sugardeath

:(((((((((((((((

Wiki says tonsillitis looks kinda like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonsillitis

Mine are practically touching, literally coated in this nasty green, gray, yellow shit. Sure, they looked like wiki’s tonsils last time I had tonsillitis and a few days ago, but now? No. Fuck you, tonsils. Good thing my appointment with student health services is in nine hours. About fucking time. I’m just afraid they’re gonna be like “shiiiit emergency tonsillectomy” because of how bad they look I was coughing up bloodphlegm about twenty minutes ago. Gargled some water and fixed that right up… somehow.

Vomitting with tonsils as such is terrible.

I felt like a kid again.

So I’ve owned Super Smash Brothers Brawl for about a week now and I feel that I’ve logged enough hours in it to state what I believe is the best aspect of this game. I have not unlocked everything yet, mind you, that’ll take ages. Anyway. What would you say is the best part about Brawl? The fact that it has ten more characters than Melee? That there are no more clone characters? That all the characters are way more balanced than in Melee? That there are more stages than Melee (I am unsure of how many)? The fact that you can play with people online? The stage builder so that you essentially have an infinite amount of stages? The fact that stages can be shared via SD card AND via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection? Or howabout the picture mode? In Melee if you wanted to snapshots you had to go into Camera Mode, which was lame. There was also no way to get them off of your Gamecube memory card (well, no easy way, the PSO exploit worked, but it was a bitch and a half).

In Brawl you can take snapshots anywhere and anytime except for online matches (can’t pause an online game). You can share snapshots with friends via SD card or the WFC. Did you know there’s a third-party tool to convert the snapshots into jpeg files? Sweet, eh? You can also take replays of matches if they’re under three minutes long! These are also shareable via SD card or WFC. Oh! Everyday, if you connect to the WFC, you’ll receive a brand new custom stage, snapshot, and replay make/taken and submitted to Nintendo by another Brawl player. I like this part a lot. I’ve already seen a few ridiculous Home Run Contest replays.

OK, maybe you’ve played with all of that. Have you taken a look at the story mode? It’ll take you at least seven hours to complete and has some absolutely amazing cinematics. Basically, it’s Kirby Super Star on steroids (the Great Maze is the Great Cave Offensive). Once you finish that, there’s Boss Rush mode. All-Star mode makes a come back. Multi-Man Brawls, Home Run Contests, Event matches; it’s all sure to keep you busy. Oh, and everything but Classic mode can be done in coop. COOP HOME RUN CONTEST. Terrifying. Coop Break the Targets? Piece of cake!

How about the actual multiplayer part? Where most people will spend 90% of their time. It took us maybe a few months to unlock all of the stuff in Melee. I’m guessing we hit that in March of ‘02, or so. I could check, but I’m lazy. Well, we thought we got everything. Just last month we were playing Melee here at school and we got a new notification: “You’ve played 4,995 Vs. matches! That’s one cent per match!” Looking at the notifications list in Melee, you’ll see a ton of ‘01 and ‘02 ones, and then a lone Feb ‘08 one at the bottom. It took years of multiplayer games to get that last notification. The game is smooth as ever. A few glitches were fixed, new items were added (and old ones taken out.. sadly ), the bumper from the first Smash Brothers made a return, many new stages and characters, old characters reworked to be more fair/less dumb, overall awesomeness.

Oh! If you’re playing online with a friend, you can have more than one person locally on your Wii in the online match! Neat! I love it when games do that! Regarding the online mode, if you’re not heavy into the brawlin’ you can also spectate matches and bet coins on who you think will win. Spectate mode is really awesome and I’ve somehow spectated more than forty matches already. If you’re not heavy into the brawlin’ and don’t feel like going online, you can play the Coin Launcher mini-game to collect trophies and stickers. This game is quite fun and I often lose much time to it. There are a ridiculous amount of both trophies and stickers to collect in the game. Trophies are collectable in the Coin Launcher, Subspace Emissary (the story mode), as well as the All-Star and Boss Rush modes. Stickers pop up all over the fucking place, which is a good thing because you’ll want to use them to upgrade your characters in the Subspace Emissary.

But no. Fuck all that shit. None of that shit is what stands out as the best part in my mind. Not at all.

It’s all about the motherfucking music, my friend.

Someone ripped all the music from the Japanese release of the game when it came out about a month ago. I have been listening to it pretty much nonstop for a month. I have the OST loaded into Amarok right now and it tells me it is three-hundred twelve tracks long. Two-hundred eighty-five of those are actual song songs (the others are victory musics and the like). Two-hundred eighty-five songs. Songs from a ton of different games (many that I have played, many that I have not played) featuring many different styles of music. All of this music is featured in the game, many of them as unlockables. All of the songs are available for use as background music for your custom stages. Most of the songs are fully orchestrated. There are some heavy rock songs (F-Zero, I’m looking at you), they even took a Donkey Kong song and turned it into something you’d expect to hear at a rave! And it doesn’t suck! I have yet to find a terrible song in here!

I think the coolest thing would have to be the fully orchestrated Tetris theme song. No wait. The two fully orchestratred Tetris theme songs! All of the Kirby songs stand out as being way more fucking awesome than everything else. The Metroid ones are awesome, even though a couple of them were ripped from Metroid Prime (they were good songs, though, so it’s all cool). F-Zero’s Mute City has been redone gloriously. Epic guitar. Piano. Can’t go wrong. Another of the Donkey Kong songs is extremely epic sounding. All of the Fire Emblem music is amazing. Fully orchestrated, some songs with a chorus.

A few Melee songs make a return, which is acceptable because they were already pretty awesome as it was.

The songs composed specifically for Brawl are top-notch as well. Again, fully orchestrated, the main theme is sung in Latin by a chorus. It is a very epic theme, especially when listening to it while reading the English lyrics (which are actually pretty sweet) and watching the sun set on all thirty-five characters after having beat the final boss of the Subspace Emissary.

Yeah. Fuck all that gameplay and shit. Give me music! Games these days tend to overlook the audio part of the audiovisual experience that is a video game. Game developers wank over their new graphics and physics engines and then just dump in some shitty sound effects and background.. noise. Give us real music, guys! Not only will it draw the player into the game even more, it may have a chance of being memorable! Everyone recognizes the Super Mario theme. Good music is important to a game!

Now I just gotta complete some of these ridiculous challenges to unlock the rest of the songs…

I think if I were to go deaf, I would shoot myself.

I’ll be off in Carbondale for the day as well as part of tomorrow. It’s castle time, bitches.

Anyway, hell week is almost over! Spring Break is soooo close!!

Apparently we’re leaving for Carbondale at eight-thirty Saturday morning. Oof.