Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Gentlemen, you'll probably need to be sitting down for this revelation. Against all odds, Wii U has a second game to be assed about on the horizon. After the success of Mario Kart 8, Smash Bros. is now coming. Who knows, the console may not die in a defeated heap of gimmicky shame after all.

The acclaimed party/brawler is due to arrive this holiday season, with the 3DS version released this very week. So it's a good time to take another big ol' steaming dump on the word ‘retro', and take a look back at the previous installment in the series.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl hit the Wii in 2008. It follows the basic formula of its predecessors, but shovels on more balls-out crazy than you can handle.

If you've never gotten your Smashtastic on before, here's the deal. Nintendo's big ticket items, from Mario and Link to Fox McCloud and Kirby, all join together for a crossover shitstorm. In a family friendly fashion, naturally. Imagine Fight Club with no shattered bones and everybody apologizing like Canadians to each other afterwards, and you're about there.

It's a winningly winning formula. Nobody quite knows why they want to see Mario punch Yoshi in his dangling dino-plums, but they totally do. You fight across stages from the characters' universes (Peach's Castle, a shit-your-pants hazardous ride across moving F-Zero cars, and everything in-between), with all kinds of power-ups of similar origin... cutesy it may be, but it's also completely ridiculous and irresistible for many.

Still, by this time, the franchise had already existed for almost a decade. For Brawl, they had to go all out. To blow our undercrackers off. To ram everything conceivable into the game, ‘til they could ram no more.

Well, effing Sonic is here, for one. And Solid Snake is here, for... two. We know what you're thinking, Smash-fans. Third party characters in Smash Bros were enough to make you think you were in some kind of Bizarro World, where Justin Bieber was celebrated for his musical genius and wasn't an obnoxious little ballache, and celebrities knew how to cover their cooches before emerging from taxis. But it happened, and it worked. (Check out Pac-Man and Mega Man in the latest release.)

Elsewhere, Brawl brought us the series' first substantial singleplayer offering: The Subspace Emissary. This campaign of sidescrolly levels is similar to Tekken 3‘s Force Mode (remember that? It was badass), and was a fairly half-assed but passable attempt at giving the game a plot.

Beyond the usual multiplayer shenanigans, Brawl was rife with all kinds of extras. There were even time-limited demos of the characters' past masterpieces included, just in case you'd forgotten how wank the original Zelda looked and damn well needed to play 57 seconds of it. There was a whole new sticker album, offering more completely-useless-yet-OCD-soothing collectibles to go for.

In all, this was the ultimate, chock-full installment of Smash Bros. A lot of the chaff has been removed for the new game, but there was no denying: this little doozy had years of gameplay to offer.