What a stupidly petty concept for a video game, I kinda love it ngl. This game wasn't ever meant to be commercially sold; only like ~100 copies exist and they were given out at some business meeting or something. As a result, this game is one of the most expensive Atari carts costing thousands of dollars, so enjoy your four-figure atari coke propaganda, game collectors. The game is an extremely simple romhack of the Atari 2600 port of Space Invaders except now you control Coke and the invaders are Pepsi (with alien companions since pepsi is a 5-letter word and there are 6 columns of enemies in Space Invaders, good job with that one guys). The gimmick is that as you are the almighty Coca-Cola company, you are invincible the entire game. No matter how many times Pepsi hits you, you will always get right back up to continue destroying them. If the enemies get to the bottom, instead of triggering an immediate game over like regular invaders, the Pepsi invaders will just keep bouncing back and forth until you do destroy them. The game is set on a 3-minute score timer, loudly flashing "COKE WINS" once the time is up. Could this potentially mean that this is one of the first Caravan shmups...?????? (no)

Honestly since there's a timer that just stops the game no matter where you are it really doesn't feel like you "win" the game when its over like the crowning domination the game expects you to feel, it's more like a stalemate if anything. Maybe this is a reflection of the eternal corporate battle that large conglomerates fight with one another in late-stage capitalism, where there's no real winner or loser, just perpetual hostility..... (this is also not the case)

Despite being an incredibly petty joke advertisement of a video game, through screenshots and the title of the game you'd honestly think this is an endorsement for Pepsi instead of propaganda against them given that the game has more PEPSI's on screen through the enemies than the sole COKE WINS on the top left corner. At least you can strategically shoot aliens to make the game spell out PEEEEEEEEEE so that's gotta earn this game something.

It really goes to show how much simpler game development was back then that you could just manufacture some doofy romhack of a best-selling mainstream title whipped up by some dude as a joke and nobody bats an eye. Imagine if something like this existed nowadays, where only in shareholder meetings for fuckin mcdonalds or something can you get an elusive copy of MACDONALDRING, a hastily-made hacked version of Elden Ring that replaces your character with an invincible Ronald Mcdonald and changes all the bosses to Burger Kings that die in one hit. actually that sounds rad hold up

Ultimate is interesting to me, because, despite being an ostensibly more casual experience than Melee, the way a lot of the kits are designed are extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't, like, go to tournaments. But even if you stick it out and get to the point where you can hit a moving target with Fox back-air, you've probably gotten good enough to be frustrated with the set initial dash distance, or how miserable it is to interact with platforms, etc. There is the classic post-melee ceiling on movement mechanics we've come to expect, but there is also a weirdly high floor to the way a lot of the characters play. I actually think this is where, at least from a non-hyper-competitive perspective, the worst changes to how Smash functions on a basic level have come from. The removal of lasting hitboxes being a kind of default, the lowering of the frame windows on weak hits generally, and the outright removal of reverse hitboxes, restrict a lot of the cool skill expression that comes from manipulating the specific placement of attacks, but more importantly, these changes harm a beginner trying to play someone like ZSS for the first time. I guess I just find it really interesting that complexity is being removed, but that has come with the strange consequence of the game being harder to learn in a lot of ways. I don't really have my finger on the pulse of smash as a primarily casual experience, so perhaps this isn't really an issue, or maybe the game naturally just filters people into the few dozens characters that don't really have this issue as strongly, but either way, I think ultimate has really strange and conflicting design priorities. (Just as a disclaimer: a lot of these things have probably been true since Brawl, but Ultimate is the first Smash game since Melee I actually put considerable time into)