Super Smash Brothers

Tennessee circa 2001

My first exposure to video game consoles was a Super Mario Brothers SNES game at our local dentist office, and it was the only reason I ever looked forward to appointments. As simplistic as the game was, it was always a special treat when I got the opportunity to bounce on the heads of some angry anthropomorphic mushrooms.

Other than that, video game consoles didn’t play a very significant part of my early childhood. My father bought me a slew of DOS-based educational computer games, but we never owned the Playstation or SNES consoles that everyone at school bragged about. It never occurred to me to ask my parents why this was, but my best guess is that they were trying to shield us from the popular violent first-person shooters of the day, like Doom and Wolfenstein.

There was a time when we owned a Sega Saturn and a rather blocky fighting game called Virtua Fighter, but the clunky thing didn’t last very long in the hands of us rowdy kids, and it wasn’t long at all before the CDs were scratched, cracked, or lost entirely. In general, if I ever wanted to play a video game, I would have to go over to one of my friends’ houses, because they were the ones that had all the newest gaming systems. The closest thing I got to owning one of these video game consoles was my precious handheld gameboy.

The first generation gameboys were huge, clunky gray things with relatively small pixellated screens with hues of entirely green and black. Sometimes you had to tilt the screen into the light to see properly and it was impossible to play at night without one of the special light attachments. Riding home after indoor soccer games were the worst. My parents didn’t like it when I turned on the car’s interior lights, so the only time I could see the screen was when we passed under the glow of one of the sparse orange streetlights.

We owned more games for that gameboy than I care to remember, but there is one in particular that stands out among all of them, and I will always remember the first time that I was introduced to Pokemon. It was an eight hour ride home from a beach vacation, but my eyes were glued to that screen the entire time.

From the first moment I played that game, I was in love with it. It had the perfect combination of adventure, strategy, and math, and I couldn’t get enough of it. My first Pokemon was a Charmander named “Charley”, and from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to Chattanooga, Tennessee, we trained together. Even after we arrived home, I stayed in the car playing the game until it was too dark to see the screen. I have since beaten the game so many times that it has nearly lost its value, but in those days, the creatures I spent so much time of my time with were my loving and loyal pets.

On the gameboy, sprites for these creatures are rendered in blocky two dimensional figures, and their attacks consist of two or three varied frames and beeping 8-bit sound effects. It left a lot to the imagination, but I had a very active imagination, and these few blocky frames were more than enough to satisfy me. I believed that video game consoles were a luxury that our family simply couldn’t afford, and I was okay with that.

Valerie has since found her own path through the video game world, but at this time, she usually insisted that she be included in any video game that I played, though usually in her own style. Where I played Pokemon Red, she played Pokemon Yellow, which is basically the same game with a slightly altered storyline.

When the Nintendo 64 was first released, it came bundled with a game called “Pokemon Stadium”, and when I first saw a commercial for this game on television, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. Because of the green and black graphics of the gameboy, illustrations in gaming guide books were the only clue I had to what color these creatures were, but Pokemon Stadium promised not only full color, but 3-D rendering of all of the creatures we’d grown up with. It even featured special controller attachments that would allow you to import the creatures from your own personal game into this full 3-D colorized world. It was enough to make me finally crack and beg my dad to get this gaming system. My sister joined in, and I was thoroughly shocked when he actually approved this request.

Though we spent most of our Nintendo 64 time playing Pokemon Stadium, my mother would often surprise us by coming home with a random new game that happened to be on sale at Blockbuster that day. Most were awkward and confusing, but there were a few weirdly fun gems that we still play today, like F-Zero X, Mia Hamm 64 Soccer, and Beetle Adventure Racing. They weren’t the legendary JRPGs that Playstation and SNES were famous for, but Valerie and I made the most of what we got.

The soccer game, in particular, was full of glitches in everything from player movement to AI decision making. However, instead of complain about them, we integrated them into the rules. These glitches were mutually accessible, so we considered them fair game. We learned to predict how the AI would glitch out and how the players would clip each other, and we used it to our advantage. We learned how to use airborne passes at the perfect angle and distance to fool AI goalies of even the highest difficulty settings.

I’ve mentioned this several times before, but when you grow up playing games with sisters, one of the things you learn is to constantly keep track of is how interested the other person is. Often, the real game is not so much about getting the highest score so much as it is simply retaining the other person’s attention. If the other person doesn’t want to play any more, it doesn’t matter what the score is, because the game will inevitably end, regardless of who is winning.

This became a very common theme when I played video games with my sisters, with one unusual exception. This rule never seemed to apply to Super Smash Brothers, a fighting game like nothing that came before it. Not only is it a multi-level platforming game, but it allows up to four players to play together and includes famous protagonists from previous Nintendo franchises.

Though it had its quirks, it may not have held all that much interest to me except that, for some reason, Valerie was insanely good at it. I didn’t think much of it at the time, though it was nice to be able to experience an actual challenge in a video game for once. It would have been nicer if I didn’t keep losing, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

When we updated the Nintendo 64 to the Nintendo GameCube, it just so happened to come bundled with the new and improved Super Smash Brothers Melee, or SSBM for short. Valerie and I both started playing at the same time with no experience or muscle memory other than that of the game that came before it, but from day one, she could wipe the floor with me. I don’t much like being shown up in video games, but as I put more focus into the game, I realized that this was something more than just beginner’s luck. For some reason, Valerie had this insanely intuitive natural instinct for the game that I never had, and it was the best I could do just to keep up with her.

Because we’d grown up on second-hand glitchy games, learning the quirks of each character and map was second nature to us. Once either of us discovered something new, it was fair game. Something as simple as grabbing a ledge so the other player couldn’t or the difference between throwing and dropping an object could make all the difference. Sometimes she’d do something brilliant out of nowhere and not even realize what she’d done until I later copied it.

We made up our own rules in addition to the given ones. On certain stages, you get bonus points if you can land the opponent on a ship as it flies away. If you were lame enough to get tagged with a freezie, you were openly mocked (even more so if it was a homerun-KO).

In most other fighting games with character select screens, like Soul Calibur, there was generally a distinct pattern when Valerie and I played. In the beginning, I would choose a random character. Over time, I would learn the quirks of that character and how to take advantage of them. Eventually, I would be good enough at that new character to beat her and would have to choose a new random unknown character. This process would repeat until I was good enough at all the characters to beat her with any of them. This is generally when she stopped playing the game with me entirely.

This was never the case with SSBM, and I had to step up my game just to compete with her. While she talked to the villagers in Animal Crossing, I’d be watching internet tutorials by respected players. When she was off at soccer practice or fast asleep at night, I’d be up late, putting in time practicing combos against a motionless sandbag or wireframe AI players.

I put in far more practice time into that game than I care to admit, but it made absolutely no difference. Though I hold some stellar records in the home-run contest, she was always more than a match for me, no matter how much practice I put in.

For the first time, I had the opposite problem; I was challenged with keeping my opponent from getting too bored from winning too often. If I lost a few too many times in a row, I’d wave it off as a “bad day” or I’d intentionally choose a character I wasn’t expected to win with, hoping that she couldn’t tell how hard I was actually trying.

She would never believe me if I told her, but I have no doubt that she could easily become a competitive player if she ever wanted to be. As cool as that would be, putting too much effort into video games isn’t really her style, and that’s okay. SSBM is our game anyway. To this day, it’s the only video game we both play that she’s undeniably better than I am. Though I have a near monopoly on video games we play, Super Smash Brothers is hers, and probably always will be.