The Stage That Fits Everyone

Nintendo’s E3 reveal for Super Smash Bros. Brawl hit like a gut punch of joy. I watched the trailer repeatedly, the way you do when something you’ve wanted for years finally shows its face. Mario, Link, Pikachu, Kirby—all returning, but bigger, on proper hardware with real horsepower behind it.

I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Melee on the GameCube since it launched and I still haven’t gotten tired of it. There’s something uniquely satisfying about a fighting game built around characters you grew up loving—the violence is cartoonish but the competition is real. You can beat someone badly and still feel affectionate toward them. It’s almost the only multiplayer game where losing doesn’t feel humiliating.

Brawl promises to carry all of that forward. The Wii’s motion controls are still a question mark—nobody quite knows yet how the nunchuk setup will translate into the tight directional inputs this game demands—but the spectacle of what’s coming is undeniable. They’ve added Solid Snake to the roster, which shouldn’t work at all and somehow makes perfect sense. A man who crawls under missile launchers sharing a stage with Pikachu. This is the game.

I’m already thinking about who I want to play it with. That’s always the real metric for Smash Bros.—not how good you are solo, but how loud the room gets.