20 Nintendo Games You Must Play Before You Die
9. Super Smash Bros. Melee (GameCube)
One of Nintendo's greatest strengths is its ability to boil genres down to their essence, making them more fun and accessible. Mario Kart did this to the racer, and the Super Smash Bros. series saw the studio give the same treatment to the brawler.
GameCube instalment Smash Bros. Melee is the pinnacle of the series, which has been pitting Nintendo's most iconic characters against one another in no-holds-barred fights to the finish since the N64 era.
Beating the snot out of Mario with Link, or clobbering Pikachu into next week as Donkey Kong is about as satisfying as console gaming gets (especially if one of your friends was happened to be controlling the character on the receiving end of the punishment), and Melee was the definitive way to do these things.
The GameCube classic did what any good versus fighter sequel should: add tonnes and tonnes of new stuff. The way it improved on its N64 predecessor with additional characters, new gameplay modes and features still marks the biggest leap forward for the series to date.