Super Smash Bros. Online!

When Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo64 was announced, I was skeptical about the idea of Nintendo characters fighting each other. To me, it was a weird concept that I felt would never sell. Oh boy, was I wrong. Super Smash Bros. turned out to be one of my favorite multiplayer games for both the Nintendo64 and the GameCube. My friends and I played both games to death (we played the N64 version significantly more though - I'll go into that later).

Now that I'm in SoCal, I want to play Super Smash Bros. online with my friends back in San Francisco. Yeah, I know that Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Wii is coming out with online gameplay, but SSB:B won't be released until sometime in 2007 and I want to play online now. Thankfully, there are now ways to play both Super Smash Bros. Melee and the original Super Smash Bros. online.

Super Smash Bros. Melee can be played online via the infamous PSO Loader hack. I would try this method to play online, but not all of my friends have the GCN broadband adapter. However, I would say that the biggest downside would be that players 2, 3, and 4 lag by up to a second while playing. Lag == death, especially for fighting games. The lag also causes weird, yet entertaining, errors as you'll see in this video. A valiant effort to get SSB online, but the lag kills the experience.

Oddly enough, you can play Nintendo64 games online and it turns out to be a more enjoyable online experience than SSB:M online too! Playing SSB online resulted in no lag. Simply amazing! Yeah, there are less characters/stages in the Nintendo64 version but SSB is so much fun, I'm willing to "settle" for the N64 online until Brawl comes out. If you want to see an online fighting game done right, try SSB. (Just ignore the graphical glitches - those are the emulator's fault.)

It's funny really. Using the latest hardware, Xbox Live Arcade's Street Fighter II' Hyperfighting suffers from terrible lag (1+ second delay from input to screen? No thanks.) yet a N64 emulator suffers nearly zero lag. What's up with that? It is the way Xbox Live's network structure is set up that is causing the lag? Or is it buggy network code? Or could SFII be doing the same thing as the SSB:M online hack where player 1 is the host and player 2 has to wait for his own data to come back from player 1? Either way, it's really funny and only helps me enjoy SSB even more.

Going back to what I said earlier, my friends and I spent countless hours playing SSB on the N64 yet in comparison we barely played SSB:M on the GCN. Why is that? SSB:M is a better game overall. It's more balanced, offers more characters and stages, and has tighter controls. I noticed this trend for most, if not all, of the GameCube's multiplayer games. We played the N64 versions significantly more than the GCN versions. Are the GCN versions actualy inferior or are they just more of the same that we've already played too much of? I'm betting it's the latter.

I find that Nintendo has a habit of evolving the gaming industry every ten years. The NES jump started the current industry after the crash, the N64 evolved the industry into the 3D era with analog controls, and the Wii is going to evolve the industry again with spacial controls. To me, both the SNES and GameCube are just more powerful versions of the NES and N64, respectively. I'm not saying that the SNES and GameCube are bad consoles, they each have their games that are contenders for the best game(s) of all time. I just think that these two consoles took the ideas of the NES and N64 and refined them into near perfection. If this history holds true, what can we expect of the Wii's successor? (Also note that Nintendo evolves the industry with controls, not graphics.)