Author: Daniel Golding

How would you describe Super Smash Bros. Brawl to an alien? The packaging of the Wii-friendly iteration makes simple work of it: “Nintendo Worlds Collide!” It’s a neat summary, and one that captures the basic appeal of the series from its early days on the Nintendo 64. Like Disney of the 1990s, Nintendo now possesses a handful of franchises that are well-loved and guaranteed to line the company’s pockets. However, unlike Disney, in Smash Bros., Nintendo have found a way to successfully combine these separate parts into the one appealing whole. It’s Pikachu versus Mario. Donkey Kong versus Kirby. And now, Nintendo are outsourcing: Sonic versus Snake, that great fanboy fantasy, is finally a reality. The appeal of the game is almost a given. But the quality itself? Brawl is a game that redefines the sheer depth of features, options, and possibilities for players. But why, we ask, does it seem so uninspired?

We should mention that it’s quite possible that the delayed PAL release for the game has dulled its impact somewhat. If you’ve got an internet connection and have more than a passing interest in the series, you’ll have known everything there is to know about the game months and months ago. The world of gamers is now an instantly global one: think of the YouTube videos you’ve watched, the reviews you’ve already read, the forum posts you followed. Perhaps you even managed to import the game. This distance is both an advantage and a disadvantage for obvious reasons. Ultimately, though, the game should speak for itself, hype or no hype.

Mario had trouble explaining this position to Peach.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is the definitive full stop to the series, the punctuation mark that indicates the completeness of a franchise. Here is a game so evolved (and we use that word carefully) from the initial incarnation that it has reached saturation point, and it is impossible to imagine further development. Any wish you’d ever had while playing the original, or Melee has now been made possible. You want online play? Granted. You want to play as Sonic the Hedgehog? Granted. You want a level builder? Granted. Perhaps it even indicates an analogy between videogames and computer software: what we have here is Super Smash Bros. 3.0, with improved options and features. It is undeniably an amazing improvement, and those who loved Melee will undoubtedly want to upgrade to Brawl, but only in the same sense that those who use Word 2003 will want to upgrade to 2007. At its absolute core, the game is the same.

That might seem like a thinly-veiled insult, but it’s more a simple observation. After all, keeping the same basic gameplay might not be a bad thing in any sense. In fact, you could mount a pretty good argument that changing what isn’t broken would be a bigger mistake than to leave it untouched. The previous Smash Bros. games were wildly successful for good reason. The initial ‘pull’ of the game might have been the chance to beat the pulp out of your least-favourite mascot, but long after the novelty wore off, players kept coming back. The mascots eventually ceased to be characters and instead became simple avatars with strengths and weaknesses within the Smash Bros. universe. The gameplay just somehow stuck. Maybe it was the fresh and unique approach to the fighting genre that stood out. Maybe it was the sheer fun of the multiplayer, and the real sense of competition and reward it offered. One of the major strengths with all Smash Bros. titles is that (and like all good Nintendo games) there never feels like there is a barrier standing between you and your character. What you do really counts. The game never steps in to help out your movement or attacks. It is your skill on trial, and nothing else.

We never understood what was so deadly about sausages. We think Ness is vegetarian.

And of course, that remains true for Brawl. The gameplay is wonderfully tight, and victory feels as rewarding as it ever did. There is still a beautifully held line between competitive balance and fun, and we’re sure that this game will still be doing the rounds until the next Nintendo console is released. The little tweaks that have been made to the gameplay are for the better as well. The combat has somehow been shifted upwards, and you’ll now spend the vast majority of your fighting time airborne without noticing it. There are no obviously useless characters, though some will take practice to reach their full potential. The dreaded ‘clones’ of Melee are now all but eliminated (though the Starfox triplets leave a little to be desired), and the Final Smash Ball brings a great new surge of tension to the game. The levels are aggressive in the truest sense - it often feels as if the landscape itself does not want you to be there and is doing the best it can to help eliminate you. Returning Melee levels provide well-needed respite, and the option to make your own and share with others provides potentially limitless variety.

Additionally, the game is leaps-and-bounds ahead of its siblings, aesthetically speaking. Many stages, such as the Pikmin-inspired ‘Distant Planet’ are nothing short of beautiful, while others, such as ‘Warioware, Inc.’ provide some great and quirky art. The effort put into the music is nothing short of exhaustive, with an enormous track list filtered from every game that has a remote connection with Smash Bros. Most are completely fresh arrangements, as well, and with over 30 composers working on the game, it’s more than likely the arrangement was done by the original composer. Cutscenes, so often implemented to the detriment of good gameplay, are here a work of magnificence, with one late sequence in particular being truly breathtaking.

Moments later, Mario regrets serving baked beans as Wario's evening meal.

In fact, so much love and devotion to detail has obviously gone into this game that it feels somehow unfair to criticise it. If the problem is that now, everyone who loved Brawl’s predecessors can now play the game the way they want to, what kind of criticism is that? It’s certainly not a stinging rebuff of the game, but it is a flaw. If ever there was a game pulled down by the weight of its feature set, it’s Brawl. The game feels like Masahiro Sakurai and co. have created a sandbox to surpass the sandbox genre - there are simply so many ways to play that Brawl lacks identity. For example, the game can be played with any controller set-up imaginable on the Wii: Wii remote, Wii remote plus nunchuck, classic controller, or GameCube controller, while the buttons can be configured to your slightest whim. Taken on its own merits, this means that any player can play in their preferred fashion, but it’s indicative of a larger feeling - that the makers were afraid, or unable to push Brawl in a single, definitive direction of its own.

The one area where Brawl takes a chance and tries on a new hat for the series, so to speak, is the story mode, here amusingly titled ‘The Subspace Emissary’. All Smash Bros. titles have had a single player mode, but this marks the first major attempt to actually tell a story. It’s reasonably engaging and can hold your attention (which is more than can be said for the previous single-player modes), but unfortunately fails to be anything more than an interesting barrier to unlocking all characters. The Subspace Emissary showed all the signs of being an interesting and modern take on the side-scrolling platform-adventure, but it seems that it was not to be: the enemies, with the exclusion of some bosses and reoccurring Nintendo faces, are uninteresting and the stages uninspired. It’s still enjoyable, and certainly the first thing that you’ll do in the game (as, unfortunately, Brawl falls prey to that familiar trap of forcing players to play lengthy bouts to unlock the most interesting characters), but it won’t be the first thing you think of when you recall Brawl in a decade’s time.

Perhaps by being willing to limit itself, Brawl could have been a great game. As it stands, it is simply the strongest iteration of a great series. This is no understatement, or a downplaying of the game’s strengths. The game that hits store shelves tomorrow is a very, very fine example of design and will undoubtedly remain one of the Wii’s most attractive multiplayer games until the end of the system. In saying that, however, it’s worth noting that by squeezing so many improved features into the one game, the makers have somehow managed to turn Brawl into something not too dissimilar from its GameCube sibling.

A Nintendo Wii game that features a compilation of sports - now that is a novel idea. After Deca Sports, Summer Sports and Big Beach Sports, Ubisoft has announced the launch of its Play Zone range, exclusive to the Wii, which kicks off with Sports Party - a disc stuffed with nine different activities.

Sports Party is set on a tropical paradise island, where up to four players can compete against one another in nine different disciplines: basketball, croquet, lawn darts, badminton, volley-ball, horse shoes and mini-golf – all which make use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuck’s motion-sensing abilities.

There isn’t a lot else to say about it; although Ubisoft lists one of its key features to be “short gaming sessions”… a reflection on the game’s pick-up-and play nature, or how long you’ll endure what is already becoming a tired format?

“With our new PLAY ZONE party titles, the Wii gamers who like to spend time with friends and family will have fun with the Wii through innovative and involving mini-games. The PLAY ZONE label will provide them with the best games to mingle and compete together in a fun and friendly atmosphere” said John Parkes, Ubisoft’s EMEA Marketing Director.

After Ubisoft showing, disappointingly, its casual gaming priorities for Nintendo platforms at its Ubidays event recently, Sports Party, we feel, isn’t going to do too much to recapture the imaginations of those legions of players feeling let down by the French developer.

And worryingly, this is only the beginning. It’s released on July 11.

World War II seems to have been a brilliant event for gamers and publishers, despite being very bad for the rest of the world, as so many games nowadays are being made about it, the latest of these is Call of Duty 3 which is being released on all three next generation consoles, although Wii gamers may feel a bit short changed in that they are getting a cut down version of the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions in exchange for their hard earned cash. Many have been feeling pessimistic about what really is the first proper first-person-shooter for Nintendo’s new console, as it has not been built around the new controller, but instead the control scheme has been forced into what it an existing port which ultimately could lead to a lot of control issues rendering the game unplayable, but is this the case for Call of Duty 3, or has Treyarch made something comparable to the game’s Xbox 360 counterpart?

The game jumps between the three main forces of British, American and Polish as they all centre in on Paris in the middle of the Second World War. You are essentially taking part in what already happened about 60 years ago when the Allied forces tried to regain control of France from the Nazi regime, you do this by completing 14 different chapters each with their own separate plot lines that serve little purpose other than to keep the game moving and justify the missions goals. Luckily you won’t be constantly interrupted with cutscenes and dialogue in the game, but rather you’ll just be left do your thing. But as is the case with most World War games, the story is really quite irrelevant as the majority of people playing the game will already know enough about the whole conflict and in the end it is the gameplay that really matters.

If you are looking for a game to show off the Wii’s graphical capabilities with, then this may well be one of the best options from the whole launch line up. While it may be unimpressive to those used to Hi-Def 360 visuals. The environments are something special with destructible scenery and a whole variety of different bombshells, shrapnel and all degrees of rubble lying around helping you feel as though you really are in a battlefield in 1940’s France. The animations add a few nice touches as well, whether it is the clouds of smoke and dirt from an explosion, or the flash of a gun going off that will keep you on the edge of your seat. You won’t be disappointed with the audible side of the game either, with constant noises varying from a bullet flying just past your head to a grenade exploding after you’ve launched it into the Nazi base. As with the other Call of Duty games the music score is exceptional, and at times it is on par with several blockbuster movie scores. The voice overs are also surprisingly good considering many other games hire very unprofessional voice actors and end up with near ridiculous voice overs. As the Wii doesn’t support digital audio you won’t be able to listen to the game through full Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound speakers, but this isn’t by any fault of the developers or the publishers, but does take away from the atmosphere of the game slightly.

The game introduces you to the new control scheme via a tutorial level, which is still one of missions but you are given a lot of guidance in how to play the game. It isn’t complicated at all, you use the analog stick on the nunchuk attachment to move around, much the same as the left analog stick on a normal controller, and to aim and move your view around you just use the WiiMote. The WiiMote essentially acts as your gun in the game, as to fire all you need to do is pull the trigger button, the buttons on the nunchuk are also used for various movements like ducking or jumping. You can either throw a grenade with the press of a button, or for the more adventurous you can make an overarm throwing motion with the nunchuk to lob an explosive at your enemies. Reloading and changing weapons can also be controlled by a quick movement left and right or up and down with the nunchuk. Even though all of these are going to become what is the norm for all Wii FPS there are a couple of nice little additions, like being able to wrestle weapons off your opponents be putting the WiiMote and nunchuk forward together and then yanking them both back at the same time.

The controls may take a little getting used to, but this is the case with all Wii games due to its new controller, it was the same with a lot of the early DS games. But after a few hours of play it will become second nature to even the most experienced FPS gamers. The “bounding box” mechanism, which is similar to that used in Red Steel, is more accurate than dual analog sticks, but not quite as precise as a mouse and keyboard. Once you zoom in the aiming becomes even more accurate and you don’t need to worry about moving around. All the motions are picked up well by the sensor bar, so you won’t need to worry about dying because for some reason you weren’t able to throw a grenade in time.

The main downfall of this game is the lack of any form of multiplayer mode, something that makes the game very enjoyable on the Xbox 360, especially combined with Live. It seems unusual that such a key feature from the previous installments has been left out of the Wii version. It does also mean that you will not be playing the game for as long as you will imagine, most gamers won’t have much left to do after about ten hours of gameplay, and without any multiplayer support you’ll probably have forgotten about Call of Duty 3 within a month.

Call of Duty 3 is an excellent example of Nintendo’s insistence of gameplay over graphics, it is more engaging that it’s bigger PS3 and 360 brothers even if both visually and audibly it isn’t as good as them. With multiplayer the game would have got a far higher score as you can imagine the fun you would have had with three other friends all trying to kill each other. There is very little originality about the game aside from the control scheme, but then again the new controls are reason enough to play this.