SMASH REMIX

The Super Smash Bros of your dreams, assuming you haven't slept since Y2K.

- By Justin Wagner

Smash Remix goes back to 2019 when it replaced Captain Falcon with his slower counterpart Ganondorf, but six years' worth of updates have brought the roster up to 30 regular fighters and 16 'bonus' fighters that skew stronger and sillier, like Lanky Kong and the piano from Super Mario 64.

This is not a fan game, but a patch that runs as easily on a RetroArch core as it does on your dust-stained Nintendo 64. As long as you've got a way to transfer your Super Smash Bros 64 cartridge's ROM onto your PC and then back onto an SD card (to slap into a custom N64 cart like an Everdrive), you can run Remix natively on original N64 hardware.

The new character picks are strategic, as if they treated a 1999 Blockbuster rental section like a shopping list for character ideas. Any anachronisms, like Lucas and Dark Samus, are tucked into a side menu as bonus characters; the vast majority of new additions are era-appropriate all-stars like Sheik and Goemon, who you could picture making it into the original if HAL Laboratory had been given free rein to do whatever it wanted and a lot more time to do it.

Even a character like Wario, who was added in later Smash games, has had his motorcycle and farts stripped away since those elements weren't really part of the character until WarioWare came out.

It's also a chance to retroactively add regular