At the start of the year I had a bit of an epiphany when it came to my gaming habits. I realised that I would typically play the same few games forever and ever and never vary what I did. I also played a LOT of Super Smash Bros. Sephiroth had just been added to the roster and I was once again dipping my feet in, trying to kill as many Sephiroths online as I could. Despite the optics my preference is not to use Cloud, but to kill Sephiroth with Minecraft Steve. Because Minecraft Steve killing Sephiroth is hilarious.
Then I did a double take which is something that over the years Super Smash Bros. occasionally gets me with. It's become a bit more normalised now, to be playing a Nintendo party fighting game where Mario is beating up his friends. It's become normalised to have him fight Sonic, Solid Snake and even Cloud Strife. But there was something about mining for diamonds while Sephiroth waved his Masamune around on a Nintendo fighting game that momentarily caught me off guard.
Super Smash Bros. started out as a first party Nintendo fun free for all beat em up. Over the years it's become something...much more. With every new surprise edition to the roster, rules are broken and characters who would NEVER be a part of the game just seem to become...part of the game. You would never see a non-Nintendo character in Smash. Except they added Sonic, and Snake...and Megaman. Okay but they all had games on a Nintendo console right? Kind of, until they added Cloud. But Cloud was in Kingdom Hearts which had SOME games on a Nintendo etc..
Okay I hear you. And then they added Joker from Persona.
The fact is that Super Smash Bros. is no longer a Nintendo fighter. It's a celebration of video games as a whole. A few years back in the Brawl hey-days, the game used to come with a catalogue of all the games which featured content in Smash. So you could run through and check them all out in your own time. There were maybe 200 or so, pretty big list.
We have moved on. The roster is now 85 characters deep at the time of writing. And many of these are not Nintendo characters. You have the Belmonts, bringing in a whole bunch of Castlevania music and a cool stage. You have all the Final Fantasy VII stuff (finallY). You've got Terry Bogard basically dragging the entire SNK back catalogue in behind him via various characters on his stage and music tracks. Plus you've got Street Fighter so you can dip into that whole Capcom vs SNK scene.
Not only that but there are over 1000 music tracks, 100+ stages, and more than 1500 spirits. Spirits are basically jpegs of characters you collect. Nothing special, except that the vast majority of them also come with event matches that allow you to "fight" the character or thing represented in the jpeg. This is achieved via creating a battle that is an homage to the character, since you can only fight characters actually in the roster. For instance, shy guy from Mario is represented by a whole bunch of Mii fighters wearing Shy Guy masks who shoot shot putts at you (since shy guys fire those sorts of projectiles at you in the game).
When you take all the music, spirits, Mii costumes, fighters, stages, background characters on stages, costumes, items etc. etc. as a whole, the game references more video game content than anything I could ever have dreamed of seeing in one place. There has never been a single game which is more chock full of references to other games.
So I found myself thinking, just how many games WOULD you need to play, if you were to categorically have played every single solitary game referenced by Super Smash Bros. Ultimate?
And I did more than wonder. I set out to catalogue everything in the game. Every spirit, every item, every fighter, every house that appears on an Animal Crossing stage, every minor detail in every characters every single attack. The fact that Link uses his motion bombs from Breath of the Wild but Toon Link uses the cel shaded bombs from Wind Waker. The fact that every Megaman colouration references one of his outfits upon obtaining a weapon from one of the robot masters.
My only rule was to give full credit to all the games as origin games, I needed to find which game FIRST featured the content. So even though Link's outfit in ultimate is from Breath of the Wild, he himself originates from the first Legend of Zelda. So at a very basic level, Link's mere appearance (before diving into movesets) references TWO origin games. The origin of him, and the origin of his outfit. And then he uses the master sword as his main weapon. The master sword appears in Breath of the Wild but it ORIGINATES in A Link to the Past.
And so by simply selecting Link as a fighter, without even looking at any move or anything beyond that simple fact, we already have a reference to three distinct games. It goes on and on like this. It was a painstaking process helped by the fact that a lot of people online have already documented a lot of this stuff (e.g. somebody on reddit has already made a list of where most characters moves originate and what they reference, very helpful!).
But unlike most crazy schemes I conjur up, I actually finished it. In the time SINCE I finished it, content has been added to Smash. Stuff gets added all the time. Arthur from Ghosts and Goblins has a Mii costume and a spirit (bringing two Ghosts n Goblins games into the mix) and some new IPs were added (Bravely Default II, Monster Hunter Rise) to name but a few. I'm treading water and just about keeping the list updated. Fortunately the last character reveal was Pyra and Mythra who don't bring anything other than Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (which was already in the list). But I'm sure whoever comes next will be different, maybe! There are still two (maybe three) still to come, along with spirits and Mii costumes which keep getting added. So it's an evolving list.
However the list currently stands at 823 games. So yeah, if you were to understand every solitary reference embedded in Smash Bros. today, you would be required to play 823 different games (in most cases, probably to completion).
I have a spreadsheet containing all 823 games, their release date, the series they belong to (so I can list them in release order by series), their original console and whether or not any of the games themselves contains content first referenced in another game (e.g. Banjo Kazooie technically references Diddy Kong Racing, since Banjo appeared in that FIRST).
Anyway I did the only sensible thing you can do when presented with a list of 823 games. I decided to play them all.
Before I carry on, no, I have not completed 823 games since January. I have completed 25~ (approximate because one of them is Animal Crossing and that doesn't really...end...ever). At my current completion rate it will take me a further 8 years to get through them all.
But I have solved the problem with my gaming habit. I'm no longer playing the same few games, but rather working my way through an incredibly long list of many many games (many of which were already on my to do list, which is handy!)
This whole thing is really just a framework and an excuse to play new games. And yes, I could do that without the ridiculous setup, but it does ground everything and keep it focused. It also allows for experimentation. For instance, I recently completed Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan for the Nintendo DS. This game is the precursor to the more famous (in the West) Elite Beat Agents, and was only ever released in Japan.
I can safely say that I would have never even picked up Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan without this silly framework. However I found the game an absolute delight to play. It was fun, quirky and uber challenging. I'm discovering content I never even knew existed and having an absolute blast in the process. I feel like I've recaptured the joy of discovery that was missing from my gaming experiences of late.
How I operate is I use random.org to randomise the list of games I still have to play. I then pick a random number and I pick the game corresponding with that number on my list. I line that up as my next game to play after completing the games I'm on. I'm only playing 2 games at once (I cycle between the two active games so no one game becomes stale and I don't end up stalling the whole playthrough forever because of one impossible game) and when one is done I move onto the next selection.
I also have a rule that I have to play each game sequentially within its own series. So if I roll Mario Odyssey, I have to go right back to the earliest Mario release and start there. No jumping the queue. Furthermore, I honour callbacks and references within the game (which as mentioned, is already on my spreadsheet). So in the Mario example, I'd have to play Donkey Kong. Because whilst it's not a part of the Mario series, it's still where Mario was introduced.
It sounds convoluted and IT IS. But it's also a hell of a lot of fun.
My intention was to review every game as I played and start a blog featuring all the reviews in turn because it's a really interesting experience I'd like to share. But as with all my projects this has fallen by the wayside. I have only written 3 reviews out of 25 and they're not even fully edited yet.
But what I might do is throw my brain-farts out here as I'm playing. Just quick fire discussion of my experiences with each game as I progress. There's a lot of stuff on this list, many not even Nintendo specific. So if you want to read about my rough musings on this ridiculous journey, watch this space. I might forget to even reply to this thread, but hopefully not! I'd quite like to document this experience in some form and getting myself in gear to write proper reviews may never happen going by my track record. We'll see!
At the time of writing I have now completed* the following games:
Pilotwings
Rhythm Tengoku
Donkey Kong
Katamari Damacy
Kirby's Dream Land
Rad Mobile
The Legend of Zelda
F-Zero
Mega Man
Warframe
Ice Climber
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword
Wonder Momo
Mario Bros. (Game & Watch)
Animal Forest
Mario Bros.
Mega Man 2
Pikmin
Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan
Mega Man 3
Super Mario Bros.
I am still kind of "completing" Animal Crossing (my criteria for completion is to just encounter all the content in Smash, else infinity is a very, very long time!)
I am also still "completing" Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (Lots of sudokus, not sure I want to or will do them all. But I do find it relaxing).
I'm counting those two as special cases and there will be more special cases, games which are kind of ongoing because of the nature of them.
But more proactive games, I'm playing Culdcept and Samurai Shodown.
I am enjoying both, but they're both kinda grinds at this point. The last stage of Culdcept takes an age to beat and I keep coming unstuck. And Samurai Shodown is ridiculous. My intention is to beat arcade mode with all 12 fighters, but I've only managed 4 in 4 days so far. It's a brutal fucking game.
(* because some games don't have logical endings, so my definition of complete varies. Warframe would take me a good couple of years to grind out all the content currently in there, I think. So I've progressed it to a point and I'm leaving it there)
I will eventually be screwed over because not all games have a localised release or a fan translation. Rhythm Tengoku and Culdcept had decent fan translations. Animal Forest didn't...but it was just a v1 Animal Crossing so I didn't play it very long.
Ouendan has no translation but it doesn't need it. It's more of a joy if you don't know what's going on.
My first sticking point was I just rolled the first Famicom Detective game. It's never been localised. HOWEVER, a localised remake is coming to Switch this month. So I tossed that one back into the roster and will have to make do with that version. I'm hoping to mostly get by and experience all that I possibly can.
To get around this I actually pick two numbers when I randomly select my next game. The second is a backup in case the first is unplayable currently or too expensive. I prefer to not use roms unless I absolutely have to, and if I keep rolling new games I'll be broke.
But I'm setting a solid rule to strive to play the first where possible (2nd if I absolutely must). Otherwise I'll just keep re-rolling the dice until I get Mario Odyssey and Super Metroid and defeat the whole point.
My next game is Dillon's Rolling Western. I have it downloaded on 3DS ready to go. Just waiting to beat one of these other two. May be a while (:
I don't know a fat lot about Dillon's Rolling Western (half the fun of this is I'm going in pretty blind to a whole bunch of this stuff) but I think it's sort of a Tower Defense-esque thing? I'll find out soon hopefully!
Wow hi Paul. Glad you are keeping yourself busy. Sounds fun but I could never attempt that! I am fine with just saying I've completed all Mario games to 100%!
Aren't a lot of these games probably only playable on the old consoles though? Like, the more obscure ones.
The oldest game on the list is Table Tennis for the Magnavox Odyssey. It's the original "Pong".
Beyond that it's largely just the NES and most of those games are relatively easy to come by thanks to game preservation efforts. There's a solid chunk of Game & Watch games, but almost every single Game & Watch is playable via the Game & Watch gallery series on the Game Boy (which are all available on 3DS virtual console).
So yes, logistically it's quite complicated. And there are definitely some games that you can't play despite preservation efforts. There's a Castlevania mobile game that they took offline (for example).
If I can't play it I can't play it, but so far I'm having a fairly decent run.
There are quite a few arcade games actually but I have MAME for that. Not that emulating an arcade on home PC is a great experience generally. Both attempts at that have been pretty lame so far, but it may just be the games themselves I didn't like.
The Pokémon games would be fun to play. I’d love to play the original again at some point. If all I had was time. Man. Wouldn’t you just love to get paid to dick around and play video games all day sigh.
I just beat another game, so I figured I'd do a little write-up. This is almost certainly only interesting to me, but I like documenting down my thoughts so I might as well follow through on this thread. Eventually I might play a game that somebody else has (:
Samurai Shodown is a classic arcade SNK fighting game. You play as various characters (largely Samurai based, hence the title) from different localities around the world battling it out to eventually battle some evil guy trying to take over the world.
It's the same deal as Street Fighter really, and it's hard for me not to compare the two since it's a solid frame of reference. This is the first proper SNK game I've played, and I'm not much of a fighting game guy in general so I don't have a ton of exposure to the genre. However I have played a little Capcom vs. SNK in the past. I barely grasped who most of the Capcom characters were at the time, let alone the SNK ones (so I'm kind of looking forward to revisiting that after playing quite a chunk of these!).
Outside of this now, there's only Tekken, Street Fighter, a little Mortal Kombat many years ago and the first Rival Schools I ever really played. And out of all those it's only really Tekken 3 and Rival Schools I played to death. The long and short of it is that I'm not very good at these games, having not practiced a whole lot. And Smash Bros. is not a fighting game, despite the protestations of the community. It doesn't really count.
Needless to say this was an...experience. It wasn't a bad experience, but it was a tremendously frustrating and challenging one. There are 12 playable fighters from a diverse range of backgrounds, including this lovable gent who of course represents America (Texas specifically!)
The full rogue's gallery
To "complete" the game my goal was simple enough, beat the arcade mode with every one of the 12 characters. As well as having to fight all 12 of them in each run (including an alt of yourself, which the game actually lampshades quite nicely in the characters opening dialogue), you get 3 bonus stages smashing about training dummies before fighting Amakusa, the game's big bad (who is not playable). He's essentially the M. Bison of this game (gonna keep referencing it). Interestingly he's also loosely based on an actual real Christian revolutionary who led an uprising. Apparently this guy is referenced in a ton of Japanese culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amakusa_Shir%C5%8D
I didn't think it would take me that long to breeze through these. Again benchmarking Street Fighter 2 in which I can grind through the stages with maybe 3 or 4 continues in general, it seemed fairly trivial.
I was a tad optimistic. The game took the best part of the entire past week to beat. Now I'm only putting about 2 hours tops a day into these games due to other commitments (with potentially a little more at weekends). So it's hard to gauge exactly how long that is in hours. But the game does track the continues when you beat it with a character, and I'm pretty sure my first run through with Haohmaru (Ryu) was in the region of 120 continues.
Now this was a popular arcade machine back in the day so if you go with the view that each credit was a quarter, that run alone cost me $31.
It did get easier as I went on. The key thing to grasp about Samurai Shodown is it's not a run of the mill button mashing beat-em-up. It's a game very much about patience and observation. Your characters are not stacked with combos. They have a few special moves (some of which are painful to pull off for me, I'm just not a fighting game guy in general). However mostly just reliant on standard kicks and throws along with their weapon attacks. It being a Samurai game, everybody has a weapon of some kind.
The game rewards you for punishing your opponents mistakes. If you hit somebody whilst they're jumping you do more damage. But the tables turn quite badly on you if you regularly screw up. And I did this quite a lot!
You get more powerful if you're knocked about a lot, which is one of the game's mechanics. But honestly this didn't help me a whole lot. If I was already in that rut, I was going down before it even mattered. You do persist your attack bonus to the next round (it's a standard best of 3 format) but even that didn't help me. The key thing is not to get flustered and to wait your turn (this seems to be the standard guidance online, I consulted a lot of forums because I really sucked at this).
CPU opponents are certainly very patient, to the absolute extreme. Sometimes it's easier to just smack them a little and wait for the 99 second timer to run down because a fair few of them are hesitant to do anything at all other than crouch in the corner and block. Amakusa is terrible for this, although he alternates between this motion and jumping around the stage like an idiot (giving you an opening). Nakoruru (Chun Li) is the absolute worst here though. She barely does anything but block, apart from the one micro-second you lower your guard and she stabs you in the face (literally tossed you on the ground, sits on you and plunges a knife into your actual face. Ouch!) Nakoruru vs. Nakoruru was my single worst fight.
You can also knock your opponents weapon out of their hands. You sometimes clash and go into a button mashing "duel" and if you win that, they're disarmed until they can pick it up. But I often found that they'd kick my ass MORE without a weapon, which was pretty ridiculous. The same forums seemed to suggest the original two Samurai Shodown games are notoriously hard so maybe it wasn't just me.
The final rub was that I was beating this game on level-2. This is a setting from the original machines that basically served as a dipswitch for difficulty. The highest is 8. So I was playing this thing on almost the entry level difficulty and it was still insanely tough. Like I say, it did get easier. I was able to beat the game using Charlotte (I actually don't think she has a SF equivalent) with only 4 continues. I think she's one of the more cheap characters, so it might not mean a fat lot (: or it might mean I eventually got into the true rhythm of this. Who knows.
Storyline is silly and non-existant, as was the style at the time! I could barely follow the characters arcs and resolutions but none of that matters, it's not about that. The visuals are of course beautiful. It's an arcade so the graphics feature all of those gorgeously rendered fully animated sprites and quirky background characters that are peppered through the genre (again I am just talking about Street Fighter here). Case in point the bear on the far left here who gyrates in time with the music whilst you fight (I played this stage a hell of a lot since it's Nakoruru's!)
Music and sound are on point too. The soundtrack is catchy as hell and a few of the songs have been rattling around in my brain long after I stopped playing. Controls work fine on the version I played via the Xbox controller (although I mapped the A+B combos to shoulder buttons. A lot of people do this because getting them synced up is apparently a bitch and a lot of moves rely on it).
I would overall highly recommend this, but with a proviso that if you don't do fighting games this won't be a cake-walk. It does take a lot of perserverance and grinding through. It's frustrating, but does feel eventually so rewarding when you finally win, as with all this stuff.
It's fun, it's painful. It's a nice intro to the world of SNK which will dominate a fair chunk of this whole run! There's only Samurai Shodown 2 on my list after this, but I am really excited to play it now (and also dreading it slightly (: )
How to play it:
I'll chuck this in here in response to Vern's point about these games being on old hardware. Most of them actually aren't, and are quite easy to get a hold of if you want to try them out.
It's available via the Arcade Archives series stand-alone (these are really good replicas, I've played a few), but I got the Digital Eclipse Samurai Shodown collection on Steam. This is available for Switch, PS4 and so forth. Digital Eclipse also do a pristine port and they stack a whole bunch of side content like concept art, soundtracks and original interviews for good measure. Highly recommend their collections if you're interested! They do a Mega Man collection too which is just as nice.
You also get save states, which meant I could pause in between fights and quit. Although I'm vowing to do as much as possible on this journey without cheesing any gameplay via save states.
The standalone game is about $7 and the full collection is about $40, but you do get about 7 games. It also has online play, so if anybody does try this out let me know and we can play (I'll probably lose).
Song of the Game:
I'm a huge game music guy. I probably listen to Video Game soundtracks and OC remix more than any other produced music around. I also like to share music I really like. For each game I'm playing I'm looking for one stand-out piece of music to remember that phase of my journey. I'll post each of them here as I go.
For this, it's a really tough call. The obvious candidates are "Banquet of Nature" (Nakoruru Stage) and "Gaia" (Earthquake Stage). Both of these are outstanding for different reasons, and they each made it into Smash Bros. Ultimate with a remixed version when you buy Terry Bogard's DLC pack. I'll link them here because both them and their remixes are pretty solid.
Banquet of Nature Original:
Remix:
Gaia original:
Remix:
But all these are just VERY honourable mentions. The soundtracks is really good so it's a hard pick.
My absolute favourite is Foreigner, the music for Tam Tam's (Dhalsim) stage. Tam Tam is a kind of somewhat racially awkward South American guy (I think the game's canon can't even decide where he's from). He has a huge sword which he spins around screaming BUNGA BUNGA. And he throws actual skulls at his enemies. He's a weird out there character for a game about fighting Samurais. But I always found his encounters hilarious, not just because he's so incredibly easy compared to the rest of the roster (surprisingly had one of my better runs PLAYING as him though!)
BUNGA BUNGA
Novelty and quirkiness aside, his stage music absolutely kicks. His stage is set outside a Mayan temple in a jungle with flowing water and you can hear it perfectly in the background of the tune. It's so horrendously catchy, I can't get it out of my head.
Anywho that is that. I'm gonna keep writing these up regardless of if people actually read them. If anybody actually does or just wants to talk about the games I'm playing feel free. Otherwise I'll just keep on posting to myself anyway (:
