Super Smash Bros. Melee

Okay I spent some time wondering if I should give this a 9 or a 10…landed on 10 because this game is the absolute blueprint for a good fighting game in my opinion. I’m too bad at fighting games but it feels punchy, characters are still unique (looking at you 27 sword characters in modern smash). This game was my childhood. I didn’t have a GameCube but I did play this every single time I went to a friend’s house or my grandmother’s house. S/o to granny for buying an NES when it first came out and getting the entire family playing games after she stayed up until 2am after her nursing job. Anyway, as a kid I loved link and samus. If I went back and played now I’d probably go for peach or something. So many good memories

Like a lot of people, I discovered this game through the Smash Bros Documentary that came out in 2014. I immediately got hooked, bought a gamecube controller, and started practicing wave dashing, l-cancelling, and all sorts of tech skills. It was around this time too that a lot of people in our school picked up melee and it became something we carried with us throughout our time in high school. By seinor year, our AP Physics class every morning was just 4-6 of us taking turns around 2 game cube controllers and a laptop. Its sad to say I never got good at the game. Right now I would get washed by a bronze player on slippi, but to this very day I'll still watch some melee tournaments and zain streams and be in awe of the level of gameplay. This game itself is a "beautiful accidental mess of a masterpiece." While most of it may not have been intended, the mechanics of the movement and combat are so sharp and so crisp that its not only by far the best in all smash titles, but one of the best in all fighting games. Although it's hard to compare to fighting games like SF, Tekken, or Marvel Capcom, I feel that the sandbox nature of the game along with different stages/platforms allows for a higher degree of freedom in skill expression. There are combos and flowcharts, but the game is much more than just memorizing button sequences. Ultimately, this is what melee is to me. It's art; it's jank; it's culture. It's S2J losing to some weird invisible ceiling glitch. It's M2K vs Armada, Mang0 vs Hbox, Zain vs Cody. It's Chillin getting 5-0'd by Leffen. It's "Happy Feet. Wombo Combo. that ain't falco." It's the fact that over 20 years in, it is still too early to make a tier list, and mid-tier characters like Pikachu and Yoshi can win majors and even low tiers like DK will have top 20 players. Falco will always be my boy. PPMD Kreygasm

This is the best fighting game of all time hands down, and has the deepest lore. If you know, you know. The competitive scene is diverse despite not as strong as a couple years back. The 5 Gods of Melee era was one of the best, and the Smash Documentary to go with it is a much watch. You can find it on YouTube Additionally, new ways to manipulate movement in the game are still be discovered to this day, about, what like 20+ years after its release in 2001? And yes, there are many mechanics in this game that require certain techniques with the gamecube controller itself. The coolest part is that the game was NOT meant to have most of these, or at least these were NOT easily visible or apparent at all. Things like wavedashing, L-canceling, waveshining, etc. Additionally, the characters are iconic. Eh, there's too much to get into. All I will say is bring back PPMD and Mango please.