The one everyone loves, apparently. For years I didn't get the hype for this game, it was just faster Brawl with less stuff to do, but when I actually sat down and gave it a shot I had a ton of fun with it. I still think Brawl's got the upper hand because of how much content it's got, but this is still excellent.

Random anecdote: I met one of those ultra pro players at a con once and he asked me who my main was and I told him it was Peach, and then he gave me like this whole talk about how great she was competitively because of her aerial movement or something like that, I forget. I just kinda blinked and told him that I didn't even know she was good, I just liked her because she's pretty. Great guy by the way, forget who he was.

Don't tell Nintendo, but as a kid I got a Nintendo 64 emulator running on the (at the time) newly upgraded family computer, and for some reason this was one of the games I played the most. My mom didn't like this game, my brother was too little to play, and I had no friends to call over, so I just spent loads of hours playing this, all alone. In that sense, this game holds a lot of nostalgia for me, despite being such a uniquely solitary experience, but being objective, this is not the best. The boards are pretty meh all things considered, the game is not balanced at all, and this one has those infamous palm-destroying minigames that were thankfully taken out of future entries. Despite all that, I still have a little soft-spot for this game, even if it's not all that amazing when compared to the rest of the series