Intro to Smash
Super Smash Bros. is a series of platform fighting games. It can be thought of as “king of the hill”, where you and your opponent try not to fall off the hill (the stage), as doing so results in the loss of a life (or stock) when the boundaries of the stage (blast lines, which is a large box surrounding the stage) are reached. To make your opponent reach the blast lines, you attack them. Attacks deal damage in the form of percent and knocks them back. Percent is unlike health in traditional fighters in that lower percent is more desirable, as having more percent increases the distance you get knocked back by, increasing the chance that the blast lines will be crossed, resulting in the loss of your stock. Upon the loss of your stock, your percent resets back to zero. Once the number of stocks of a player reaches zero, the other player wins.
Above is Nintendo's video on how to play Melee.
Here, Peach has 3 stocks and 0% while Marth has 4 stocks and 128%. Peach has less lives than Marth so she's losing, but Marth will likely lose his stock soon because his percent is too high.
Competitive Melee (the main competitive game of the Super Smash Bros. series) is played with a timer of eight minutes and four stocks each, often in best of three matches (best of five for grand finals, top eights, or top thirty-twos in some cases). It can be played one-on-one (singles), or two-on-two (doubles) with friendly fire on. Only some stages are permitted for play as others can have random elements, stage hazards, or abusable properties (ground leading into blast lines (walkoffs), large enough for stalling to occur).
In the above gallery is all of the legal stages in Melee with a red box representing the blast zone.
