a GameCube controller in their sorry lives learned the basics of Melee in about ten to twenty minutes. Fluidity, tricks and timing come via experience - so don't worry if your battles seem clunky and boring at first. This game is fun as long as you have a competetive, equally skilled partner or partners nearby. Single-Player is fun for only one purpose: unlocking hidden stages, characters and trophies ( I will return to this specific subject a bit later ).
Friday is a tempting day for video-gaming. You have a whole weekend ahead of you, a flat of your own and a nice, brand new television-set with a GameCube, 4 Controllers and a copy of Melee underneath. Lucky son of a mushroom - for this is the setup we Melee-gamers dream about. But for some reason your friends are unavailable, and you think the night is ruined and it is better for you to hit the sack. Mistake. It is time to test the single-player capabilities of the title, hunt some trophies and unlock a few hidden characters during the process.
A lonely evening offers you many options - you can either try to complete the game in the Adventure-mode, compete against random foes in the Classic-mode, destroy some targets in the Target Test, tweak your skills in the Event mode, hit a poor, defenseless, innocent and cute Boxing-sack in The Home Run Contest or just go whacky in the Multi-Man Melee mode. Believe me - there's dozens of hours worth of quality gaming if you aim for all the characters, trophies, stages, extras and what not. Plus you can hone your skills and claim yourself as the champ once your friends come over.
There is a certain bonus-feature I have mentioned twice already - a feature which was designed to keep all nostalgic Nintendo-freaks glued to their seats. Trophies. I can not remember the official amount (292 - Ed), but there's close to 300 different trophies within the game. During my 80-hour gaming-time, I have only managed to collect some 200 trophies - so there's a lot to do before every trophy is in your shelf ( some even require you to buy a specific game - ie. Pikmin for the Captain Olimar trophy ). A short, but very descriptive text comes with each trophy, and they are fun to read through, 'thus making the trophy-hunt a very addictive free-time activity. Still it is obvious that SSBM is a party-game all over. Let me re-assure you - SSBM is the best multiplayer-title on GameCube at the moment.
If friends are available, however, the real fun begins. You can choose from three different play-modes - VS. Mode, Tournament Mode and Special Mode.
VS. Mode is the easiest and fastest to set-up - just choose your characters, give them names and select the stage. You can tweak the gameplay a bit, though, if you enter the Options-menu. As a default, the VS. Mode is set to 'Time', which means that your characters will have infinite lives but a limited amount of time. With each death, your character loses a point, and consequently, with each kill, he / she / it gains a point. The player whom has the most points when the time runs out, wins the round. The next option is "Stock" - aka Survival Mode - which lets you choose the amount of lives. When your character runs out of them, he / she / it drops out and those whom are still alive, continue the fight. Last man / woman / thing standing wins. The third and final option is the 'Coins' mode. When your character gets pounded by an enemy, he / she / it loses coins. And vice versa. The point is to collect these coins and keep them - the person with the largest amount of coins on the end of the round, which is limited by time, wins. In the Options-menu, you can also tweak the Damage-Ratio, the appearance-rate of Items and whether the stage-selection is at random ( this appears as a special-feature later on ).
Tournament Mode lets you choose the number of combatants, for example: 4 hmn ( human ), 60 CPU ( computer ). After you select the amount of players involved, the battle-template and who is controlling which character, the actual Tournament begins. The battles themselves do not differ from Versus-mode.
The Special Mode boosts different, mutated gameplay-methods for your entertainment. There are nine variations to choose from - Giant Mode, Tiny Mode, Camera Mode, etc. You will have fun with these - at least once or twice.
But now that the gameplay department is set, what about the visuals and the audio?
Visually the game is pretty - not ground-breakingly so, but the graphics cut the cheese easily. Add in the fact that the characters move fluidly and are animated well, and you have a game that is worth drooling over. Anyway, whether graphics matter or not, you will not have much time to ponder their brilliance - or lack thereof (if you are blind), during playtime. So, what about the music and sound effects, then?
The music tracks in Melee are remixes of old, classic Nintendo tunes - such as the Mario 2 theme, Starfox theme, Metroid theme, etc. They fit into the game perfectly ( due to very obvious reasons ) and give some extra spice to the fights. Sound effects represent the grunts and groans of the characters nicely - although I have to admit that the voices of both Mario and Luigi get very annoying after a while. "Yah-hoo!" "Whippiee!" "Woo!"...
So, as a conclusion, if you have friends whom love videogames, this is the game for you. Believe me - you will be playing this game as long as you have a working 'Cube around. Or friends. Two thumbs up - way up!
arkard 
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