Wii Warm Up: The eyes of a rookie
Okay, this is going to be a little weird. But as we were watching all of the awesome new Smash Bros. footage featuring our BFF Solid Snake (with some allusions to the survival techniques of his "dad", Big Boss), we realized that not only is Snake one of our favorite characters ever, his inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Brawl makes us enjoy both Smash Bros. and Snake a little bit more.
It's not just that the incongruity of a gravelly-voiced mercenary in the kid-friendly fighting game is hilarious. It has more to do with the juxtaposition of what is more or less a human guy from a world that is kind of like the real world with, say, Mario, who is supposed to be human but clearly isn't. It's intriguing. It generates some really interesting cognitive dissonance. And then Snake fires a Nikita missile or snaps Mario's neck (M rating, here we come!) and we get a different kind of cognitive dissonance.
Putting Snake in the middle of a confluence of Nintendo universes makes them all look intensely bizarre, and makes Snake, a man who fights one-on-one with helicopters, seem like an everyman. When he expresses surprise at Wario's farting skill, he speaks for us. Of course, his everyman-ness still runs through a filter of Snake's life experience; he's still making long phone calls in the middle of a fight. He still sees strange animals as survival rations. There's really no other situation in which we'd be able to identify with this guy.
We don't really know how to form this discussion into a question, so we just thought we'd open it up to a discussion of Snake in Smash Bros. and how wonderfully weird the whole thing is. And then, for no reason, we're embedding the ridiculous "Eat Like Snake" Burger King commercial after the break, which has nothing at all to do with Smash Bros., Metal Gear, the Wii, or Snake, except that it has the word "Snake" in it.
