One thing I vowed to do when I got my Nintendo Wii was to not own only three games. Unfortunately, with games being $50 a pop and consoles being expensive as well, you can’t go out and buy a new game every week. You have to be careful which games you buy as your chance of finding a dud on the Wii is rather high. Thankfully, one truth still remains when it comes to Nintendo: the games Nintendo makes themselves are usually well worth the price.

I found out this weekend that the new Super Smash Brothers Brawl is no exception. Believe it or not, this was another game I bought sight unplayed. I’ve been reading about it forever, it seems, but I never played the N64 version of the game – so for all purposes, it’s a completely new game. All I knew is that it was a fighting game, and I like fighting games.

However, Smash Bros. is not your ordinary fighting game. It certainly lives up to the “brawl” moniker because that’s exactly what it is – just out right button smashing. You won’t find any combo moves or fatalities here. No rolls. No towards-towards-away. Just mashing. All you need to do to play Smash Bros (and be decent) is hit buttons feverishly while walking the in the right direction – that being towards your opponents.

So far, Smash Bros. delivers for both single-player and multi-player modes. Alone you can fight the computer in one-off matches or in a story mode. The story mode is great for learning as it forces you to use different characters, of which there are plenty. Possibly the game’s greatest strength is the wealth of characters it has, and they’re not all Nintendo-brand faces. I must admit one notch in the “want it” column for me was the inclusion of Metal Gear’s Solid Snake in the game.

There are also tons – and I mean tons – of collectible items throughout the game. Call them tokens, or stickers, or unlockables…whatever…there’s a bunch of hidden things to collect while playing alone and with others. For me, this type of collecting isn’t very motivating because you don’t get to see any immediate effects, at least not like you do with other fighting games. But the laundry list of unlockables should prove to keep the game open for a long, long time.

You can play with others either on your console or over the internet. While Nintendo doesn’t have all the kinks worked out in the downloadable contest arena yet, their over-the-net play is pretty solid. Fighting against multiple opponents is fast furious and chaotic. This is really not a game if you can’t stand a fighting game that requires almost no skill whatsoever. In fact, if you learn what few “moves” there are and try to use them in a 4-player battle, you’ll lose. There’s just no time to plan your moves that far ahead and there’s not way to really know what your opponents will be doing.

There are two things going against Smash Bros., however. One is the controls. You can play the game with any number of controller types or combinations. Since I only have the remote that’s what I had to use. Let me tell you the remote is not the best controller to use. It works, but I’d prefer something with more substance. Since you have to hold the remote like a normal controller the buttons are too small and poorly positioned to lend itself to a fighting game. Of course, since you just need to button mash it’s far from unusable.

The other down side of Smash Bros. is the zooming of the game. When you have four players fighting at once, each level is constantly zooming in and out to show all of the action. This is necessary but very annoying and will make your player very tiny, very fast…at which point all you can do is mash since you have no way of knowing what your fighter is really doing.

Super Smash Brothers is a different type of fighter. It’s not DOA, it’s not Mortal Kombat, and it’s not Street Fighter. It’s a fighter for everyone, literally. Anyone can grab and go on this one. The entry barrier is extremely low. But at the same time, it makes it hard to gauge how good you are in the end. Since there isn’t a long list of moves to memorize it almost doesn’t seem challenging. Yet the fast and furious play keeps you determined to continue fighting. But if there was ever any sort of “casual fighter” game, this would be it.

Figures that on the worst winter weekend in my life we choose to add to our family. Roxi the puppy. I know, I know…another dog?! But yes, another dog. The opportunity was perfect as far as the type and history of the dog. And we’d been debating another dog to give Colby some company. It just so happens that it all goes down in a blizzard. Oy.

Roxi is a (mostly) German Shepard and she looks like an ewok. We she’s about eight pounds or so, but her parents were huge, so we expect her to be about 100 pounds when it’s all said and done. She’s six weeks old.
The blizzard is interesting. Friday snow sucked but wasn’t impossible. We wake up Saturday – after a long night of doggy duty – to find the snow has doubled and any sort of shoveling I had done was gone. Colby loves it, but it comes up to his armpits. It’s blowing like a son of a bitch and from a few random ruler readings, there’s about ten inches in the back yard and eight in the front walk – so easily 10″ all around…and it’s still blowing. Funny how the blizzards around here seem to be on 30-year cycles.

So an entirely new chapter of life has started. One I’m not sure if I’m ready for, but if hundreds of other fools can get by raising a puppy, so can we.

If you have any puppy tips, please comment here or in the forum. We’re constantly doing internet look-ups, but if you have any tried and proven methods please share.

And stay tuned to the Toast Flickr page and photo album for more Roxi pics.

We talk a lot of music in our house… out at dinner… shopping… just about anywhere we go. We’ve spent countless hours talking music and debating mundane points about bands, songs, and time. One aspect of music that always fascinates me, is why certain songs and bands are “chosen” as being important and influential. I often wonder if the bands we know as being “important” really are, or if they’ve just been chosen by the industry and media as being so.

One aspect of many important bands throughout music (and history in general) is being “ahead of their time.” This phrase gets tossed around a lot in the art world and covers music, movies, fine art, literature…just about anything we consider entertainment. But in order for something to be ahead of it’s time you have to look at it within context. Often during our discussions we say, “compared to music at that time,” when trying to place their overall importance in context of the era. Usually we just go with it assuming we know what other music was popular at that time. But do we really? I decided to go a bit deeper and actually try to discover if bands and songs are really “ahead of their time,” or if it’s just a bunch of bull that makes for an easy excuse.

For this first crack, I’m going to take Iggy Pop & The Stooges and Nirvana. Both are rock/punk bands with only about 20 years separating the two. Both played music that is hard, fast, loud, and most of the time incomprehensible music – a genre my parents would simply classify as “noise.”

But where The Stooges ahead of their time? Let’s see.

One of the more popular Stooges songs is “Search and Destroy,” which was released in 1973, 35 years ago. I took a look at what was topping the popular music charts in 1973 and here’s what I found: Carly Simon, Stevie Wonder, War, and Seals & Croft.

Let’s take a listen to track from those four artists to get a feeling for what the vibe was in 1973

Now, listen to what The Stooges were doing at the same time.

That’s quite a difference. The Stooges were definitely ahead of their time and it’s easy to see why they can be seen as influential to modern rock and punk. But there’s one problem…The Stooges were never went anywhere. They never charted and were the farthest thing from mainstream as you could get then or ever, and they stayed there.

So let’s try another. Nirvana.

Nirvana is probably the only (and last) major influence in rock music that I’ve experienced in my life time. The Pinfields of the world will quickly start shouting that Nirvana was not the first grunge band. Fine, I won’t argue that. But I will argue that Nirvana is the band that made the difference – they were chosen. But Nirvana, unlike The Stooges, did chart and continue to be played on rock and classic rock stations to this day.

Was Nirvana ahead of their time? When Nirvana’s album was hiking up the Billboard in 1991, you’ll find Michael Jackson, U2, and Garth Brooks. But lets throw things in context, shall we? Here’s some of the top songs to set the mood.

Now listen to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

You can see why Nirvana was a brick through the window, but maybe not ahead of their time. First off…compare The Stooges with Nirvana. Nirvana made it, Stooges didn’t but yet their music is the same. So The Stooges? Ahead of their time. Nirvana? Just good timing. If The Stooges couldn’t make headway in 1973, but Nirvana could in 1991, that means people were ready for Nirvana. But why?

And that’s the stuff we talk about. We don’t sit around talking about work, babies, money, weather, or people’s problems. We talk about the important things in life, like debating the greatness of music.