Being it's the 16th anniversary of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, I thought I would expand upon a cryptic reference to the Wii back in January. Like I said at the time, I had the Wii when it was new, I played the games as they were released, and all of that intersected with a really bad time in my life. For this reason, I have very strange memories of the Wii and several of the games I had for it. A lot of those have to do with Brawl, since that was one of my "stuck in a rut" games at the time.
The first strange memory was on launch day. I had been following development on the Smash Bros. Dojo since the first trailer was released, and I was just as amped as every other "Doritos & Mountain Dew" gamer. I went to what was still called EB Games (later, "Gamestop") in the mall exactly 16 years ago today with my $45 cash; there was a bit of a rush going on because some other game was also released that day, so, between Brawl and Whatever Other Game for Xbox 360 Probably, there was quite a lot of activity in the shop. The neckbeard at the checkstand immediately tried to sell me the Prima guide as well as the game; I conversationally mentioned I'd been following development on the Dojo and he said in response something to the effect of, "Well, Sakurai didn't tell you everything; like how there's a giant Nintendog that comes on and kills everyone." Probably so I could just get the hell out of there, I said, "Yeah, I know." Now, I knew the Nintendog's only purpose was to obscure the game screen, but I had allowed myself to be pwned by this guy, claiming I "knew" something that he had just made up on the spot. That kind of set the stage for how I would interact with the game in all future encounters; I would remember getting intellectually upper-handed by the clerk at the game shop and it sort of reinforced my self-doubt and negativity.
I wasn't sleeping very well back then, so I had the tendency to play at the same time the sun was rising. The very first time I ever stayed awake so long that I got to see the sun rise was in 2008 while I was robotically playing Brawl. On another occasion, probably around 2010, I played a 99-stock match against the computer to keep myself awake for some reason. I'd played SimCity Societies earlier in the evening, decided to try and sleep, couldn't, and went out to the sitting room and, on a complete whim, decided to start a 99-stock match; Luigi vs. Bowser on Final Destination. It took me about 5 hours to complete, and I was enjoying myself for possibly the first 2 minutes. As I played, it became readily apparent that I'd wished I were playing with someone else (someone specific), and I just sort of slogged through the remaining 4 hours and 58 minutes. I recall falling asleep on the couch to the public access real-estate listings channel after that.
Remembering that, I also remembered something else. It hasn't got anything to do with Brawl, but another game for Wii, CID the Dummy. When I was a kid, I'd had quite an obsession with the Incredible Crash Dummies. I had most of the toys, and I carried on playing with them until junior high school (3rd form). CID the Dummy had nothing to do with the Tyco toy line, but it caught my attention anyway—not in a way that would make me want to buy it, but I still knew it existed. Well, my mum and I had gone to the supermarket one day in around about the same time as 99-stock Luigi vs. Bowser, and I noticed CID in the discount games bin. I didn't even know this store sold games. Nonetheless, here it was, along with about 10 other games that I'd heard of but apparently weren't selling well enough to justify asking the MSRP for. I picked it up, looked at it for a second, read the back cover, considered what else I could buy with $5, and put it back into the bin. The following January, we went to see my mum's friend from work, and I found that she had gotten me that game as a belated Hanukkah gift. It was probably the very same object I had picked up and set back down months before. I never even bothered taking it out of the shrink-wrap, and it sat on my shelf until I gave all my Wii games to the homeless shelter on erev Yom Kippur 5778.
Anyway, back to Brawl, then. The Stage Creator was both the best and worst possible feature to put into a Smash Bros. game. The best-possible, because players could now indulge their "not invented here" complexes in matches with their friends. The worst-possible, because some of stages I personally made with it were twisted and sadistic beyond belief. My favourite was called "Coin Box", so named because you could have endless coin matches there. It had no exits except for one thin platform at the bottom centre, which was also the entrance. Fortunately CPU players were skilled enough to know how to get into the Coin Box on their own; you had to fall off the top of the stage, then jump and Up-B Smash to get through the platform. Then, there was no exit. Damage could go as high as possible; you'd be careening off the walls like a pinball; but the only way out was to commit suicide through the platform at the bottom. The music I selected for that one was, perhaps too obviously, the Coin Shooter theme. Obviously, the computer-controlled fighters would never commit suicide, and I certainly wouldn't; so, when I got bored, I would usually leave by returning to the Wii Menu.
I took so very many snapshots with this game. One of the things I'd wanted to do in high school was invent a trading card game based on Super Smash Bros., using Melee as a starting point. I'd envisioned having rare cards from Smash 64, peppered methodically throughout all the packs and everything; but, what we now know as Dolphin did not exist at the time. People were still working out how to get around Nintendo's copy-protection on GCN discs back then, and Dolphin was more or less just a proof-of-concept. There was no feasible way for standard players to take high-quality screenshots of GameCube games, and all the attempts I made, taking photos with the Digital Mavica, just didn't work out. That's a peculiarity of the old "radioactive box" style TVs; the screen refresh would progress linearly down the screen at much too high a frequency for people to see, but cameras could. Since there was no time in which the entire display was not refreshing, if you photographed a cathode-ray tube TV or computer monitor, part of the screen would be dark. This is also why there are pulsing horizontal bars on computer screens on old news video of offices or other places where computers are present. So, when I heard that Brawl was going to have its own in-built screengrab feature, I thought, "Hey, I can finally get somewhere with this idea!" Of course, it turned out that any screengrabs you take in Brawl are encrypted and can't be read by anything except that particular copy of Brawl on that particular Wii. Like I said before: Nintendo have always been that company.
Is it possible to decrypt those shots for use on a computer? Of course, but I couldn't find the tools, and, even if I could have, I don't think the WinXP computer I had at that time could have run them anyway.
Not all of my Brawl memories were bad, though. When I went to college, my roommate brought a TV and his Wii with him, and he was pretty good at the game. Of course, I had spent most of the past 4 years playing against the computer, learning all the various exploits, the various ways to hide from assist trophy effects, things like that. We played it occasionally, but he preferred Activision GoldenEye and spending 24 hours in the computer room watching Vocaloid videos on Youtube. Incidentally, that was the only time I'd ever played the game with another person. Unfortunately, his computer time cut into his class time and he was kicked out of school 2 months after arriving.
I think I played the Subspace Emissary story mode once. It seemed the easiest way to unlock stuff, but it was really just a weird anime-type thing so all the characters from all the franchises could break character without breaking character. I played it for about 2 hours and had to stop because my back hurt from sitting Like That on the ottoman the whole time. When I quit, it didn't feel like I'd played Super Smash Bros. so much as, like, Final Fight or Streets of Rage or something. I don't think I unlocked much by doing it that way either; maybe Ness? I decided to use the alternative means of unlocking everything, through just standard Brawls, and it worked out much better. Masterpieces was an interesting idea, but not in the way Sakurai probably intended. I was able to try out games that normally wouldn't have entered into my field of vision, and then download them for my emulators. It caused me to spend exactly $0 on Wii Shop Channel DLC.
So, yeah. There's my contribution to Super Smash Bros. Brawl's Sour 16th. I stopped playing it promptly in 2013, gave it away in 2018, and hadn't thought about it much until I read about it on TCRF back in January. If I were to make a 15 Essentials list for Wii, Brawl would be on it, because experiences are not universal, and it may end up being someone else's favourite game. It just brings way too much baggage to the flight for me to play it ever again.
--9 March 2024--