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Monday, May 26, 2014

Memorial of Super Smash Bros. Brawl

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - For one particularly creative feature we'll never see again.

By now, hopefully the entire world is well-aware that Super Smash Bros. Brawl and other games that use Nintendo's Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection no longer can do things online. This means no battling with your friends across the world. It also means you can't ever do anything ever again like the Planet Koopa Advertisement Video.



It's the video with the most production values on my YouTube channel at PrinceOfKoopas. Just ignore what it's advertising for a moment (Planet Koopa now functions as KoopaTV's Intranet) and observe what we did for the video.

So, what makes it so special? Obviously it's the 20-character phrases you can attach to each of your four taunts (one for each part of the D-pad). This type of thing, having a scripted conversation with taunts to communicate a message, has never been done before this. And probably hasn't been done since.

Obviously, that means we had to write a script for it. In twenty character chunks across four characters. We wanted to get the most out of what we had. Many creative people, including game developers, will tell you that structured constraints help fuel creativity. It really is true. So we wrote four distinct characters there. For the record, Vul of course refers to...

Captain Vul, or Captain of the Halberd.
Who is one of my favourite characters ever. Anyway, the fact we chose Lylat Cruise as our stage was an act of symbolism. It also meant we had a dynamic background to work with. Which made filming even more of a pain in the ass. Oh, and it had to be filmed live, because Brawl's replays do not show the pre-written taunt messages.

For an example of how much of a pain this was, here's the bloopers reel:


All sorts of problems here, ending with the lag that people associate Super Smash Bros. Brawl's online for. By the way, the lagginess of Brawl's online is very overstated, even given the ending of the blooper reel. The plot was that the characters would fight for a bit WITHOUT KILLING ONE ANOTHER until the background got to a certain point, and then Bowser would signal a stop and we would start the script. Then, everyone had to perform their script in order, and they need to remember which dialogue they put to which taunt button. (And remember their place in the script.) And they need to not speak out of turn!

...So anyway, we were all really proud of ourselves for that. And it inspired a bunch of "let's do this again with a different thing!" talk in the [Koopa Keep] AIM Blast that we never actually did. (One idea was to re-enact George Zimmerman killing Trayvon Martin, because we're a bunch of sick bastards (as is every Trayvon supporter who made a reenactment video, except all of theirs are weird and inaccurate). ...But are we sick bastards for just considering it? Since we never actually did it. You tell me, thought-police!)

If you wanted me to talk about other parts of Brawl, well, I do so here. Fact is, those parts aren't dead yet. You can still play them or listen to the glorious soundtrack. However, the Wi-Fi Connection part of Brawl is dead forever. It was a big part of our lives, spending hundreds of hours on it, actually. "With Anyone" was just taunt parties and no one will miss that, and it looks like Smash 4's solution (For Fun/For Glory) to it will be a lot better. "With Friends" has met its end. So this article is a memorial to it, and just one awesome thing you can do with it that's unique to the writers of this site and that you can't do anywhere else. Somehow I doubt those taunt-messages will be in Smash 4. But I'll be happy if they are.

REST IN PEACE.

Our second-ever look at the mode...

"The Wii is trying to connect in earnest! And it succeeds!" - Sakurai. Well, no more.

Oh, and other games' wi-fi need to rest in peace too. But not Mario Kart Wii. That's caused more harm than good to the world.


We are now in the new generation (a year and a half old now, actually). We have Nintendo Network IDs. Ludwig's is PrinceOfKoopas. Check him out. You can't play any games with him yet, but that will change soon.


For 2013's Memorial Day article on Paper Mario: Sticker Star, look here!
KoopaTV's 2015 Memorial Day article, on Koopa Troopas, is here.
The fifth Super Smash Bros. game has now released, and the Planet Koopa advertisement video is part of our entire Super Smash Bros. series retrospective.
Not mentioned in this memorial is that Subspace Emissary was a big part of Super Smash Bros. Brawl's appeal, and the robots there are the subject of KoopaTV's Memorial Day 2020 article.

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