Got that new smash, yeah, on launch on lunch. No joke. Forgot to Amazon it had to go to the Gamestop on my lunch break like some kind of fool that stops for games. Hell I even got me a photograph of it.
Dang I forgot my hand was in that photo. Oh well. It’s not like I’m going to take another or anything.
So Smash on the Gameboy, damn! Who would have thought of such a thing? You see the only smash me and my contemporaries really got into was that n64 smash, which as far as I’m concerned is the only smash. All things considered I probably poured more hours into that smash that any other game, and even though I still can’t tuck roll, I’ll flick that switch and kong you so fast you won’t know your toes from your garden hoes.
Check it out, the tape’s still in the deck-
So as you loyal Zesty readers know, I got one of the new Gameboys, so when I heard they were smashin’ on that I had to get involved. So first thing’s first – this new smash got Kong?
Alright, yeah, but how much Kong we talking?
Enhance that Kong!
Alright. So we got Kong confirmed. Does that mean it’s a good game? Well, yeah. It’s smash, it’s got Kong, it’s in your pocket. That’s pretty much what you signed up for and what you’re going to get. I don’t think this is going to disappoint you in any sense, but maybe after an hour or two of fiddling along you start to disengage and realize it’s not that interesting. Why?
Well, I said earlier I smash 64, but some of you smash cube or even wii, and that’s alright. It stands to reason our first and most engaged Smash is our favorite smash, not because of the smashing itself, but who we were smashing with. The precious memories and friendships forged between game paddles and stock 3s. The reason we love smash is not the game, per se, but the human connection.
Friend of mine, old friend of mine, got kicked out of High School for bringing brass knuckles to school. Stupid reason. Anyways a month or two down the line we were hanging out somewhere and I asked him, I asked him “man you got all the free time in the world to do what you see fit, isn’t that amazing?” and he replied “No. Without people, there’s nothing.”
“Without people, there’s nothing.” ~Old Friend of Mine
He’s on to something.
Maybe that new two screened three d’d gameboy in your pocket has more processing power than the shuttle that put us on the moon, but it doesn’t mean a damned thing.
So maybe when you’re an hour or two deep into smashing the new smash, you realize something, there’s no one anymore. The world spun and revolved around the sun, and the sun spun and revolved around whatever it is suns revolve around, and in this perpetual cosmic ballet time passed and we lost something. You don’t realize the good times until they’re history. You don’t realize the good times until you paid the gamestop man $40.00 and tax to sit down and smash by yourself.
It’s a good game, but it’s also very fucking depressing.
So, yeah, it’s Smash, but you’re about a decade older and you’re in the middle of time and space and it’s a fucking vacuum. Where did all your friends go? Where did all my friends go? Why am I depressed? You smash and you smash and smash but without people there’s nothing.
It comes with some type of angry birds though I took a photo of that.
So I hit up some fellow Zesty writers- Srol, Box, and Khrene- to play a little online, maybe re-capture some of that wonderful human connection that has forged and strengthened so many friendships in my time.
It was my first experience doing online play on any Nintendo system and the entire online experience seems pretty broken. I suppose that’s no news to anybody, though, the friends code shuffle.
Well we boot up into a match and there’s two things.
Firstly, there’s no voice chat, at all. What’s the point? That Ness I’m Kongin’ on may say “Srol” on it’s health bar but it might as well be an AI. Taking away the voice chat just strips away any chance of couch emulation the multiplayer had. We’re just back to being lonely, isolated souls, grasping at straws for connections long gone and out of reach.
Second, the lag. It’s awful. It’s horrible. We were playing three or four people all sitting next to a broadband wireless connection, and the lag was horrendous. Now keep in mind I played computer games back when 200 was considered a good ping, so I have some patience for lag, but it was really truly awful. Speeds all over the place, from dead-stop to slow mo to hyper speed. Just about every speed but normal speed. What are we doin’ here?
“THis game made me feel cold and empty inside, so I put it on par with the general experience of being alive” ~ Srol
So these are my gaming buddies, they live upwards of thousand miles away from my couch, and when we try to play together we’re just faceless characters, random victims of random time, just dying in a depressing void. Drifting away, further and further. I don’t know man.
It’s a good smash game, if you like smash you should get it. You already knew that. Have a nice Sunday.