The Gaming Den

Hahaha, that's pretty awesome.

Mega-crossover series in general have that problem. They introduce an unexpected character or two that gets them a huge amount of buzz and then they keep trying to recreate that moment. In the previous game, it was Sonic and Solid Snake. In the game before THAT it was Marth. In the game before THAT it was Ness.

What I don't get is why Smash Bros. 3DS felt the need to keep trying to top themselves like that. They already had enough 'holy shit, that's unexpected and/or awesome' characters: Wii Fit Trainer/Villager (unexpected), Little Mac/Megaman (awesome), and Shulk (both). Adding Pac-Man and the Duck Hunt dog just feel like they're pandering at this point.

Well if they don't do that, they would have to stop making Smash Bros. games. And if they stopped churning out new variants on Smash Bros., Pokémon, Mario, Zelda and Metroid, they wouldn't be Nintendo.

Also, the work computer actually autocorrects Pokémon to have the accent above the e. That's pretty awesome.

They could always update the engine. But, pffft, new game mechanics and refining old ones is for squares. You think that the jRPG and RTS genres are stagnant? Wait until you get a load of the ossification in fighting games!

Duck hunt dog is the only one I don't get in the least.

I'll take the dog over multiple versions of link and a bajillionty fire emblem characters any day.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:They could always update the engine. But, pffft, new game mechanics and refining old ones is for squares. You think that the jRPG and RTS genres are stagnant? Wait until you get a load of the ossification in fighting games!

I've never played Melee (played the original followed by Brawl) so Brawl felt like a huge improvement. What did it change from Melee?

Look, as far as the Brawl vs. Melee thing goes, I'm normally against admitting that grognards have a point on principle. But people who claim that Brawl was mechanically a downgrade to Melee aren't talking out of their asses.

For one, Melee's tiers aren't as steep as Brawl's. Melee still had tiers but you didn't feel like an idiot for grabbing someone not in the top 3. Non-command grabs aren't as worthless in Melee as they are in Brawl. And the characters move a lot more fluidly. If you play Melee and then Brawl you'll find that Brawl characters not only move more slowly but also attack more slowly. Combos are also harder to pull off because of this. And air-dodging is almost worthless in Brawl since it doesn't move you very far. Finally, while I think that most of the people whining about randomness in Super Smash Bros. (like items) spoiling battles are just little bitches, tripping was a legitimate bad idea. There are also some more minor problems -- such as the hitboxes being more inconsistent in Brawl -- but those are the big ones.

And grognard whining is legitimately a problem with the Smash Bros. fandom. Super Smash Bros. being a fun party game and a technically sound mascot fighter is a huge selling point, but the tourney scene is only a tiny part of it and they overestimate how important they are to the franchise. So even if they have very good reasons why they feel that Brawl is a downgrade to Melee, the way that they frame their arguments and denigrate aspects of the franchise that make it a great party game but a poor tournament fighter (like the items) makes the rest of the Smash Bros. fanbase and the video game community at large hold them in contempt.

For example: the tournament community's obsession with wavedashing. I wouldn't mind them having a mechanic that's like wavedashing for future games, but Super Smash Bros.'s biggest selling point is that you can figure out 95% of what your character is supposed to do or can do after 10 minutes of playing. Wavedashing is a very advanced technique that takes hours of practice just to start being able to do and days to start being able to apply usefully; it's no surprise that Brawl took that out. Yet Melee holdovers scream like raped apes about it and it makes them look bad.

If you really want to see if the grognards have a point, try out Project M. You don't need a hacked Wii to play it, just a retail disc and a 2GB Memory Card because Nintendo sucks horse anus sometimes.

I was skeptical at first, but having played it I see what they mean. Even without getting into some of the more advanced techniques, I legitimately like how it plays over Brawl just in the baseline mechanics. Stuff like having a huge palette of costumes, rebalancing all of the old characters, and reintroducing most of the old Melee characters is just gravy. Unfortunately, Subspace Emissary doesn't work and the project managers have flat-out said that they have no interest in fixing it at this time, which just goes to show you how narrow-minded and idiotic the hardcore Smash bros. fans are.

Yeah, I have no tourney fighter pretensions but I was almost instantly turned off by the speed difference in the transition to Brawl from Melee. It was just a matter of feel, since I had always gravitated towards characters that are fast but still easy to handle, like Marth, Sheik or Pikachu. They were fast enough to do cool stuff but less prone to goofy deaths than Fox. Making everyone clunky just left me cold.

I may be the only person on the planet who overall thought Brawl was better than Melee.

...then again, I also like Gen III and think that Dragonball GT was okay. Maybe I just like to have unpopular preferences.

Don't get me wrong, I think Brawl is a better game than Melee even though the mechanical changes are uniformly worse. However, what most of the tourney scene doesn't get is that the reason why Brawl was a better game has little to do with the moderate downgrade in mechanics. Which is why you see most of these idiots trot out the old 'haw haw, Melee and Project M is more accepted in the tourney scene than Brawl!' talking point like it's some kind of rhetorical masterstroke.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:They could always update the engine. But, pffft, new game mechanics and refining old ones is for squares. You think that the jRPG and RTS genres are stagnant? Wait until you get a load of the ossification in fighting games!

Isn't Smash 4 introducing a bunch of new play modes and customizable movesets? I think edgeguarding is a bit different now too, though I'd have to do a little searching to pull up the specifics.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Finally, while I think that most of the people whining about randomness in Super Smash Bros. (like items) spoiling battles are just little bitches, tripping was a legitimate bad idea.

Can you elaborate on that? I haven't played enough SSB of any kind to know if you mean a throw-like "trip" move that apparently has something to do with items, or if people trip over items, or what.

For example: the tournament community's obsession with wavedashing.

True story: last time I heard about wavedashing, I did a youtube search to find out what the hell it was. The video ended up being ten minutes of an old man in a rocking chair, with one frame of gameplay hidden in the video for the preview screen. Yes, the next search was more successful.

If you walk or run, sometimes your character will slip like they landed on one of Diddy Kong's banana peels. There's no way to predict or prevent it, it just sometimes happens.

Ahahaha, yeah, that doesn't sound like a good idea. There are a lot of random things that are fun, particularly in regards to "risky" things where you have some input (high-risk moves that can pay off if they hit, items where one person decides to grab the box and maybe it's a Mario Star, maybe it's a bomb), but tripping over at random...

Wait, are they implying the characters are as drunk as the players should be? (Based not on it being a bad game, but on it being a party game. If you have more than two players at the one console, I'm pretty sure they're going to be hammered.)

I have more fun with items off but there's people on both sides of the argument with such severe cases of butthurt that I'd rather just let other people pick the settings and keep my mouth shut than ever step into that particular hornet's nest again. I never understood how it was a big enough problem to migrate to the internet though. I mean, FFS, there's already a goddamn toggle! We're already in the best of possible worlds, you assholes.

Koumei wrote:Ahahaha, yeah, that doesn't sound like a good idea. There are a lot of random things that are fun, particularly in regards to "risky" things where you have some input (high-risk moves that can pay off if they hit, items where one person decides to grab the box and maybe it's a Mario Star, maybe it's a bomb), but tripping over at random...

The entire purpose of tripping is to fuck with tournament players. Tournaments are played without items, and pretty much any stage with random elements is banned. Also, several characters have "start running" animations that let them move faster than simply running in a straight line. This results in high-skill players spamming forward and back to move faster than just holding the control stick forward. In response, Brawl introduced a chance of tripping whenever you start running to a) include randomness the tournament players can't turn off and b) nerf counter-intuitive stutter-steps without having to eliminate their root cause.

The crazy part is that they weren't even addressing a particularly hard problem when they decided to piss on tourney players en route to catching us all in the splash zone. There's all sorts of ways you could fuck with dashes that would make them less practical to spam so why go with the one that randomly plays sad trombone?

Yeah, I love fucking with tourney players, but that sounds like a really poor implementation.

My Brawl disc died a long time ago and I've been using Dolphin since then. Setting up Project M on Dolphin was a bit annoying but it looks pretty awesome. First thing I noticed was everyone falling a lot faster. Matches seem shorter thanks to everyone being sped up, which is pretty cool. Really digging the new costumes and the stages from Smash 64 (Hyrule Castle and Saffron City were my favorites). It feels a bit off with some characters due to Brawl muscle memory, but I think I'll get used to it after a while. I need to spend more time with this after school (played roughly 20 minutes so far). Thanks for the recommendation Lago .

I have a few beefs with Project M.

First is that they got rid of Subspace Emissary, which is/was the greatest part of Brawl. Second, they got rid of a lot of stages I liked and changed some others for no real reason (removing all the stage elements from the Brawl version of the Pokemon stadium, for one), as well as removing custom stages (since using that option is how you get to Project M).

Also, the fact that they broke up the Pokemon Trainer's Pokemon into separate characters makes them suck so much ass (they are mostly weak on their own and the lack of a final smash is incredibly fucking retarded). Marth, who was my main in Brawl, has been neutered to the point of licking bitchrods. And finally, they changed the way dodging works to the way it did in Melee, because wavedashing.

Shrapnel wrote:Marth, who was my main in Brawl, has been neutered to the point of licking bitchrods.

I'm not sure if this is a clever troll or you're really just that retarded, lol.