Super Smash Flash

Super Smash Flash, commonly referred to as Super Smash Flash 1 and abbreviated SSF or SSF1, is an non-profit Flash fan game developed by Gregory Cleod9 McLeod and published by McLeodGaming. The game is loosely based on Super Smash Bros. Melee in the menu format, music and numerous other fields such as game play modes. The game features several characters from the  series, such as Mario, Samus Aran, Link, Kirby, and Pikachu. It also features many third-party characters, including Sonic the Hedgehog (who, at the time of the game's creation, was not confirmed to be a character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl) and Mega Man X. Besides that, it also includes original fan characters like Blade and Blue. The original browser version for Super Smash Flash was first launched on August 21, 2006 on entertainment media website Newgrounds to mixed to positive reception. A downloadable EXE version was made available seven days later on August 28, 2006 on the McLeodGaming website.

Super Smash Flash is getting rebooted with a new game called Super Smash Flash 2, which is completely ignoring the basis of the first game and starting a new with gameplay mechanisms that are more similar to the ones in the official Super Smash Bros. games.

On August 21, 2016, Super Smash Flash celebrated its tenth anniversary launch on Newgrounds. To commemorate this event, McLeodGaming released a video confirming the inclusion of "SSF mode" on SSF2 ' s special mode which purposely recreates the physics and quirks of SSF.

Gameplay
Super Smash Flash ' s gameplay is based on that of the official Super Smash Bros. games. Unlike most traditional fighting games, each character's health is measured by a damage percentage counter. As each character is attacked, damage is accumulated and the percent value increases. Each player's objective is to KO their opponents by knocking them outside the stage's boundaries, and as a character's damage percentage rises, they can be launched progressively farther by an opponent's attacks. Players can also attempt to recover when launched off of the stage, but failure to do so will lead to them falling out of bounds, resulting in a KO.

Players are able move and jump freely around the stage, with the arrow keys (or A, S, D and W for a second player) being used to move and crouch and the O key (or G for a second player) being used to jump. Five different attacks can be performed by pressing the attack key P (or F for a second player) while holding a movement key, including a, an up attack, a side attack, a down attack, and a attack. Additionally, some characters have an extra attack while jumping.

The gameplay mechanics are loosely similar to those of Super Smash Bros. Melee, but it differs heavily in many areas. Due to characters' limited movesets, core mechanics from the official games such as special moves and defensive options are missing, making it very difficult for most characters to recover when knocked off the stage. Additionally, attacks deal a particular amount of damage on each frame they are active, allowing players to deal large amounts of damage with a single attack.

Matches can be played with various rules adjustable by the player, with the two primary settings being Time and Stock. Time mode uses a point-based system in which players earn points when they KO an opponents and lose points when they themselves are KO'd or if they self-destruct. The player or team of players with the most points at the end of the set time limit wins the match. Stock mode uses a life-based system in which each player is given a set number of "stocks", with each player losing a stock when knocked out, and players are eliminated from the match if they run out of stocks. The winner is determined by the last player or team of players standing once all other players are eliminated or, if a time limit is present, the player or team of players with the most stocks remaining once time runs out.

During gameplay, a variety of items can appear randomly across the stage. Items can be picked up by players and have a variety of unique effects, such as activating upon being thrown, being swung like a melee weapon, firing projectiles, or healing the player's damage. Unlike how they appear in the original Super Smash Bros. games, all items have limited uses, particularly those of the battering-type like the Saber or the Home-Run Bat, which disappear once they have been used a certain number of times. In multiplayer, players can adjust how often they appear.

Characters
There are a total of 28 playable characters (30 if and  are counted), of which 13 (15) are starters and 15 are unlockable. Many of these are simplified versions of characters appearing in Melee, while others are unique to this game and appear in third-party game franchises or media outside of video games.

Starter characters
These are the characters available after starting the game.

Unlockable characters
These are the characters that become available after meeting certain criteria and then defeating them in a challenger match.

Stages
There are a total of eight stages available across all game modes, of which six are starters and two are unlockable. Many of them are based on stages in Super Smash Bros. Melee, with some being original.

Starter stages
These are the stages available after starting the game.

Unlockable stages
These are the stages that become available after meeting certain criteria.

Single-player stages
These stages appear only in the game's Classic, Adventure, All-Star, and Stadium game modes and are not available for use in the multiplayer or Training modes.

Items
There are ten items based on items that appear in Super Smash Bros. Melee. These are the items that appear in the game.

Game modes
Super Smash Flash contains several game modes based on traditional Melee game modes. All, save for All-Star and Burly-Brawl Melee, are unlocked from the beginning.

VS. Mode
Melee is the only multiplayer game mode in Super Smash Flash. Up to four players can select their characters by dragging their respective tokens on the character selection screen to their characters' mugshots. Of these, up to two characters may be controlled by a human player, and up to four may be controlled by an artificial intelligence, with players being able to select how difficult they will be. Players can also choose to play either free-for-all or team battles. Once all characters are selected, players can then select the stage to fight the match on, and the match begins once selected.

The Rules menu can be accessed from the top of the character selection screen. This allows players to change various settings for the match, such as the match time or how many stocks players will start at. Players can also turn on settings such as the starting damage, the damage ratio, or the frequency at which items appear across the stage.

Regular Match
The Regular Match menu focuses on single-player game modes. The majority of these game modes are based on game modes from Super Smash Bros. Melee with several changes.

In Classic, the player fights CPU-controlled opponents in a series of levels. Bonus rounds play for certain levels, and the final level is a fight against on. Points are awarded based on bonuses received for performing certain tasks during a match, with higher difficulties awarding higher bonuses after the final round.

Adventure is a similar game mode to Classic, with its levels spanning across several different game series. Some levels are traditional battles, while others are linear stages in which the player must traverse to a designated finish line before time runs out, fighting enemies along the way. The final level pits the player against both Master Hand and on Final Destination. Like in Classic, points are awarded based on bonuses.

All-Star is a game mode that is unlocked after all characters are unlocked. With one stock, the player must fight against all 28 playable characters in succession with a limited amount of recovery items. Like in Classic and Adventure, points are awarded based on bonuses.

Training allows the player to freely test characters on any stage without the restrictions of a VS. Mode match. There are three modifiers in the upper left corner of the screen with which the player can spawn items or change the behavior of the opponent character.

Stadium is a series of sub-games that generally have more unique objectives compared to other game modes. In Target Test, the player must destroy eight targets on the Kirby Hub Room stage as fast as they can. The positions of the targets are different for each character. Multi-Man Melee challenges the player to fight grayed-out versions of other playable characters known as the Fighting Silhouette Team. There are several sub-modes, one of which is unlockable, that challenge the player to defeat as many opponents as possible without falling from the stage.

Development
Super Smash Flash began development some time around mid 2006 and roughly took about from two to four months for completion. All development processes, including programming, was handed by Gregory McLeod himself with little help from fellow users of the McLeodGaming Forums. Intended to be his first big Flash project, following very small Flash projects like the Pong games or school projects such as The Cell, Gregory McLeod initially envisioned a platforming game with a combat-oriented gameplay, rather than a Super Smash Bros. fan game. To make the first prototype, McLeod asked permission to use one of Equinox-Twilight's Sonic fan characters, which was redesigned by users of the Forums to become an early prototype for. For the staging, he created an early prototype for Emerald Hill Zone and included Buzzers as the incoming enemies. Certain products were released periodically in the form of small demos.

As a vivid Super Smash Bros. player, McLeod took note of the fan games made at the time based on the Super Smash Bros. series, particularly Super Smash X by ChannelCat. He felt that these games delivered a very short experience and were invariably buggy and incomplete, lacking much of the gameplay and features present in the official games. He thought a more complete Super Smash Bros. fan game was possible and now envisioned a Flash-based game, suggesting the name of "Super Smash Flash" as an example. Wanting to fulfill this, he began to rework his Sonic fan game into a full-fledged Super Smash Bros. fan game, which he initially called a "flash Smash engine". As development progressed, he started to incorporate new characters, stages, and items to accommodate a proper Super Smash Bros. game, as well as updating the sprites of previously added ones. The availability of sprite sheets on websites such as the Spriters Resource determined who would become playable in McLeod's fan game, now appropriately called by the name he had previously suggested: Super Smash Flash.

Super Smash Flash was released on August 21, 2006 on several browser game websites, including its home site McLeodGaming, as well as other major sites such as Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games. The game was still developed on after release, with the downloadable version released on August 28, 2006 adding additional features such as fullscreen support, custom controls, faster game speed, and the ability to skip the Floating Islands level of Adventure mode.

Bugs and glitches
As the game was created in a very short time by an inexperienced Cleod9, the game has become known for its assortment of bugs and glitches. Some only occur with certain characters, while others can be performed from the game's menus.

One of the most crippling bugs in the game is the "instant-KO attacks", which is a result of the game's knockback formula that multiplies opponents' momentum with their damage when attacked with vertical knockback. This causes these attacks to almost instantly KO opponents at medium to high damages. The existence of this bug is often cited to make completing All-Star very difficult.

Another popular glitch allows the player to advance forwards or backwards through events by opening the right-click menu or Control menu and selecting either "Forward" (or "Step Forward") for the next event or "Back" (or "Step Back") for the previous event. When used in Classic, Adventure, or All-Star, this can cause the player to instantly advance to the next level without having to complete the current one. This can also lead to additional glitches when used in the correct areas, such as unlocking and  quickly, accessing unlockable stages without having to unlock them, or playing with null data.

Various other bugs and glitches can occur as well. For instance, pausing the game during fights against Master Hand and Crazy Hand results in the bosses being unable to hit the player. Additionally, holding the attack input with certain characters can result in then canceling their animations into different attacks.

Reception
Super Smash Flash was met with mixed reviews from the day it was launched. Various reviewers on multiple websites, including Newgrounds (which gave this game a 4.18 / 5.00) and McLeodGaming itself, declared that it was one of the best Smash fan games ever created because unlike other fan games, it was complete with a full character roster and single-player modes. Many others, however, were more critical of the game, pointing out its horrendous physics flaws, lack of item regulation, lack of VS. mode customization, and game-breaking glitches, such as the infamous Skip glitch.

The character roster was met with mixed reception, although it was arguably the main reason why Super Smash Flash received recognition. This was because it included lots of characters that many fans of different franchises wanted in the real Super Smash Bros. games, such as and, and many were excited that they could finally pit these characters against their favorite Nintendo characters. Many others criticized the selection, claiming the character additions were excessive and out of place. They stated that there were more Sonic characters than Mario characters (including a "" character and even custom  characters known as and ), which is odd, considering it is based on the Nintendo-created Melee. A lot of people were also fed up with the insane number of other third- and fourth- party characters, including, , , , , and most notoriously , who all have little to no backing of being in a Smash game, have seldom or never showed up on Nintendo console games, and have extremely inaccurate representations in Smash Flash (for example, Naruto cannot use anything but kicks and headbutts, while in his original series he could use ninja-based attacks.) All of these pieces of criticism accumulate into the idea that the creators randomly chose characters with no regard to whether they would fit into Smash Bros..

The controls and physics also garnered criticism. Super Smash Flash is notable for having an extremely watered-down control scheme, using only two buttons and four directional keys to play. All attacks, including some jumps, deal insane amounts of knock-back even at low percentages, sending characters either horizontally or on a semi-spike trajectory that is impossible to recover from. This is exacerbated by the fact that most characters only have one midair jump for their recovery and lack an up special move to gain more distance, causing matches to end crazily, unfairly, and too quickly. Characters with projectiles and five midair jumps also dominated to the point of complete centralization. Overall, while the game was received well by fans for introducing desired characters into a Smash Bros.-like environment, it was panned by critics for lacking the depth that defined the series as a whole.

Trivia

 * Kirby and Meta Knight are a 2-in-1 character in this game due to the lack of Kirby's Inhale and copy ability. In the reboot, they are now separate playable characters and Kirby's Inhale and copy ability are finally present.
 * It was rumored that Wario was planned to be playable in this game, supported by the fact that sprites from  are used in the game. However, there is no evidence to support whether it is true.
 * Like the first Super Smash Bros., the  universe, along with the Super Smash Bros. universe, is the only universe that has more than one stage in the game: Peach's Castle and Mushroom Kingdom II.
 * Super Smash Flash was originally hosted on Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games (the latter which still "sponsors" SSF), but due to legal issues was removed from Kongregate in early 2009. It is unknown when or why it was removed from Armor Games.
 * On the Newgrounds page, Cleod9 mentioned he did not add all the characters from Super Smash Bros. Melee for a reason; it was later revealed that it was because he did not have any available sprites online when the game was being created.
 * On April 21, 2021, McLeodGaming's official Twitter account liked and retweeted a post that erroneously stated SSF was launched on April 21, 2006 and that it was the company's first project (that title belongs to the TI-83 Plus game, RPG).