I think one of us was but I'm not sure it was me.  The only praise for Destiny seemed of the "it sold a lot of copies" type, which he then turns into talk about how over-hyped it was--none of which really has much to do with Super Smash Bros.

"Destiny spent a couple years as a much-hyped Next Generation of Gaming talking point, which explains the sense of curious disappointment–oh, this thing isn’t the greatest thing ever! And Destiny completes the 2014 Disappointment Trilogy that started with Titanfall"

"None of these games ever experience the next-best-thing ever hype cycle of Destinyor Watch Dogs or Halo A Billion or whatever mega-game Sony and Microsoft are releasing next."

"Even when Nintendo had its strong late-2000s comeback, it still felt strange to try to compare Nintendo’s signal product (Mario Galaxy and Wii Fit and Nintendogs) to the overstuffed mega-games on Playstation and Xbox"

It's pretty clear how he feels about Sony and Microsoft.

Forget that for a moment, though.  I want to know what the last paragraph is even supposed to mean.

"Isn’t that possible that someday everything will be Smash Bros.? And is it possible that that’s not a bad thing–or anyhow, that it’s not as bad as everything being Destiny?"

It's like he's try to create the perfect straw-man argument.  Isn't a future where neither of those things are true easily the best?  I sure as heck don't want everything to be Smash Bros.

The whole part about the history of the N64 and Super Smash Bros just reads wrong to me.  It is so completely different to the experiences my friends and I had.

"Legend has it that the game had a tiny budget, that it was barely promoted."

The game had TV ads.  Plenty of them.  Memorable ones too.  Barley promoted my ass.

"You could argue that Smash Brothers wasn’t even a proper Nintendo product"

Because it came from HAL?  I guess Iwata isn't a proper Nintendo employee.  This just doesn't make sense.  A Nintendo developer made the game, so it is a Nintendo game.  Full stop.

"You don’t often hear gamers trumpet the 64 as a revolutionary device..."

What?  Built in 4 player multiplayer which became the standard across the industry.  The analog stick which became standard across the industry.  Home to the games which showed everyone else how to do 3D games, features of which are still copied to this day.  Yeah, not revolutionary at all.

"...any list of the “greatest” Nintendo 64 games probably defaults to “pretty good” before too long."

I am not even sure what this means.  It would be true of any console ever.  Since the N64 didn't have a huge library, it probably has a better ratio of "great" games than most other consoles.  And if the author was just trying to say the N64 didn't have as many games as the PS, then objective failed.

"But the great games were transcendent [...] Super Smash Bros. was not any of those games. [...] But I can’t imagine any serious or highbrow treatise on the history of videogames would even notice Smash Brothers."

Yeah, why would any history of video games mention arguably the most popular fighting game franchise of all time.  A "highbrow treatise" would just leave the genre out altogether, right?

"The fact that the game was so cheap-looking actually enhanced the effect."

This whole section has to be a joke.  It is like he doesn't remember this era at all.  I love the links to an in-game model for FFVII and a cutscene for FFVIII for evidence of games becoming realistic around this time.  We all know if you paused Super Smash Bros and zoomed in and looked at the characters and environments, it didn't look great.  It wasn't supposed to.  It looked great in motion, with the camera zoomed out where it should be.  It was meant to play well with a ton of stuff happening on screen, and it did.

Stuff like this makes me not want to trust anything else the guy says in the rest of the article.