Super Smash Bros. Melee

So, this is where Smash Bros peaks. I hold out hope that Sakurai will bring the franchise back to these heights (the power and elegance of the Switch has me excited -- and yes, I just dated this review), but even then will it top Melee? Hard to imagine. The gameplay was refined to perfection here. This is why sequels since have missed the mark: how do you improve on perfection? All you can do is meddle with it and make it worse.

Though I have no skill whatsoever at the deep tournament-level metagame, me and my friends played this for literally hundreds of hours in high school. Not misusing the word literally. Literally literally. Hundreds of hours. So much fun.

The pinnacle of the Super Smash Brother games. It was still fresh enough to be better than Brawl, and improved enough to be better than the original. A solid collection of characters, the solo mini games were entertaining, but the multiplayer was where it's at.

there's a reason this is still the go-to Smash game for so many people. the killer app for the GameCube and the game I've spent more time playing than possibly any other, enough so that childhood memories begin to blend into adult ones. a treasure, iconic, perpetually great.

All my friends liked this game so so much more than I did. I'd get bored after 3-4 games and they would carry on playing for hours. so I kinda have bad memories of it but it's still a good-ass game