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Seven years after Super Smash Bros Melee' first appeared in Japan comes Super Smash Bros Brawl, the third in the fighting series that brings together some of the most popular Nintendo characters to wipe the floor with each other. Choose between classic fights, Wi-Fi multi-player mode for up to four people or Adventure Mode in which you fight your way through a sideways-scrolling world with alternating characters.
One of the first things you'll notice about Brawl is that it has the unique system of measuring damage taken in fights rather than health lost. So, you begin a fight at zero and the more hits you take, the higher your damage counter goes. Get near 200% and you're in trouble - the same goes for if you're knocked off the screen. You have two lives in each round so if you die once, you can't afford to do it again. This means keeping an eye on what you're standing on at the same time as the characters you're fighting. Some modes will let you choose how many lives you have, though.
The amount of moves available are daunting. For each character you'll have a series of combos and a Final Smash move, not to mention whatever weapons you happen to pick up, including lightsabers, laser blasters, swords, cannons and...Magic wands. In Adventure mode you'll be fighting off The Ancient Minister's Basset's Allsorts-style henchmen (which are fairly slow and easy to kill) before fighting a boss. You travel across the world to try and stop the Subspace Army from detonating more subspace bombs, as well as preventing Wario/Bowser etc from using guns to collect characters such as Mario, Zelda and Pikachu as frozen trophies.