If you attend college, you probably know what Super Smash Bros. is. In case you live under a rock, I’ll explain it. Super Smash Bros. is a highly competitive four-player fighting game that was released for the Nintendo 64 in 1999. It brings together the most popular characters Nintendo has to offer and allows you to make them duke it out. It is incredibly fun and time consuming. Since the N64 version, 3 more have been released: Melee for the GameCube, Brawl for the Wii, and most recently Smash for Wii U. Me and my friends have absolutely no lives, so of course we’re pretty good at all of them, most recently Smash 4. This week, while exploring the features of the new game, we discovered that you can buy a figure called an Amiibo. An Amiibo has a microchip in it, so it records the games you play and learns from it. Needless to say, it took us about half a second to get to Gamestop and buy a few of these bad boys. The following is my analysis.
First off, Amiibo’s are the most American invention ever conceived. Once you train them a little bit, it becomes fruitful to plug them in and let them fight each other. More or less, we have become too lazy to play video games. I’ll repeat that. We are too lazy to play video games. I basically paid twelve bucks to have a robot do it for me. But the thing is, it is incredibly entertaining to watch them. You almost feel an offspring-like attachment to these brilliant fighting machines, and its really rewarding to watch them whoop the ever-loving life out of your friends’ Amiibos.
It is also fun to pit them against your friends, and hilarious to watch the suckers be defeated. Since the Amiibos learn while they play, they end up getting a lot better than you really fast. I had two friends come over to play last night and I ended up just plugging in two Amiibos for them to play against. I was able to continue on with my daily life and they got absolutely devastated by my little devils. It almost functioned as a babysitting service, albeit an incredibly lazy one. Either way, watching two grown men get severely frustrated at your little figurine after driving across town to play a game was surprisingly rewarding. I felt like my kid’s soccer team had just spanked a rival team and I was hearing the other parents complain about how unfair it was.
Of course, this wouldn’t be Florida State if I didn’t tell you that there was an awesome drinking game to go with these tiny fighting machines. Amiibo deathmatch. Bet on your favorite, let them duke it out, losers chug. Its quick, it requires no work, and its actually kind of stressful to watch. But, man, there is nothing that gets you more hyped than watching your Samus Amiibo short-hop-back-air the Diddy Kong Amiibo off map then follow up with a meteor smash for the KO. So sweet.
If you are as into Smash as I am, which you most likely are not, Amiibos are a must have. If you are casually into Smash, they are still definitely worth having. They give the game a new dimension and give you all new ways to go about it. I’m not always on board with innovations in gaming, but this is definitely one that I can get behind.