Super Smash Brawl Tournament

Well today was the Super Smash Brawl tournament down in L.A. so I decided to go. I took along with me my super awesome pal Oliver again, and my not so super awesome pal An. (Just kidding man, I love you ;) ) The tournament was set to start at 3 but we decided to go at 12 just to be sure we could get in. Well it turns out going 3 hours earlier was STILL too late. By the time we got there, the lines were wrapped around the alley.

So for 3 hours we talked about why the sky was blue, why are we here on this planet, does God have a greater meaning for us, and who was going to pay for the ice cream. Eventually after a brutal 3 hours of waiting, we approached the entrance. By then my neck was as stiff as an oak tree and my back was like twig, ready to snap at any time. Luckily the inside was amazing. The place was pretty big.



This was the main hallway. The only well illuminated place here, the rest of the place was pitch dark.

Unfortunately for me, I had to have an I.D. to play in the actual tournament, which was pretty retarded. So I decided to go to the free play area with Oliver. An already has his driver's license so he was able to enter the tournament.

There wasn't a long line for the free play so I quickly lined up behind a bunch of little punk kids. They all had the exact same hairstyle and were all overweight. They remind me of a bunch of Kirbys, just nowhere near as cute. The cool thing was that they had a projector in the line so we could still watch what was happening in the tournament.




I only wish that the projector was of a better quality.

After an hour of waiting, it was finally our turn to play. It was a 4 player free for all using the classic controller.



Here's a really bad shot of the booth. And there was only one booth for some odd reason.

The roster had no unlocked characters so sadly, I couldn't use Marth or Snake. =\ Ah well, I made do with what I had and chose Ike.

First Impressions of Brawl

Well playing with the classic controller didn't help out that much. It was very awkward playing and Ike moved like an elephant trapped in tar. He was sooo slow! I would try to do his smash, and he takes his sweet time to execute it like he's showing off to the ladies.

"F+A Smash Ike!"
"Oh yeah ladies, check out my muscle. Ooo, and here comes the swing."

>_> Luckily when his smash connected, it did some major damage. Maybe it was just using the classic controller, but things feel TOTALLY different from Melee. I thought that since I was pretty good at Melee that it was going to be a cakewalk. How wrong I was. Everything that you know about SSBM will not help you in SSBB. The gameplay is drastically different, with the most noticeable being the speed. It's a lot slower than Melee and it feels a bit sluggish for commands to execute.

I was playing against two foxes and... I think Peach. Well when the match started, I started tapping every button to get used to the game. Ike's U+B is so damn awesome. I could do it all day but I had some asses to kick. I was trying all sorts of Melee moves with very poor results. =\ So I went into a hyper concentration mode that involved walking up to someone and pressing F+A Smash in hopes of killing them. Luckily this worked up until Fox grabbed the Smash Ball and summoned the Landmaster tank. After I died, I used the few seconds of invincibility to jump in the middle of the tank, perform a smash, and sent someone flying. Then at the very last second, I picked up the smash ball and used my smash against Peach, promptly sending her flying. Yep, I won my first Brawl match.

Unfortunately for my other friends, they both lost (Oliver was playing in the same match I was. But he kept bitching about how the controls were all weird. I had no problem, it's just Ike is damn slow.) The cool thing was, I got one of these little Wii-mote laser keychain as a reward.




So yep, I had waited in line for close to 6 hours to play 4 minutes of Brawl. Was it worth it? Probably not but since I won my match, I'm pretty satisfied. After the free play, I went into the main area to watch the tournament.




Final Thoughts

As I'm typing this up, my body is breaking down. I'm not sure who won because I just wanted to go home after playing my match. Now I'm REALLY psyched about Brawl. Oh, one thing to note was that I saw a lot of other bloggers or press covering this. Maybe I'll appear on someone's video. Had I known it was going to be this big, I would've taken my camera instead of using my cell's camera. Well, you live you learn. Next time, I'll be covering events in much greater detail.

Oh and sorry about the delay with the iPod Touch review. I had a really bad cold last week that I'm still trying to recover from. It should be up by next week at the latest.

Edit: I found a video of the final match in the tournament.