Night One I got back into Brawl and back into the Subspace Emissary. I tried to complete as much of the Great Maze level without looking up what to do. I’m pretty sure I unlocked all the doors and defeated all the characters. I did play it about three separate times and went back to a few rooms multiple times. But there was nothing left on the map. I’ll have to look up what to do next.
Then I went to the Event Matches and played the first three on normal until I lost one.
On Night Two I took another break from Smash. If I play every day I’m really going to get burnt out.
On Night Three I beat the Subspace Emissary! On Normal with no Stickers! Beating that mode unlocked Sonic and the Stage Green Hill Zone. Then I went back and unlocked Toon Link and Jigglypuff. Unlocking Toon Link also unlocked the Pirate Ship level. Then I tried to unlock Wolf but he kept beating me as Fox. I thought you had to use Fox, but you don’t actually.
There are stages that unlocked if you play on the Pokemon Stadium 2 stage a number of times, play as Luigi a number of times, play as Donkey Kong a number of times, play as Captain Falcon a number of times, and play as Kirby a number of times. So I played on Pokemon Stadium in a 2 Minute KO Fest as Donkey Kong against Level 3 CPUs of Kirby, Captain Falcon, and Luigi about five times in a row. I actually wasn’t doing great and didn’t win every battle; the batteries in my WaveBird were dying. I realized that and I realized a human has to play as these characters to get the unlocks. So the rest of the night I just self-destructed on 1 stock battles. By the time I was done, I had unlocked the Stages 75m, Luigi’s Mansion, Jungle Japes, Green Greens, and Big Blue.
I’m not sure about trying to unlock the final 3 stages, none of them are Tournament legal, but Mario Bros. and Spear Pillar can be fun.
On Night Four, I didn’t have much time. Just played five matches in Ultimate online. Not sure why, but I was determined to finish playing each character in QuickPlay one more time. And I finished that with five straight losses. The Mii Fighters are real bad. The matchmaking was particularly bad, three of the five matches ended up with items on and two of them were on non-Battlefield stages. They were super annoying stages of PictoChat and Shadow Moses Island as well, so I ended up self-destructing my last stocks to get out of those matches.
On Night Five, I finally unlocked Wolf! Played as Pikachu in the Subspace Emissary instead, it was very close but I got my Final Smash and was able to finish him off.
Then, I played nine random 2-Minute KO Fest CPU matches with Ness. Going from Levels 1 CPU to Level 9. I won each match except against the Level 8 CPU surprisingly. It was a bit annoying though when one of the random levels was one of the Custom Levels (I think one of the default ones) and it was very hard to KO since it was almost completely enclosed. Even with all the Items set to Medium it did not seem like many items dropped. Though the Smash Ball did appear usually twice in two minutes. Still the whole pace didn’t seem as chaotic as other Smash Bros games.
Then I went into Training Mode with Ness and practiced. I tried to get down some more advanced techniques but had some trouble. The reverse aerial rush technique was introduced in Brawl, but I wasn’t able to get it down. After Training I went to play Level 9 CPUs in tournament conditions on the tournament legal stages. I won none of those matches, and even though I choose Random, I faced Mario four times. I got pretty close to wins sometimes, but the CPU was blocking or dodging nearly every attack.
On Night Six I played 99 KO matches until I was able to unlock “More Rules” settings. And my son tried some VS matches as well.
Then later that night we had some friends over and we played Smash Ultimate using Genesis tournament stage list for a few hours. I still have a ways to go. I have to decide either to go all-in on Ness or really work on a secondary to face up against the Sword characters, the Links, and Yoshis. I also, really have to work on short-hopping and my other advanced techniques. I’m getting better at edge guarding and recovery, but a competitive gamer would still destroy me easily in those situations.
On Night Seven, I did some Training mode with Meta Knight. Then I played a level 9 CPU on each tournament legal stage, under tournament rules with Meta Knight. I was able to beat Link in the first match, but that was purely through edgehogging. Which by the way is an advanced technique that I really enjoy, mainly because it’s one that I can do, and it makes me feel like I’m really good at the game. But then I lost the remaining games, including twice to Ness. One time in an embarrassing 3-0 beating. So I guess maybe Ness can be great in this game?
But now, I’m ready to move on to the next game!
Of the three games I’ve delved into so far, this is my least favorite. It is the slowest, it is almost impossible to perform combos, and tripping is too prevalent. There’s supposed to be between like a 1 – 1.5% chance of tripping, but I played around 14-18 tournament styles matches and my character tripped in six of them and the CPU did in two.
So far each game I’m enjoying less than the one before, but I have a feeling this will change when I start Smash 4 next week.