The House (Monty on the Run)

Let's start off with the biggest and best reason to put a Monty on the Run stage into Crusade:



So, now that you know the origin game has one of the greatest pieces of music ever put into a video game (I highly recommend listening to the whole thing), here's my proposed stage layout, a combination of the Commodore 64 version's design (with some tweaks to make it more Smash-y) and the ZX Spectrum version's color scheme (which is much brighter and prettier):



Please note that this is the hazard-less version. The main tweaks from the original stage (the ZX Spectrum's version of which can be seen here (LARGE IMAGE FILE WARNING) at the top-right, were to remove a few floating platforms that would have been unnecessary clutter in a Smash stage. In addition, the section to the left of the starting area has been removed, and the various barriers above have been turned into background decoration. Note the cloud on the left - in both versions of the stage it constantly spawns at the bottom, slowly moves upward until it goes off the top, and then respawns at the bottom, like the platforms in SMB1 1-1.

Now, since that's the hazard-less version, what's in the full version? There are 3 enemies that simply knock foes away lightly - the smiley face, the ball on the magic carpet, and the tea kettle. The smiley face and magic carpet ball move up and down, reversing direction when they touch either the boundary of the ceiling (these enemies are the only things affected by the ceiling, as it's now a background object) or the floor. The tea kettle, meanwhile, moves back and forth on the platform it rests on very quickly. There's also a crusher, which appears in the map as a gray cylinder on the ceiling. In the Smash stage, it would appear under the solid portion of the ceiling. This will occasionally slam down onto the ground, entirely at random, and launch fighters it hits VERY far. This is primarily counterbalanced by how easy it is to avoid getting anywhere near its danger zone. For reference on all these behaviors, skip to around 30 seconds in this video (don't watch it until you've heard the whole track linked above!). In addition, the water to the left of the stage will do damage to those who touch it with hazards on, in all other cases it's just treated as regular floor.

So, aside from the music, why should a Monty on the Run stage be in Crusade? For one thing, it's shockingly political - in the midst of miner's revolts throughout Britain, Monty on the Run stars an anthropomorphic mole who takes a pocketful of coal from his work at the mines and is now on the run from the police, who want to jail him for life for his petty crime. Though little of that premise comes through in the gameplay, the concept was definitely a controversial one to make a game around in Thatcher's Britain. In addition, though it's now a bit obscure on a global scale, Monty on the Run was a very influential game in its home region of Britain. In addition, it's an example of a "europlatformer" with a low-mobility protagonist and one-hit-kill obstacle courses. These were huge in the days of the Commodore and ZX Spectrum, but have somewhat fallen out of favor now. A recent homage to this genre, however, is indie darling VVVVVV, which replaces slow, uncomfortable jumping physics with unique gravity-reversal mechanics. Monty on the Run is also an early example of an indie game, made by a few IT guys during their lunch breaks and simply shipped to small game stores and magazine distributors (fill out this envelope and enclose £5 and we'll send you a copy of Monty on the Run!) around Britain and later the world, as was the process for indie developers before the Internet. It never made much of a splash in America or Japan, but in its home region of Europe Monty on the Run was quite an important game on a number of levels.

Plus, yknow, that music. Bonus GaMetal version.