Samus had been kicked around, shot, thrown down the hill, so now she was keeping his distance. She tried to attack Fox McCloud with her charge shot, but that didn’t work any better ? McCloud’s force shield reflected all Samus’s blasts back at her. In the end McCloud, almost invincible, threw Samus into a pit of lava after a hard battle.
On Saturday, October 19, the UR Smash Club held its first tournament in Lander Auditorium. Attendance appeared sparse, only taking up a small part of the auditorium. At one point, there were only 10 participants and viewers present. The club is less than two years old and is still in the process of getting SA funding. Because of this, most members are happy that they held a tournament at all.
The two finalists in the tournament were club president and junior Dave Wolpert and freshman Jose Garcia and they both chose to play as the lizard king Bowser. The randomly chosen battleground had cliffs and walls everywhere. This made it very hard to throw or knock an opponent any distance, which is important to winning in Smash Bros.
In the end, Wolpert-Bowser won, finally ramming Garcia-Bowser with his spiked shell one time too many.
The Smash Club is a club devoted to friendly competitions of Smash Bros., a console game for the Nintendo Game Cube and Nintendo64. Like any fighting game, it presents a range of options, such as team play ? up to four people can play at a time, free-for-alls, and a single player set of missions, though it’s much more popular to play the game with or against friends. “[The game] is addicting because of the variety of attacks that each character can perform,” sophomore Matt Mayan, who plays casually, said. “You can change characters and find a whole new interesting set of moves you can do.”
The feature that sets Smash Bros. apart is its characters. While most games have characters and storylines of their own, the characters of Smash Bros. are the heroes and villains of a dozen other Nintendo games, old and new. Part of the charm of the game is that it is possible to see Mario and Samus work together to pound that yellow pest Pikachu into a pulp for example. Many of these older characters were forgotten as the systems they were created on have become obsolete, and it can be refreshing to see them again in a 3D, 64-bit world. “They’re the characters we’ve been playing with since we were I don’t know how old,” Wolpert said.
The club is new, but it is anything but isolated. Similar clubs exist at State University of New York, at Buffalo and Rochester Institute of Technology. There is a ladder ranking, a system of scoring players by skill and experience, for the clubs of all three schools. And in November there are plans for a tournament open to all three schools. Wolpert expects about 25 competitors from each school. “We’ve been organizing it since March,” Wolpert said. “It should be pretty big, it’s important to our clubs.”
Levesque can be reached at clevesque@campustimes.org.
