Super Smash Bros. Melee is my favorite game of all time. You may know this from looking at my list, which I will shamelessly plug here. Now, before you get your pitchforks out and start to kill me, there's a reason for this. A perfectly logical one.
I grew up as a kid playing Playstation 2 and GameCube games. I know this may be heresy to all you old folk, but I'm still pretty young so cut me some slack when I say that I haven't played all the classics of the NES and SNES era. I do have an older brother who played these systems so I still have a lot of exposure to them, but PS2 and GCN games are what I was playing when I was growing up. The first console I ever received was the PS2 as a birthday present. I remember playing a lot of PS1 games on it actually, games like Spyro: Year of the Dragon. I'm not really sure why I played PS1 games on my PS2, but hell, I had a blast. I also loved games like the first Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank. Eventually, I also got a GameCube, and this is when I really started to get into the world of video games.
When I first got that game, I really enjoyed it, but didn't really love it. I played through the Classic and Adventure mode, played some multiplayer, and got some trophies. After that, I unlocked all the characters, and that was about it. I thought I had "beat" the game and I was done. Nothing really amazing popped out at me and it didn't revolutionize anything. So I moved onto my next game and life went on...
Until a couple of years later when I decided to pop this sucker back in. I usually do this; play games you've beaten before just to see how it holds up. As I was fiddling around with the multiplayer, I found the thing that changed SSBM for me: spiking. Now, veterans of SSBM know what I'm talking about. It's when a character is trying to come back on to the platform, and while they're in midair, you jump to them and execute a "spike" move which makes them plummet instantly to their death. The specific spike that I first found was Captain Falcon's jumping down A (aka his dair for you SSBM vets). If you know what that move looks like, then you know it looks hilarious. Captain Falcon would kick both feet at the ground like some psycho, and me and my brother thought this was awesome/funny/ridiculous. We affectionately called it "feet first."
After discovering spiking, I found out that the SSBM was an insanely deep and complex game. As I became more and more familiar with the Internet and the endless amount of information that could be found there, I learned about techniques such as wavedashing and L-canceling. I also found out about the SSBM tournament scene in the MLG circuit. Players like Ken and Isai amazed me with their skill. After learning about the depth that SSBM had, me and my brother played the FUCKING SHIT out of that game. Seriously. It was scary how much we played. I played more than 200 hours of that game. Probably a lot more actually. I'll never know the actual time spent because Baten Kaitos formatted my GCN memory card for some odd reason (I'll always hate Baten Kaitos because of that). Even after I lost all my data, I unlocked all the characters again and probably spent another 200 hours. This is why it is my favorite game of all time.
Which brings me to my next point. No matter what, games that people have played as a kid will always be considered their all time favorites. Memories of childhood are like wine: they get better with age. People will always look back to the games of their childhood fondly. So try to remember this the next time you're blasting someone for saying that Majora's Mask is their favorite game of all time.
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