Super Smash Bros. Melee

Even if you're alone, the sheer amount of options, trophy collecting and hidden characters make this game worth playing again and again. It's easy to learn but incredibly challenging to master and collect all the trophies.

Smash Bros. is known for its deep game play, and Melee is a bottomless pit. [Dec 2001, p.166]

It's a long way from the Tekkens of this world, with no complicated combos or tricky special moves to pull off, but under the surface there's a fighting game that requires almost as much skill in its own way, as any of the 'serious' martial arts sims - and is a lot more fun. [NGC]

Yes, the game still lacks a certain depth, and fighting game fanatics raised on "Soul Calibur," "Virtua Fighter" and "Tekken" should certainly look elsewhere, but fans of Nintendo (and of the first game) will absolutely love what's going on here.

The game has an enormous amount of charm, and it mixes old school with new school almost seamlessly.

Seeing the ducks from "Duck Hunt" or the 2 dimensional Ice-climbers (also featured as playable characters) will have you praising Nintendo for their kindness in bringing back some long forgotten gaming moments.

The camera angles were enigmatic and frustrating. The action on the screen was great when we were fairly close to the fighting, but once scaled out became chaotic. The personal feel of smacking each other around when close was decent and enjoyable; but once the action panned became impersonal and out of touch.

Game is perfect and represents the fun era of the Nintendo GameCube really well. This came out back when you didn't have to pay extra money for DLC and back when you didn't have the internet spoiling what the unlockable characters and stages were. In that regard, there was a great feeling of excitement when playing this game for the first time as a kid and trying to unlock everything. I have a lot of nostalgia for this game. Melee had lots of fun characters to play as like Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, Link, Samus, Fox, Falco, Pikachu, Pichu, Mewtwo, and so on. Melee also had great single player modes such as Classic Mode, Adventure Mode, and All-Star Mode. It even had fascinating challenges such as the home run contest and multi-man melee. Collecting the trophies was fun too even if it was pretty time consuming to get them all. Melee was a product of its time; you don't really get games like this anymore. It's still worth playing today!

It’s fun, really a multiplayer game though. Once you find a character that you nail a few moves with it can become a bit competitive. It would have been better if there was a story mode for single player.

The game itself is good, but its mechanics make me feel compelled to play it competitively.

Super Smash Bros. Melee is a mess of accidental mechanics and rushed development that only a nostalgia-blinded cult could love. People call it "deep," but it’s actually just a glitchy, unpolished disaster that Nintendo scrambled to finish in thirteen months. The movement feels like you’re sliding on a floor covered in butter, and the fact that you need a specialized controller and a heavy tube TV from 1998 just to play it properly is peak delusion. Half the character roster is completely broken and unplayable, yet fans act like it’s the pinnacle of competitive gaming. It’s not a masterpiece; it’s a high-speed car crash that people have spent twenty years trying to convince themselves is art.

This game does not hold up nowadays. The game play is extremely buggy and unbalanced. The graphics are terrible (even for the gamecube) and the sound design is atrocious. Doesn't hold up play Ultimate or sm4sh instead.