A Piece of Cake.

Awesome box, far surpasses the GCN version's boxart,
yet we are left without the king of the jungle.

Alcoholism is a disease, and according to the late comedian Mitch Hedberg it is the only disease you can get yelled at for having. Obviously Mr. Hedberg has never grasped his palm around a Nintendo controller to gear up and play Super Smash Bros.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii is the third iteration in the fighting series. The game takes every major Nintendo character from the past 25 year of Nintendo history pits them together in arguably the most epic game Nintendo has ever made.

Not much has changed to the Smash formula which premiered in Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64 in 1999. Gamers pick a character, a stage, and they duke it out with two buttons, one for specials and one for smash attacks, a jump button, and a shield. The main goal is to knock up the opponent’s life meter to a high enough percentage where they will become weak and easier to “smash” off the board.

The character count now comes in at a staggering 37 characters, up from the 26 characters in its predecessor (Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube), and far surpassing the measly 12 from the original. Every character from Melee is included with the exception of Young Link, Mewtwo, Pichu, and Dr. Mario who were more or less “fill-in” characters. Everyone ranging from Mario to Diddy Kong, to even Sega’s mascot the blue blur, Sonic and Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid fame have decided to “join the brawl”.

Creator Masahiro Sakurai, who also created Kirby, beefed up and trimmed different ingredients of Smash in order to make a better rounded game, perhaps his greatest addition is the new adventure mode, The Subspace Emissary. One or two players are aloud to take part in an epic fight between good and evil in a mixture of platforming, fighting, and even RPG elements. These are all baked to perfection to create an outstanding side-scrolling experience, something that has been missing from the gaming scene for the last ten years.

The icing on this deliciously addicting cake are the graphics, music and computer generated cut-scenes that tie The Subspace Emissary together. Sakurai collaborated with 36 different composers from all around the gaming industry to bring forth a soundtrack that is not like anything else. Everything from the Mario Theme (from 1985) to the Metal Gear Solid 4 Love Theme graces this game with ease. Finally Nintendo and Sakurai have decided to take full responsibility and overhaul the soundtrack with epic chorus and full piece orchestra.

Nintendo finally made a smart decision with their online strategy and put an online mode into Brawl. The only way to play a friend though is to manually swap 12 digit friend codes. Gamers will then have to wait for Nintendo to approve the two codes over the next couple days. The lack of easily playing a friend online and the inability to voice communication are two things Nintendo have decided to do in order to protect children. Obviously this makes no sense on a gaming device that can search any website on the internet. But biggest complaint that can be found with this game is that it is more of the same thing. If Sakurai even attempts in creating another Super Smash Bros. then he will most likely have to rehaul the entire game, or keeping up with the cake analogies, find a new recipe.

Basically the game has everything, tight controls, evened out characters, an amazing character roster, one of the best videogame soundtracks ever, a full on ten hours single player adventure, thousands of things to collect, beautiful character and level design, an online mode, and something enjoyable and just fun to look at. This is the game that eight friends from all over the world will play until wee hours of the morning with sweaty palms and Doritos, or Dr. Pepper ridden breath. I give this game 9.5 cakes out of 10.