It’s the morning of day 2 of BlizzCon. My social battery is still recharging, and I’ve got 2 hours before the WoW deep dive.
Edit: haha I ended up writing way more than I originally anticipated and once again didn’t finish until late.
Today’s theme is console exclusive, the least restrictive theme so far. Today’s game the game I’ve spent the most hours listening to, and arguably the most important.
- Day 4: Console Exclusive
- Game: Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Track: Fire Field (F-Zero)
Brawl is arguably the worst of all the Smash Bros, but it was the one I sunk the most time into and the one I got the best at. Melee (Brawl’s predecessor) is highly technical and hyper-fast, and Nintendo sought to lower the skill gap by significantly slowing the game down. They even added anti-competitive mechanics like “tripping”, where your character would randomly fall. Melee players hated Brawl.
But I didn’t – it had online play! As a young kiddo who had never been to a tournament, this was a game changer. I ended up joining some small website, I think it was called SSBBPlayers.com? There were a few dozen of us, and we battled it out every day. This was so long ago that I’ve forgotten everyone’s names, but I do have two fond memories.
My favorite practice partner played Zelda (I played Wolf btw), who was supposedly lower tier, but he was slightly better than me. Our games were close, but he usually won. In this particular match, he was tired of how weak my grab game was, so he just shield-grabbed me repeatedly while typing YOU NEED TO GRAB into chat. After the 15th grab or so, I finally understood what I was missing out on. I practiced grabs much harder after, and I actually think my grab game ended up fairly strong for my level of play, and I have him to thank.
My most hated practiced partner played Sonic. This guy just annoyed the crap out of everyone in the group chat. One day, he and I ended up in a kerfuffle that turned in a 1v1 with my pride on the line.
I got off to a solid lead, taking him down to 2 stocks while I was at a healthy 3. But then he unveiled his backup plan – spamming the b button for the remainder of the match. This caught me off guard, and frankly pissed me off. It’s like he was gonna lose the fair fight, so he stopped meaningfully participating. And if it actually worked I’d be utterly humiliated.
In terms of spammable moves, Sonic’s b is one of the best. It’s like a homing missile, except Sonic is the missile, and he bounces back to safety after hitting. But the downside is, once you release the b button, the rest of the move is 100% predictable.
I knew this, but in the heat of the moment, I was actually getting hit a lot. I had to slow down my breathing and refocus, so I just stopped attacking and focused entirely on spot dodging. Once I got the dodge rhythm down, I jumped in to counterattack. I could only chip away but I slowly regained control of the match. On his last stock, he weaved in normal attacks between his spam, but I comfortably took him down.
But I digress, let’s talk about music. The Brawl soundtrack was basically a massive Greatest Hits album of all things Nintendo. Most tracks were literal copy+pastes from other games, but a good 10-20% of them were fully orchestrated covers of old favorites. Professional band/orchestra VGM was a new idea to me, since prior consoles didn’t have the technology, and most modern games didn’t have the budget.
The original Fire Field was music to one of the final F-Zero stages. Most F-Zero stages appear twice, so you get exposed to the stage’s music fairly early. Not Fire Field – it was basically the final boss of F-Zero. And the music was apt – something about that synth and pentatonic scales just sounds fiery.
Hearing Brawl’s Fire Field rendition for the first time was such a delight. I never thought Nintendo would revisit music that had come out 15+ years prior. And I certainly wasn’t expecting the full band.