If you own or have played for any significant amount of time on a Gamecube, chances are you have played Super Smash Brothers Melee.
It is the epitome of all that is the Nintendo multi-player game, and next to possibly Wind Waker, it's the best title the system has to offer. At heart, the game is faintly ridiculous, with unique, difficult-to-explain laws of physics governing the comical battles between the beloved characters on a two-dimensional field with three-dimensional graphics.
Everything about the game is a contradiction of some kind. Nothing, including swords, visibly hurts your character. Each blow, rather than harming your poor avatar, instead strikes a blow to physics itself, making you fly further and further upon being hit. Only ring-outs count as kills, and the massive array of courses and characters make so many combinations that fully mastering the game is virtually impossible.
To make things more complicated, Nintendo's successful attempt to deepen the strategy of the two-dimensional game with a huge variety of techniques in battle has led to numerous glitches. Strangely enough, these glitches, while benefiting certain characters, have not led to a grossly imbalanced or unplayable game.
Quite on the contrary, these exploits have led to considerably more levels of skillful play than even the designers could have imagined. The result is perhaps the most interesting community revolving around any multi-player game, and the many tiers of skillful play present in this community bear some explanation.
Ultra Lowest Tier: Non-Gamers: This tier is relatively self-explanatory, and present in just about every popular multi-player game. Due to Melee's nature as a social game, many poor victims who are steadfastly against video games have been pulled into the web of smash. These poor fools are doomed to spam and flail confusedly before convincing their cruel hosts that their time is better spent with other things, most probably outside.
Very Low Tier: Casual Gamers: These players are those who are very, very proud of the one time they put a good year in and beat Ocarina of Time or Donkey Kong 64, depending on their classiness. They game, but far from religiously, and it's really more about appearance for them than anything. They have a 50-50 chance of actually owning the game, but regardless of this you can expect a basic strategy from them. They will play one of three characters, depending on their personality.
The silliest of people will go for a heavyweight like Donkey Kong, the players that have the illusion of class or seriousness will spam B-moves with Fox, and there may be an occasional Sheik or Marth spamming smash attacks. Regardless of which of these four characters they use, they will always reek of spam and the illusion of dignity. It's a guilty pleasure of many players to wipe the smug smiles from these fellow's faces, though the look of fear and outrage is replaced in a few seconds with a noncommittal shrug as they voicelessly take back their declarations of skill and pretend not to care.
Low Tier: Neighborhood Kings: The most undeserving of locally worshiped gamers, these suburban denizens of Smash own the locally used Gamecube or Wii and train their friends in the art of sloppy play. They are recognizable by the fact that they play Link, use a combination of spin attacks and obnoxious aerials, and mask their "master" status with an unassuming air.
They know no glitches, use no exploits, and understand only the tiny percentage of the game that concerns their cheap strategy. Their friends always stride into their spin attacks, and since most of them are casual smashers, the neighborhood kinds most often continue to believe themselves to be masters for many years. As well as their apprentices, most of these players remain in the dark to the greater world of smash for quite some time, but this is not the true stopping point.
Eventually, either they or one of their minions WILL discover the L and R buttons, and a new era is guaranteed to emerge.
Average Tier: Roll n' Smashers: These are players who have learned that there is a cure for any cheap but basic strategy in Melee can be countered with liberal use of the shield, a technique that ALL players will ignore for a good year of their Melee lives or until someone enlightens them by destroying them with it. Once shielding is found, though, its users never stop using it. From shields, these players almost immediately progress to roll obsessively.
They roll before and after almost any attack. They stay on the ground almost all of the time, and spam only smash attacks between rolls. B-moves are shunned, the B button itself becoming a symbol of distant, nostalgic days of Noobdom. These players don't consider themselves masters, and in fact tend to be modest, but the opinion of them among their friends is that they are unmistakably good at the game.
