Upon walking into the Expo, we immediately noticed giant Smash Bros banners and posters hanging from the ceiling, including the strange snow-cone shaped ones which are advertising for the DS games directly below them.

The Smash Bros. Brawl area worked like this: people waited in line by sitting in a large set of bleachers while watching people play on the flat screen TV. After every match, 16 people would be moved to a four Smash Bros stations where they would battle it out for two minutes. Each winner from the four stations would move on to play a “championship round” on the big screen everyone in the bleachers is watching. Here are some images from when I was sitting there.

The unfortunate (yet hilarious) part of this setup were the two booth babes doing their best to give the “play-by-play” of the match on the big screen. They were very much into trying to entertain everyone, but they clearly did not really know the game. Saying the names of characters once selected, or counting off the last five seconds of the match were easy for them. But making small talk was not. They would try to get the crowd riled up by having us do the wave, or asking us questions such as “what’s your favorite final smash?” and “who owns this game on Gamecube?” At one point they wanted us to ask them a question. Really? Why would the experts ask the questions?

Hands-on:
The first time I played, I used the classic controller and tried out Sonic. I had way too much trouble trying to forget my Gamecube controller habits, so I had a lot of difficulty doing normal things. Mix that with not fully understanding how Sonic works, and my intimidating Smash Bros skills were dissolved into running around like a bumbling fool until time was up.

Since the first time didn’t go so well, I decided to choose Fox from then on since he was the closest to my favorite character: Falco. The next three matches I used Fox and did fairly well using the Wii Remote on its side. I didn’t exactly dish out my usual dose of pain against my opponents, but I managed to do well enough to win and go on to the big screen. It was fun playing on such a large screen with a crowd full of fans behind us, and I managed to beat my opponents and take the Championship. Well - the championship which crowns a new winner every two minutes, that is…

I went back one more time to win yet again, but right as I was preparing to play on the big-screen once more the power went out on a large number of stations around the expo. Man, that could have been two more minutes of Smash. Thankfully, we were about ready to leave at that time, so we weren’t too upset. I think it was God trying to tell me it was time to give Smash a rest.

My overall feeling of Brawl after playing it was nothing but positive. It’s just more of the same Smash Bros Melee, but with incredible graphics running at 60fps, and everything has been updated to look and move even better than Melee. The only problem I had with the game were the difficulty of learning a new button layout, but that’s easily fixed by plugging in a Gamecube controller when the game comes out in February. It was also hard playing knowing that there is so much more they are hiding from us. If the full game was sitting inside that Wii, I probably would have punched the security guard, ripped the console out of the wall, and had Tim waiting outside with our get-a-way car.

A couple little things I noticed: Fox seems much lighter than he did in Melee. He tends to float in the air a little more like Falco instead of dropping like a rock. Sonic’s different costume colors consisted of changing his gloves and shoes to other colors, and Link has a “Shadow Link” costume color.

I wish I could have seen the WarioWare stage or the Pokémon Trainer playable, but Nintendo is hell-bent on teasing us as much as they possibly can. There’s no doubt this game will be hard to match for quite some time. I had a blast playing, and I can’t wait until February. If you guys have any questions for me about the game, just ask away. I’ll be happy to answer.

Tags: smash bros.