Apologies if someone's posted this in one of the billion other Smash Bros threads but I couldn't see it.
Many people wondered just how Smash was going to work on the Wii. Would it use motion sensing? Would it need the nunchuck? Had Nintendo in fact,
painted itself into a corner with the Wii's control system and totally buggered up one of its best franchises? In the end our questions were answered with a grand total of four control options, old and new. They vary wildly in both approach and quality though, so here you'll find our thorough rundown of how to get the best out of Brawl.
The Wiimote and Nunchuck
This may be a more obvious statement than “Razor blades taste rubbish”, but using the combined Wiimote and nunchuck is a truly horrible way to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Smash is a series that requires fast, spur of the moment, improvised control. You need to think on your feet and react quickly, and to do that you need an efficient, focused input tool. In contrast, using the ‘mote and ‘chuck feels a lot like driving a Formula 1 car made out of balloons.
Put simply, your hands are all over the place. With the two elements of the controller so far apart and the buttons positioned so randomly when compared to the carefully focused and deliberate layout of a joypad, there’s just no instinctive flow to the movement of your thumbs and fingers over the controls. Fighting games more than any other genre require that symbiotic blending of player and controller, in which buttons and sticks become an extension of the hand and any awareness of the manipulation of an external device disappears into the ether. But with this set-up we found ourselves always having to conciously reach for the buttons we needed, creating a mental distancing and slowing down reaction times. It completely took us out of the game and simultaneously robbed us of our ability to play well, and there’s no bigger indictment of control failure than that.
The time delay on squeezing the B trigger is too great to ever allow you to feel on top of the action, and creates a constant feel of playing catch-up. Using C and Z with your left hand to jump and shield respectively is positively Satanic, and combined with the B problem it makes you feel like you’re reaching out to bearhug the controller into submission rather than having it under your power. And why aren’t there any shortcuts to the C-stick smash moves? Mapping them to flicks of the Wiimote could almost have redeemed this control system, but we’ve been given nothing of the sort. Bad form Nintendo, very bad form.
Verdict: The horror…
The Wiimote
On the face of it, the idea of successfully using what amounts to a NES pad for Smash Bros. (Yes, a total lack of gestural commands here too
unfortunately) sounds completely implausible. And for the most part, it is. The 1 and 2 buttons stand in comfortably for A and B, and the d-pad is fine for movement, but using the - button to grab? That we’re afraid, is the stuff of nightmares. Horrible, 1980s Cronenbergian nightmares. In a heated fight (Is there any other kind in Smash?) you’ll frequently end up accidentally hitting + instead, pausing the game and activating the zoomed-in viewpoint of the screenshot editor. The only thing that gets thrown is the flow of your game and by the time you’ve unpaused, any half-savvy human opponent will know exactly what you were about to do. And stretching a thumb over from the other attack buttons to the ‘mote’s middle is one of the most unnatural-feeling things you’ll be asked to do in any of Smash’s control schemes.
The B trigger is even more of a hinderance than it is when using the Wiimote with a nunchuck. Its awkward horizontal positioning underneath the controller makes pressing it with a fingertip to use your shield screamingly haphazard, and the time delay is an even bigger issue as there’s nowhere on the button that you can position your finger to get the right amount of leverage for quick and efficient play. Factor in the way the trigger’s curved surface leads to a lot of slippage and you’ve got a control system unattractively decorated in all shades of wrong.
That said, the standalone Wiimote isn’t that bad at all in the Subspace Emissary missions. The combat in the side-scroller tends to be less frantic than in the core Smash battles, and opponents go down a lot easier so the controller’s failings are less apparent. Enemies are more predictable and easier to manage, and they won’t read your command errors the way a human player will. Still though, if you have either of the next two options at your disposal, please use them. The health of both your mind and your TV will be much better as a result.
Verdict: Just like the pleasant but smelly kid at school. Okay to hang out with if there’s really no-one else about, but you don’t want to be its friend.
The Classic Controller
With a few minutes play, the CC becomes very, very good indeed. While at first they might feel a little low down on the pad, those analogues are brilliant. They’re taller and more pronounced than the GC controller’s sticks but they’re very fast and responsive, making them fantastically satisfying to flick around with the sides of your thumbs. You can attack them as quickly and aggressively as you want and they’ll never put up any resistance or lose accuracy.
As face button layout goes, no-one has ever beaten Nintendo’s SNES set-up, and on the CC it’s as good as it ever was. It feels compact but accessible, and the placing of ABXY matrix and right stick makes thumb movement between the two fast and natural, with barely any division ever felt in transition. The 
horizontal spacing is actually a little wider than on the GC pad, but the CC’s smaller vertical gap between the buttons and the stick is what really matters when it comes to fast and clean analogue smashes. In that respect it’s actually better than the Gamecube’s controller.
So, the catch that’s currently threatening all of us with major spine issues later in life due to the crushing weight of its inevitability? It’s the throw button again unfortunately. The ZL and ZR buttons are used for that function, and they’re just a teensy bit too close to the middle of the controller’s top edge to be within comfortable range. It’s never a major stretch to reach over the standard L and R buttons to hit them, but it’s still a stretch, and a noticeably bigger one than flicking from R to Z on a ‘Cube pad. Of course, with the main shoulder buttons both mapped to shielding, you could always use L and RZ (or vice versa) to cover both actions with minimal fuss, but the slightly asymmetrical finger layout needed to do that just doesn’t feel quite right.
The Gamecube Controller
The Gamecube pad still controls Smash Bros. just as God intended. They’re a combination as right and pure as Digestive biscuits and chocolate.
That big, tactile left analogue is as warm and welcoming as a hug from a rosey-cheeked Santa. The right stick, while not quite as well-placed as the one on the classic controller, is easy to hit and made eminently flickable by its nub-like design. And the button layout just makes total sense. The depth of the buttons and the physical differences between them make it impossible to accidentally hammer the wrong one in a frenzy, and everything on the face of the pad is laid out and sized exactly according to the game’s command priorities.
We’ve only found two stumbling blocks, and they’re very, very small ones. While their physicality is brilliantly designed, the sticks don’t feel quite as smooth and quick to respond as those on the Classic, although that could just be our controllers beginning to show their age. They’ve battled hard and served us well over the years, bless them. Additionally, and we’re being really nit-picky here, the GC pad is the only wired controller of the set. As such, it feels a little restrictive now that we’re used to the modern joys of wireless, but that’s probably more of a psychological thing than a real problem. After all, Melee played just fine last gen. And if you really do have a major aversion to digital umbilicals, there’s always the Wavebird.
Verdict: Old friends are still better. But only just.
