Sure enough, the lighting effects and detail really help… even in such a low-res image. Compare the variety of colors and good contrast here against the stereotypical “brown on brown, with some grey thrown in along with more brown” people rail at these days. The 3DS stage in that picture is going to stay in my head for a while, in a good way.
On a game design side, I like how they’re willing to do stages generally akin to Battlefield but arranging the platforms in various ways. Certainly it’s an easy thing to do, and you can’t call it creative… but it will likely have some real impact on certain match-ups. It could be interesting.
I think it’s great he’s reaching out to Nintendo. Remember, whether Nintendo cares is a different matter from whether they understand. We had to drag them kicking and screaming into the contemporary internet age and reducing their use of the ridiculous Friend Codes system, because they just didn’t ‘get’ online gaming or see why this mattered until people made it extremely clear. Likewise, Nintendo didn’t care about the Evo situation because they didn’t understand why it matters and why it’s different from their general policy on Let’s Play videos (I strongly disagree with said policy, to be clear. Hopefully Nintendo will come to their senses on it). People made them care. You came together as this incredible tidal wave of “please don’t do this to us, it’s for a good cause” and that made Nintendo understand. That made Nintendo change their minds. It wouldn’t have happened if people didn’t engage Nintendo and explain why this mattered.
What Max is doing here is a good thing; he is offering a hand, offering to educate rather than hate. He is offering to show what benefits Nintendo can reap by cooperating with the competitive scene rather than insulting us in translated screenshots during Brawl’s development (anyone remember that “Real Men Play with Items!” cheap shot a translator took?) or trying to shut our streams down… or even just plain wondering what a fighting game tournament is. I would much rather Nintendo be our friend than apathetic/ignorant, or openly hostile to us. We have seen the benefits of having publishers and developers openly embrace us. Sure, we have to put up with the occasional “and now a word from our sponsors” corporate plug… but when the sponsors are offering stuff directly relevant to our hobby, and helping with the logistical side of it, I think that’s a fair trade.
The only faults in Max’s approach are two-fold. First, he is not explaining what ‘support’ would mean. Does he mean regular balance patches? Sponsorship money to help fund tournament venues? Simply reversing their policies on streams/videos? Sakurai visiting Evo to give special announcements? Max knows what he meant by that, plus you and I can make extremely good guesses what he meant, but Nintendo has no idea. They are not ‘part of us’ yet. They don’t understand our culture. They don’t ‘get it’ like Atlus and Capcom and NRS/WBIE and Mad Catz and so on do. He’s asking for a word Nintendo in theory knows and understands, but they don’t know how to apply it in this context. We need to be more precise in explaining what we hope Nintendo will do.
Second, Max is putting this out to them within his ‘sphere of awareness’ rather than theirs. Nintendo kind of lives in a bubble, and you can’t expect them to go out and explore because their corporate philosophy is very defensive and control-oriented. They don’t like things they don’t control unless you make it clear to them you’re not a threat and show them why they should be friends with you. The FGC, including the Smash sub-section thereof, is barely on their radar in any positive sense. Nintendo needs to be directly sent copies of this video and similar outreach needs to happen.
None of this is meant to tear down what Max has done. He has the right idea; Smash 4 has a chance of being competition-viable (Yes, Brawl sucked for this but Melee has its high points in tournament play plus Namco-Bandai is helping this time around; let’s give it a fair shake). It’s good to embrace that potential and show Nintendo they can be our friends. I admire what he’s doing! It’s a wonderful, positive thing… and constructive actions like these are the only way you build good relations with others. We just need to go to them with that message, because they’re not going to seek us out to hear it; their current understanding is either “what’s a FGC?” or “they give us a bad name.” Hard to tell which, but either way they have no motive to come to us; we need to approach them with an open hand if we want their support.
This is one of those times that the ball is being softly placed in nintendo’s hands…whether or not they drop it still remains to be seen.
edit: It’d be intersting if Villager could pocket pikmin and waddle dees/doos/gordos (assumption on Triple D returning) and also make them turn on the thrower. Not only would it be an OP hammer space but it brainwashes minions too lol.
Man, I’ve been so stoked for Wii U Smash that I’m forgetting about the 3DS version. Since I don’t yet own a Wii U, the 3DS will be the place for me to Smash. If the 3DS stages look that good then I can only imagine what the rest of the game will be like.
Man, Villager is gonna be one of my main fighters. How many more memes are we gonna get from that pic of the day with him throwing the arrow back at Pit? Also, I MUST have the villagers pockets. Be real, you all know he keeps dead bodies in there as well.
Rumor has it he also keeps string (or nothing) in there, along with magic rings.
Edit: Responses below me asking “what the hell?” were inquiring about a series of Mortal Kombat 2 videos some other user posted. They have since been removed. Post sequence now looks odd since people seem to be all “what the?” about my Hobbit joke.
I only hope Nintendo doesn’t let their be a long hiatus before they do another one of these. If they have to make it a downloadable title and put Next Level back on it since they did an amazing job with the game.
The reason is because people spoil the experience by posting the cutscenes online, taking away any incentive for the player to play through story mode. I can see what he means by this; it’s like creating a character that nobody uses even though you spent all that time making it. On the other hand, it would’ve been cool if we had a MM-style single player game.
Hopefully this will translate into making multiplayer that much better.
Well at the very least I’m sure they’ll have something like Melee’s adventure mode. Perhaps a co-op version this time around. Doesn’t need cutscenes, but a basic platforming-esque adventure visiting the various Nintendo locales would still be nice. :3
And from the first Smash trailer you can see Mario solo jumping really high through a stage, which doesn’t look like a stage you would battle on, so that seems what’s probably gonna happen.
I also hope they bring back the original score system from N64/Melee P1 modes. It was fun seeing the various “mini-achievements” you got after each stage.
Edit: I also can completely understand Sakurai’s reasoning for leaving that stuff out. In any case time and money that would have been spent on that can instead go towards the game itself and I’m completely ok with this.
