 |
| Oh good, it's Sonic the Hedgehog, said no one since about 1996. |
It may be cold and wintry now, but cast your mind back to the heady days of last summer and everyone’s favourite boring trade show of underwhelming game reveals done by uncomfortable-looking businessmen dressed in ‘cool’ leather jackets a PA bought for them that morning – yes, that’s right, it’s E3!
As ever, it delivered a bumper crop of gaming goodness to look forward to over the coming 12 months, with loads of what we all love the most – risk-free, unoriginal sequels. And when you think of dead horses being flogged down to their component atoms, one name always pops into mind: Nintendo.
Their equine corpse of choice this time was SuperSmash Bros, which they belched forth about with a presentation that was so long, it may in fact still be happening. And what a presentation it was!
Who couldn’t be wowed by hour upon hour of character reveals for the latest iteration of their ‘yes it’s a fighter, but as we’re family friendly we can’t show people being beaten up – so instead there’s some sort of meaningless reverse energy counter that goes up to 800%, and eventually people just fall off the side like a drunk on a pier’ fisticuffs game?
You’ll no doubt already be familiar with the tag line for this version: “Everyone is here” – not least because they seemed to repeat it endlessly, almost as if they had nothing much else to talk about.
Now the game is out though it seems to be true, as (apart from a load of stupidly named dudes from Japanese RPGs that no one has ever heard of or cares about) SSBU boasts a vast roster of much-loved characters and favourites from gaming history! Oh, and Sonic is apparently in it too. Oh well.
But wait! Our sources have told us that there are 8 more fighters that Uncle Ninty just couldn’t cram into the game on release – a game so overfull, it was officially classed as morbidly corpulent – that will be winging their way to your Switch via everyone’s favourite feature of modern gaming: paid DLC.
So get your wallet ready and your ‘combat gland’ excreting its fetid unguent in anticipation, as here they are now!
1. Prince Philip
The Queen’s consort and one-time world’s strongest man (pretty sure this is true) may have retired from an exhausting public life of free holidays and gala lunches punctuated by casually racist remarks, but he’s still itching to duff people up! Just don’t mention that Mario is a foreigner, or there’ll be all sorts of awkwardness…
SPECIAL MOVE: Battle Royale. To take on his foes, Prince P summons the most dangerous man in Britain – his son, Prince Edward! Watch your opponents wither as the Earl of Wessex performs a worryingly arousing dance at them that he learned off of Andrew Lloyd-Webber while pretending to work in theatre, while Phil prepares to run down any survivors in his Range Rover.
2. Hamble from Playschool
Nobody likes a creepy old-style dolly, and ‘Big H, the toybox tyrant’ is the creepiest! Watch her smash her opponents into dust with her disturbingly club-like porcelain arms, while reliving nightmare flashbacks to your childhood about the time Floella Benjamin came to your school and you accidentally called her ‘mum’ in front of everyone.
SPECIAL MOVE: Brian Cant? Brian can! Hamble summons the poltergeist of the late pre-school children’s telly presenter to scare the pants off your opposition. Literally! Through terrifying electric shocks administered via the joycons, your fellow players will be coerced by the playful spook into removing their trousers and ‘throwing them through the round window’ (flushing them down the toilet)!
3. The entire population of Benelux
Smash Bros. games are already famous for their wacky team-ups featuring non-characters you forgot about years ago, or ones who seem horribly unsuitable for a combat game in the first place. So what better for the Ultimate version of this game than the ultimate massive bunch of bewilderingly ill-fitting protagonists? That’s right – every single man, woman and child from the politico-economic union of Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands!
SPECIAL MOVE: Euroverload. Your Switch crashes and immediately melts from trying to animate 29.2 million citizens of central Europe simultaneously, thus denying your opponents their victory. Sweeeet!
4. T.J. Hooker
When he wasn’t playing the girdle-wearing captain of a cardboard spaceship, William Shatner was a strangely unfit yet still on active duty policeman who also wore a girdle. But now, like so many other characters in Smash Bros. that would have been better left in the 1980s, he’s back in digital form! Relive all your favourite T.J. Hooker moves from the show, like when he threw his truncheon at a man, when he slid on a bonnet, and the other time he threw his truncheon at a man!
SPECIAL MOVE: Girdle your loins. After a particularly heavy meal, ‘The Shat’ just can’t keep it in any more and his man-corset gives out with explosive force, propelling your opponent across the screen! Bill then squats in a corner, reciting one of his famous spoken word albums until you get bored and turn the console off. Victory!
5. Peter Shilton from the ZX Spectrum version of ‘Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona’
Smash Bros. games have a great history of introducing characters from other franchises. But now all the good ones have gone and we’re well into the dross, who’s next? That’s right, an unrecognisable, pixelated 8-bit recreation of England’s former goalie!
Lifted straight out of his shameless cash-in on the 1986 world cup ‘incident’ that had bull-necked toughs sobbing about deliberate misplacement of an air-filled leather bladder, the Shiltmeister (as he was never known) is ready to rumble – and hey, it’s no weirder than including the guy from Game & Watches!
SPECIAL MOVE: Don’t touch my balls! Maradona himself is summoned to the arena by P. Shilt, who then proceeds to distract your opponents by seemingly having a massive heart attack because he’s ingested a lot of real bad stuff. He’s a very unwell man, which shows cheats never prosper!
6. Some rancid junk fly-tipped in a disused car park
Surely great-grandpa Nintenduss is as out of characters to use by now as I am tiresome combinations of relatives and misspellings of their name? Not by a long chalk, because here’s…er…2nd Cousin Nintola’s most imaginative combatant yet!
Remember how Pokémon Go encouraged naïve children to wander around derelict industrial areas while paying scant attention to their surroundings? Well this is just one of the fascinating and not at all dangerous (in a ‘we’re legally liable for it’ sense) things they may have discovered while doing so. And: at least it’s not a bloated corpse!
SPECIAL MOVE: Bin day bonanza. When activated, an aggressive group of scrap dealers descend upon the screen, pestering everyone for ‘hennnnnnnnyyaauuuullldiirraaaaaaann!’ while attempting to manhandle combatants into the back of their untaxed transit van.
7. The really old lady from ‘The Golden Girls’
Remember The Golden Girls – the stupid one, the lewd one that was horrible to think about in that sense because she was an old lady, the tall one and the tall one’s mum who was only about a year older in real life? Well one of them is back, and it’s the one least suitable for combat! They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but now we can find out whether a pithy remark from an octogenarian is mightier than a fist to the face! (It isn’t!)
SPECIAL MOVE: O.A.Pow! Just as your opponent is about to land a punch on you, you unleash the most powerful weapon in your arsenal – a request for the nice young person to help you set up your email on your ‘new iPad’ so you can see pictures of your grandkids. They’ll be tied up trying your half-remembered passwords on a horribly, underpowered tablet that lovely man from Dixons sold you for hours!
8. ‘Bario’
We’ve got Mario, and when you flip that M you get Wario (where do Nintendo get these amazing ideas? They’re crazy creative!). Well now get ready to turn that M another 90 degrees and squint a bit so it looks sort-of like a B, because heeeeeeeere’s Bario! This character is so new, we’ve only got a very rough sketch of how he’ll appear in game. But just look at those muscles, those fists, that ‘tache and that ‘super hat’! You know Bario’s going to have some mega-skilly moves. And…is that a skateboard? Radical!
SPECIAL MOVE: Mega-mimic. In a way that absolutely isn’t a lazy route to get extra fighters into the game with minimal effort, Bario will have the EXACT same moves as Mario, so he can match everyone’s favourite plumber blow for blow. He’s so good at copying, you’ll probably not be able to tell the difference! But he IS copying, yeah? It’s not just a re-skin and it’s a genuine plot point. Promise.
As ever, it delivered a bumper crop of gaming goodness to look forward to over the coming 12 months, with loads of what we all love the most – risk-free, unoriginal sequels. And when you think of dead horses being flogged down to their component atoms, one name always pops into mind: Nintendo.
Their equine corpse of choice this time was SuperSmash Bros, which they belched forth about with a presentation that was so long, it may in fact still be happening. And what a presentation it was!
Who couldn’t be wowed by hour upon hour of character reveals for the latest iteration of their ‘yes it’s a fighter, but as we’re family friendly we can’t show people being beaten up – so instead there’s some sort of meaningless reverse energy counter that goes up to 800%, and eventually people just fall off the side like a drunk on a pier’ fisticuffs game?
You’ll no doubt already be familiar with the tag line for this version: “Everyone is here” – not least because they seemed to repeat it endlessly, almost as if they had nothing much else to talk about.
Now the game is out though it seems to be true, as (apart from a load of stupidly named dudes from Japanese RPGs that no one has ever heard of or cares about) SSBU boasts a vast roster of much-loved characters and favourites from gaming history! Oh, and Sonic is apparently in it too. Oh well.
But wait! Our sources have told us that there are 8 more fighters that Uncle Ninty just couldn’t cram into the game on release – a game so overfull, it was officially classed as morbidly corpulent – that will be winging their way to your Switch via everyone’s favourite feature of modern gaming: paid DLC.
So get your wallet ready and your ‘combat gland’ excreting its fetid unguent in anticipation, as here they are now!
 |
| "I'll destroy you all! Raaaaaaargh!" |
1. Prince Philip
The Queen’s consort and one-time world’s strongest man (pretty sure this is true) may have retired from an exhausting public life of free holidays and gala lunches punctuated by casually racist remarks, but he’s still itching to duff people up! Just don’t mention that Mario is a foreigner, or there’ll be all sorts of awkwardness…
SPECIAL MOVE: Battle Royale. To take on his foes, Prince P summons the most dangerous man in Britain – his son, Prince Edward! Watch your opponents wither as the Earl of Wessex performs a worryingly arousing dance at them that he learned off of Andrew Lloyd-Webber while pretending to work in theatre, while Phil prepares to run down any survivors in his Range Rover.
 |
| It's no wonder people of my generation are so messed up. What? What do you mean it's just me??!? |
2. Hamble from Playschool
Nobody likes a creepy old-style dolly, and ‘Big H, the toybox tyrant’ is the creepiest! Watch her smash her opponents into dust with her disturbingly club-like porcelain arms, while reliving nightmare flashbacks to your childhood about the time Floella Benjamin came to your school and you accidentally called her ‘mum’ in front of everyone.
SPECIAL MOVE: Brian Cant? Brian can! Hamble summons the poltergeist of the late pre-school children’s telly presenter to scare the pants off your opposition. Literally! Through terrifying electric shocks administered via the joycons, your fellow players will be coerced by the playful spook into removing their trousers and ‘throwing them through the round window’ (flushing them down the toilet)!
 |
| Luxembourg: we need a flag. Netherlands: hey, look at our ace flag! Luxembourg: hmmm Later... Luxembourg: hey, we too now have an ace flag! Netherlands: b...but it's OUR flag, just lighter blue Luxembourg: is it? Is it blue, or is it gold? Netherlands: we hate you. |
3. The entire population of Benelux
Smash Bros. games are already famous for their wacky team-ups featuring non-characters you forgot about years ago, or ones who seem horribly unsuitable for a combat game in the first place. So what better for the Ultimate version of this game than the ultimate massive bunch of bewilderingly ill-fitting protagonists? That’s right – every single man, woman and child from the politico-economic union of Belgium, Luxembourg and The Netherlands!
SPECIAL MOVE: Euroverload. Your Switch crashes and immediately melts from trying to animate 29.2 million citizens of central Europe simultaneously, thus denying your opponents their victory. Sweeeet!
 |
| Must...not...pass...out...from...minor...exertion! |
4. T.J. Hooker
When he wasn’t playing the girdle-wearing captain of a cardboard spaceship, William Shatner was a strangely unfit yet still on active duty policeman who also wore a girdle. But now, like so many other characters in Smash Bros. that would have been better left in the 1980s, he’s back in digital form! Relive all your favourite T.J. Hooker moves from the show, like when he threw his truncheon at a man, when he slid on a bonnet, and the other time he threw his truncheon at a man!
SPECIAL MOVE: Girdle your loins. After a particularly heavy meal, ‘The Shat’ just can’t keep it in any more and his man-corset gives out with explosive force, propelling your opponent across the screen! Bill then squats in a corner, reciting one of his famous spoken word albums until you get bored and turn the console off. Victory!
 |
| This, for me, precisely captures the fun and joy of all football videogames. In that there isn't any. |
5. Peter Shilton from the ZX Spectrum version of ‘Peter Shilton’s Handball Maradona’
Smash Bros. games have a great history of introducing characters from other franchises. But now all the good ones have gone and we’re well into the dross, who’s next? That’s right, an unrecognisable, pixelated 8-bit recreation of England’s former goalie!
Lifted straight out of his shameless cash-in on the 1986 world cup ‘incident’ that had bull-necked toughs sobbing about deliberate misplacement of an air-filled leather bladder, the Shiltmeister (as he was never known) is ready to rumble – and hey, it’s no weirder than including the guy from Game & Watches!
SPECIAL MOVE: Don’t touch my balls! Maradona himself is summoned to the arena by P. Shilt, who then proceeds to distract your opponents by seemingly having a massive heart attack because he’s ingested a lot of real bad stuff. He’s a very unwell man, which shows cheats never prosper!
 |
| Let's be honest. We've all rented worse places. |
6. Some rancid junk fly-tipped in a disused car park
Surely great-grandpa Nintenduss is as out of characters to use by now as I am tiresome combinations of relatives and misspellings of their name? Not by a long chalk, because here’s…er…2nd Cousin Nintola’s most imaginative combatant yet!
Remember how Pokémon Go encouraged naïve children to wander around derelict industrial areas while paying scant attention to their surroundings? Well this is just one of the fascinating and not at all dangerous (in a ‘we’re legally liable for it’ sense) things they may have discovered while doing so. And: at least it’s not a bloated corpse!
SPECIAL MOVE: Bin day bonanza. When activated, an aggressive group of scrap dealers descend upon the screen, pestering everyone for ‘hennnnnnnnyyaauuuullldiirraaaaaaann!’ while attempting to manhandle combatants into the back of their untaxed transit van.
 |
| On the basis of this picture, they may have been called the Golden Girls because of their strange complexion.. |
7. The really old lady from ‘The Golden Girls’
Remember The Golden Girls – the stupid one, the lewd one that was horrible to think about in that sense because she was an old lady, the tall one and the tall one’s mum who was only about a year older in real life? Well one of them is back, and it’s the one least suitable for combat! They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but now we can find out whether a pithy remark from an octogenarian is mightier than a fist to the face! (It isn’t!)
SPECIAL MOVE: O.A.Pow! Just as your opponent is about to land a punch on you, you unleash the most powerful weapon in your arsenal – a request for the nice young person to help you set up your email on your ‘new iPad’ so you can see pictures of your grandkids. They’ll be tied up trying your half-remembered passwords on a horribly, underpowered tablet that lovely man from Dixons sold you for hours!
 |
| I got an E at GCSE art. Can you tell? |
8. ‘Bario’
We’ve got Mario, and when you flip that M you get Wario (where do Nintendo get these amazing ideas? They’re crazy creative!). Well now get ready to turn that M another 90 degrees and squint a bit so it looks sort-of like a B, because heeeeeeeere’s Bario! This character is so new, we’ve only got a very rough sketch of how he’ll appear in game. But just look at those muscles, those fists, that ‘tache and that ‘super hat’! You know Bario’s going to have some mega-skilly moves. And…is that a skateboard? Radical!
SPECIAL MOVE: Mega-mimic. In a way that absolutely isn’t a lazy route to get extra fighters into the game with minimal effort, Bario will have the EXACT same moves as Mario, so he can match everyone’s favourite plumber blow for blow. He’s so good at copying, you’ll probably not be able to tell the difference! But he IS copying, yeah? It’s not just a re-skin and it’s a genuine plot point. Promise.
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