A thread for cantankerous old bastards who don't like Brawl: Project M Demo!

reddeath

Olivaw wrote: »

First of all, laissez-faire does not mean what you think it means

Secondly, yes, it requires a certain tight responsiveness and camera perspective and constrained gameplay

You can't have an "open world fighting game," is what I'm saying. The movement needs to be restricted in a certain way in order to keep it as responsive as possible

I know it's considered a cardinal sin to have a game do one thing these days, but that's what fighting games do: one thing

And to a certain degree, Smash Bros. does one thing, but it also slaps a whole bunch of bullshit onto that one thing so it does a million other things in addition, and that's what makes it unique and awesome, but it also compromises it's inherent fighting game-ness

They give you the option to remove all that stuff if you really want to, because Nintendo can be very accommodating, but it's very clear that they meant the game to be played with items and super smashes and all that nonsense, because those are the default settings!

In this thread, someone in all seriousness states on of the most deep, unique, and innovative fighting games released in the last two decades actually isn't a fighting game because it's TOO unique and innovative.

Three pages of misguided hilarity ensued.

Smash brothers is a fighting game, it features between 2 - 4 characters hitting each other (fighting) on a 2d plane, using various projectiles, unarmed, or melee attacks until one goes away. Just because physics and thinking are involved more than rote memorization of specific button combinations to unload canned combos, does not make smash brothers magically not a fighting game.

If there is a tier list, people are spending time tracking move frames, melee combat is the focus, and the game is competitive, head to head between players, no matter how much you feel like trivializing it due to your own twisted perception of reality, you are still dealing with a fighting game. I can't believe I even have to explain this concept to you.

It's almost like you never got good enough at smash brothers, or any other fighting game, to understand what goes into high level play in them, and why smash brothers is more or less the same (only better) than most other fighting games.

furlion

Going to have to agree with those saying Melee was competitive. I put in several hundred hours with my friends (at least, possibly in the thousands). My university had a yearly 2 day LAN and they included melee for 3 years. I came in second, first, and third over those three years. Now I played Ganondorf, and I was good with him. Those first two tournaments I lost fair and square to other players who just played the game a lot like me. That last tournament the first and second place players took things to a new level. Wavedashing, L-cancelling, all kinds of shit I don't even remember the names for. In a 3 man, best 2 out 3 match, I killed the guy who beat me for second maybe once. Maybe. The two of them literally destroyed the other 20 or so competitors. It was not fun, it was not competitive, they just beat us like we had never played the game before. While I will agree that the level of depth was unintended on Nintendo's part, it was there.

As far as the Project M goes I think it looks pretty promising. Brawl is much more a party game then Melee and it is less fun for my friends and I to lose to tripping and blatantly unbalanced characters. I will definitely be keeping track of this and hopefully it develops into a good representation of Melee.

Rent

curly haired boy wrote: »

it's something i like to call "nintendo depth"

you get your basic nintendo family games meant for folks to play together in a casual environment

and yet they attract a certain fanbase that does nothing but expose the arcane inner workings of the game to 'make it more competitive'

pokemon: EV training
smash: wavedashing, etc.
mariokart: snaking

so instead of playing games that actually try to support such aggressive attention, they just stick to nintendo titles.

and when you encounter them online/in multiplayer, you get your ass kicked by the only person in the room who's taking the game 1 billion times more seriously than everyone else

yeah EV training is nothing like wavedashing. at all.


primarily that 1) it requires no skill to do (just knowledge), 2) it isn't some glitch or error in the programming being exploited, and 3) has been supported by Nintendo in successive titles (HG and SS made EV training a snap to do, for instance)

Shadic

Hi there everybody, Shadic from the PMBR. I figured I'd address a few claims, despite rarely checking out these boards. I'll try and return for some more comments.

furlion wrote: »

As far as the Project M goes I think it looks pretty promising. Brawl is much more a party game then Melee and it is less fun for my friends and I to lose to tripping and blatantly unbalanced characters. I will definitely be keeping track of this and hopefully it develops into a good representation of Melee.

Try it out! You shouldn't be disappointed. Especially if you play one of the low-tier characters who was included in the demo.

Kyougu wrote: »

Doesn't Melee competitive play involve exploiting a bunch of glitches and systems that weren't mean to be used during normal play? Granted, a lot of fighting game community do that to (MvC2 being a main offender) but sometimes it seems that's the only reason it even became a "serious business fighter".

This has partially been addressed, but Wavedashing and L-Canceling are not glitches, and are the two most commonly used "Advanced techniques" that are criticized. Wavedashing is perhaps an "exploit" of the physics engine, but is no more a glitch than bunny-hopping or snaking. L-Canceling was always intentional.

Olivaw wrote: »

I suppose my total inability to see any sort of depth in either Brawl or Melee as intentional...

I'd watch this:A Simple Melee Tech-Example before criticizing the depth of Melee. This is mostly just a show of technical depth, so you'd have to go to SmashBoards to see more. And what does it matter if some of what we do wasn't intentional? Do the game designers have to imagine every possibility for a player in order for you to enjoy it? If so, Street Fighter 2 "As it was meant to be played" must have been kind of boring.

BlueDestiny wrote: »

Wait why don't the people who hate Brawl just play Melee like they've already been doing.

Extra characters, extra stages, better character balance. I don't see the problem.

agoaj wrote: »

Do they have items working right? The other brawl hacks have problems with slow mo items that makes the gravity go crazy.
Edit:
Ha, if you're using a wiimote and select any character it'll say failure. Was thinking about playing this with friends, but I guess not.
Edit 2:
Nope, slow mo still screws it up. It's really not any better than the other brawl mods.

It's important to note that this is a Demo. We're aware of several glitches, but after a year of development we figured that we'd show off some of our progress. We plan of fixing these things before final release. (And we're likely to do a minor patch-up within a week or so that removes that Wiimote code. It was mostly a joke easter egg.)

Pata wrote: »

I have tons of faith in them!
At them utterly failing at this.
It'll be worse then both games, likely be an unbalanced mess, and generally be retarded.

Why don't you try it out before criticizing? We've had many people rave about the new opportunities we've brought to both low tier characters and converted Brawl characters, and we'd like think of the game as significantly improved on Melee's balance even within this little demo. We are basing our design decisions on close to a decade worth of Melee tournament results, and we have many skilled players involved in development and feedback. Why exactly are you so pessimistic? I'd like to address some of your worries.

agoaj

Thanks for responding to me, I'll keep an eye out on the mod.

Anyone else feel like Sheik gets too much air? Maybe I'm just failing to short hop because it's been so long since I've had to do some truffle shffl's.

cloudeagle

Well, now that the creator of the thing is here, I may as well ask the question I'm genuinely curious about, and I promise I'm not trolling when I ask this:

Why not just keep playing Melee?

UncleSporky

He answered that in his post.

cloudeagle

Ah, I apologize for that, then. My eyes tend to glaze over when words like "wavedashing" pop up.

Seanron

People who argue about balance in Smash Bros are playing it for all the wrong reasons

schuss

I also liked melee better, the controls just felt tighter. I played some brawl, but it didn't really have the same appeal, especially with metaknight spam just being hyper-annoying.

SkyGheNe

Seanron wrote: »

People who argue about balance in Smash Bros are playing it for all the wrong reasons

Well, if you're going to say something like that I'll balance things out by saying that anyone who plays with items on isn't really playing smash bros

Before anyone jumps on that, I'm being sarcastic and pointing out how ridiculous it is to suggest that there is a "right" way to playing the game or that balance shouldn't be a concern for certain games.

Shadic

agoaj wrote: »

Thanks for responding to me, I'll keep an eye out on the mod.

Anyone else feel like Sheik gets too much air? Maybe I'm just failing to short hop because it's been so long since I've had to do some truffle shffl's.

Sheik actually gets 1-2 frames less in the air, due to landing detection. (In Melee, characters are seen as "hitting the ground" when their hips touch the ground, in Brawl, it's kind of an arbitrary point below them.)

cloudeagle wrote: »

Well, now that the creator of the thing is here, I may as well ask the question I'm genuinely curious about, and I promise I'm not trolling when I ask this:
Why not just keep playing Melee?

Like I said before:

Shadic wrote: »

Extra characters, extra stages, better character balance.

And not to mention, Melee is a decade old now. Even if we are "cantankerous old bastards who don't like Brawl," some of us do want an expansion of the gameplay that Melee had.

Also, I'm not the creator, but one of the various mooks running about doing things. I'm responsible for Link, the Menu, some stage work, and various animation changes.

schuss wrote: »

I also liked melee better, the controls just felt tighter. I played some brawl, but it didn't really have the same appeal, especially with metaknight spam just being hyper-annoying.

I think this will be right up your alley then! You should definitely give it a try. When Metaknight comes out, you'll see that he's nowhere near as annoying as he used to be, but can still be a strong force to be reckoned with.

Seanron wrote: »

People who argue about balance in Smash Bros are playing it for all the wrong reasons

Wrong reasons for you, maybe. :wink: I think it was obvious even at a recreational level of play that some characters fell short of the rest of the cast. Poor Yoshi.

Xenogears of Bore

The biggest problem with this project is that its going to take them ten years at this rate to get everything done.

I like the demo.

Shadic

I doubt that. We've really been working on it for around a year, and have almost half the cast essentially finalized. (In the demo) We've also got a bunch of work done on other characters such as Wario and Bowser. It really depends on when certain coding discoveries are made. Also, some of our most productive members have really only been around for six months or so, and we wasted a bunch of time trying to approximate Melee data before we were finally able to crack the character data in that game and work on converting it over. All of the Melee cast has their physics around 80% done, for example.

Glad you like the demo though. Any characters in particular that stand out to you?