Brawl

Following its predecessors, Brawl is a platform fighter that uses a battle system unlike that of typical fighting games. Players can choose from a large selection of characters, each attempting to knock their opponents off the screen as they fight on various stages. The characters in Brawl include most of the same ones as the predecessors, such as Mario and Pikachu. Instead of using traditional health bars that start at a maximum value and lose value, Brawl characters start the game with 0%; the value rises as they take damage, to a maximum of 999%.

As a character's percentage increases, the character flies further back when hit. When a character is knocked beyond a stage's boundary and disappears from the screen, the character loses either a life, a point, or coins, depending on the mode of play. Brawl includes a function which allows players to create profiles with personalized button configurations for each control method along with their chosen username. Super Smash Bros.

In the Adventure mode titled "The Subspace Emissary", Mario and Kirby face each other on a stadium located in the Super Smash Bros. universe. In this world, when a fighter is defeated, they become an inanimate trophy-like object, but they can be returned to their animate forms when the object's stand is touched by an active fighter. Suddenly, the Halberd appears, releasing a stream of purple snowflake-like particles known as Shadow Bugs that form the soldiers of an evil force known as the Subspace Army.

B. units, and transports the stadium into Subspace, an alternate dimension where the Subspace Army resides. The army's advance prompts the fighters to join forces and attempt to repel the threat, while its pawns, villain fighters Bowser and Wario, attempt to deter the allied fighters by using powerful raygun-like weapons that instantly reduce them to their trophy forms, with the former using the Shadow Bugs on some of them to create evil doppelgängers. King Dedede begins independently gathering some fallen fighters, placing golden brooches on them.

At a pre-E3 2005 press conference on May 17, 2005, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announced that the next installment of Super Smash Bros. was soon to be in development for its next console and would be a launch title with Wi-Fi compatibility for online play. The announcement was a surprise to Sakurai, who left HAL Laboratory in 2003. He was not informed of Nintendo's intent to release another Smash Bros.

game, despite the fact that Iwata told Sakurai shortly after his resignation from HAL that if a new Smash game were developed, he would want Sakurai to again serve as director. It was not until the day after the conference that Iwata requested that Sakurai hold a private meeting with him, where he was asked to be involved as Brawl's director. Sakurai agreed to become director, and development of the game began in October 2005, when Nintendo opened a new office in Tokyo just for its production. Help from a variety of studios such as original series developer HAL Laboratory, Monolith Soft and Paon was enlisted, with Game Arts as the main team in the preliminary development stages.

The editors of Japanese game magazine Famitsu, who awarded it a perfect score, praised the variety and depth of the single-player content, the unpredictability of Final Smashes, and the dynamic fighting styles of the characters. Chris Slate of Nintendo Power awarded Brawl a perfect score in the March 2008 issue, calling it "one of the very best games that Nintendo has ever produced". GameSpot editor Lark Anderson noted that Brawl's "simple controls and gameplay make it remarkably accessible to beginners, yet still appealing to veterans", while GameTrailers mentioned the amount of content that gives the game "staying power that few other games possess". Eurogamer praised the game's ability to stay fun in both single-player and multiplayer modes, while "fulfilling its usual role of dominating a willing crowd's evening into the early hours, and now allowing you to sustain that after everyone's gone home".

Game Revolution hailed Brawl's soundtrack as "spectacular ... spanning a generous swath of gaming history". Game Informer highlighted Brawl's "finely tuned balance, core fighting mechanics, and local multiplayer modes". Edge concluded that, while the Smash Bros.

Brawl is unusually moddable for a console game, due to the "Smash Stack" exploit found within the game's built-in stage builder when loading stages from an SD card. Rather than stage data, a specialized program can be inserted onto the SD card that renders the builder unusable while present, but allows loading of fan-made patches from the card on top of the game's on-disc data. These patches range from simple character skins and balance adjustments to more complex modifications such as whole additional characters and extra stages more complex than the internal stage builder allows.

In 2011, a team of competitive Super Smash Bros. players, known collectively as the Project M Back Room (PMBR), began development on a mod of Brawl titled Project M. The project was designed to retool Brawl to play more like its predecessor, Super Smash Bros. Melee, in response to complaints about Brawl's physics, slower-paced gameplay, use of chance elements, and mechanics of certain attacks compared to Melee.