Ugh. I didn’t say it was basic on a competative level, I’m saying it’s easier for people to get into and feel like they’re raping.
There are still some things in melee that are pretty easy to do. Like shieks cg on herself. Lulz
Melee is a great game that takes a lot of time to get good at, but ugh I guess what I’m trying to say is that smash is a scrub magnet. Lol
I don’t exactly agree with the smash not being easy to play. I played melee for a long time with my group of friends who grew up playing the same games as I. Once I discovered years after all of these more complicated advanced tactics i was able to pull them off consistently fairly quickly could do some combinations of them with characters i didn’t really use within a hour or so. I’m not trying to bash the game either i enjoyed it when I played it and still have fun even if i play it now. However when i uncovered more games like 3s and kof i kind of felt overwhelmed with the motions and such in sequences during combos it felt a lot more difficult to do consistently. Even though the example with the fox setups was a good way to show how someone could possibly do so much in a little amount of time; when i played the other games it felt like those moments were happening all the time whenever i did a combo. Just my experience. Link 4 life…
A game is only as easy/hard to play as far as a player is willing to understand it. That bar is set by a player’s competition. There’s nothing intrinsically difficult about playing any fighting game. Fighting games are easy to play and understand relative to other genres - deplete your opponent’s life bar by pressing buttons.
In fact, most people tend to think they’re good at whatever game they currently beat their friends at until they run into tournament competition - it’s at that point, a fighting game tends to blossom in its complexity and execution requirements. Those players realize they had a **limited **understanding of the game - and most things in this universe are difficult to comprehend FULLY.
I would argue that Smash “blew up” because of the simple and incredibly intuitive controls. Instead of double tapping or pressing two buttons to dash, you just slam the control stick in whatever direction you want to go and your character starts running. There is an actual jump button instead of having to tap up every time. Likewise, grabs can be accomplished with the press of a single button as opposed to having to use 2 buttons or a direction in conjunction with a button. When you need to block, you just hold a trigger button, you don’t have to worry about left/right or high/low. Perhaps most importantly there are no traditional FG inputs like qcf’s. All moves are produced by simply pressing one of two buttons and holding a certain direction. All of this adds up to make the game 10x easier to pick up and understand on a basic level than traditional fighters.
I know several people who play smash on a competent, if not quite tournament-quality, level. Yet none of these guys will play Mahvel with me. When they try to, they immediately get frustrated because they cannot do DP motions consistently, they get hit because they forgot to block low, etc. Another turn-off to these guys are the combos. As easy as Mahvel’s basic combos are, to people who have never played a proper FG before they still look quite intimidating, and even ABCS -> BBCS -> super does take some small amount of play/lab time to get down if you have never played a FG and are still having trouble just doing a qcf consistently, as opposed to smash where combo’ing is much less important below tournament level (or simply non-existent in the case of Brawl). I really think how comfortable you can get with a game the first 2 or 3 times you play it makes a huge difference in whether or not you stick with it, and that smash excels in this category compared to traditional fighters.
Last but not least, even though Melee is extremely technical at high levels, just like in other FGs there are certain characters who can get the same results as others with much less, if any, need for high execution and tech skill. Sheik and Jiggles being the two biggest offenders IMO, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one of my friends who can’t short hop or wave dash plays those exact two chars. And then of course you have brawl where it’s like “lol execution? what is that?”
Easy to learn, hard to master.
it seems like something Sirlin would talk about. that FGs that strip down the execution barrier allow you to immediately get to the part of FGs that’s actually fun, interacting with your opponent in interesting ways. SSB as a series seems to follow that philosophy.
This is more or less what I was trying to say. I love smash and marvel and dp motions are weird, but once you practice them they aren’t that bad. :0
Hm another reason why people may like smash more, is well think of it like this.
How many reads do you need to beat someone in marvel? 3 or 4 at least, one hit should kill at least (I play zero so yeaaa). So if I only get 4 or 5 reads of my opponent, I win the match. Unless they drop a combo ect. But in smash since there’s DI, how many reads do I need tO take a stock? Well I need a few reads for damage, lets say 4 reads, and then I need a read for the kill, now you’ve taken a stock (at 5 reads), but there are 4 stocks so now I have to do this 4 more times putting it at a total of 20 reads. That’s 20 times I have to read my opponent, just to win a match. Jesus Christ. That’s annoying as hell. Haha I miss melee xD
Brawl is bad because it takes too fuckig long. There’s always tournaments going until literally 1 or 2 am because they have too many stocks or a high time limit or whatever but it’s bad. Lmao
This is just a guess. Hahah
Thanks thread now i wanna play melee. That ancient ass dinosaur game. <3 I fucking love it.
I guess that games like Melee became really popular in terms of a large tourney scene because, mostly, it’s really fun to play on a casual level. I mean, look at all of the cool fluff that the game had that wasn’t exactly made for tourney play, but it taught you how to control your character and use all of their tools in a non-threatening setting. It also didn’t hurt that it had the 1-2 punch of recognizable characters and four player capabilities.
Fuck, I really loved Melee back in the day.
yeah but that is just one perspective. that’s how he thinks of things, and what he likes.
tons of players, myself included like technical stuff and going through that process of learning and expanding with the limitation of execution.
i think ssb is a bad example anyway. imho the main contributor to its success was using a variety of nintendo characters. of course everyone who grew up during that time was going to want it. you get to beat on mario as link. it sells itself.
from that point its just a numbers game. if you sell several million copies of the game, you’re going to get some people who REALLY like it and want to seriously dig into it and push the game as far as possible. so it becomes competitive because of that.
lol, yeah, this.
Melee is an excellent example. To those that have set their minds to the discussion - the paragon. Its character roster is a great contributor to its general popularity, sure. Your “numbers game” theory is also sensible. But the design philosophy of the game’s gameplay mechanics, without a doubt, is a great contributor to the game’s competitive popularity as well.
I was going to FG tournaments a good year before I started playing Smash. Without a doubt, the scrub/competitive player ratio was, consistently, the highest for any fighting game I’d ever seen at the height of that game’s popularity. At almost every tournament, it felt like % 25- 30 were people that had never been to a Smash tournament. EVERYONE thought they were good at Melee, due to they type of game it was and people’s perception of the game.
The game bred a very unique subculture. I don’t think people outside the community realize how much of a phenom this game truly was. Melee was life. EVERYONE I knew in 04’-07’ played Melee in some capacity. My mother played Melee. A girl I dated in my freshman year of college played Melee - so did her friends. My friends and their girlfriends (and their friends). If you were part of the FGC at the time, It was only a matter of a few degrees of separation until you came across someone that played the game in tournaments, or at all. Because of how fun the game was to play outside a competitive setting you could have fun playing the game with anyone. No matter how good you were at it. That’s something special, and its in large part due to the gameplay design.
It’s a damn shame that more FG developers aren’t looking at this game’s mechanics and design philosophies more closely because they’re so afraid of the traditional community’s negative perception of it. The game has some excellent mechanics that could easily expand the genre.
melee is a great game.
not sure how that changes anything that i said. the series is successful because of the characters.
the gameplay comes after that. brand awareness is pretty much the most important thing when it comes to selling a product.
you can’t compare that to other stuff that does not have that kind of awareness. the gameplay is sick, I played melee all throughout college and still love the game. it is an awesome game all around. but smash became big because it let kids play as their favorite character and beat up their friends. not because the gameplay was super slick and refined (although it pretty much is especially in melee).
To suggest that the Nintendo branding is the only reason the game was popular is simple-minded and plain wrong.
I may just interrupting but the general gist I got form this thread is that everyone loves Smash because you **don’t **have to QCF motions to execute a move. I had been playing Smash (although not recently) for a little while and I’ll find it to be a lot easier to play than SF. Even though SF has much more simple controls than most fighters I know of, I don’t have to worry as much about inputs since they are almost universal. You know I am not sure if the time had something to do with to do people flocking to smash but from what I researched on the internet and from Shoryuken, some of the main reasons why SFIII series failed on the market is because most of the causals couldn’t recognize anyone from the games save for Ryu and Ken.
I have an easier time understanding the movesets with the help from this site but Smash is one of those games where you can pick up and play the game without having to worry about what moves do for each character.
You can pick up and play pretty well against someone else who is doing the same thing, or maybe someone who’s played before but doesn’t play often. Put them up against someone who has put time and research into the game and the person picking up and playing will want to quit cause they don’t know what the fuck is going on. I feel this holds true to most games in general.
I wonder how much of an effect nostalgia has. We know that SF4 was pretty big (in contrast to SF3) because of its SF2 characters evoking nostalgia from a generation of arcade players. Smash obviously runs the entire gamut of Nintendo’s history so it probably has a pretty strong effect here too.
To be fair, characters such as Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Bison, Dhalsim, Zangief and the SF2 cast are pretty well known by most of the world even those who don’t normally play fighting games. I look in ads of SFII and I mostly see Ryu or Chun Li fighting Sagat or E. Honda. Alpha barely breached new players and SFIII series was too different for the mainstreams liking. Ryu himself is basically Capcom’s Mario for fighters, everyone knows who he is and how his fireball sounds, “Hadouken!!!” Nintendo pretty much has the advantage of brand recognirion as almost everyone know who Pikachu, Link or Mario is.
Nostalgia can only take anything so far. Especially among a competitive crowd.
A perfect example is myself. I started playing Melee with Mario and I loved the character so much, I was determined to make him work at a competitive level when I was introduced to the scene. I was easily one of the best, if not, THE best, Mario at the time - but I couldn’t win with him. I grinded with him for a good six months at least. I could do a lot of innovative and cool things with the him and made people drop their jaws with my tech skill and understanding of the character - but I couldn’t win with him.
I made an ironic, Ken inspired decision (TG6 vids vs. Chillen) to start messing around with Marth. This was ironic because at the time, Marth was easily my most hated character. I thought he was cheap, and looked way too effeminate for my tastes. But I figured if I learned to play him, I’d do better fighting against him.
Marth quickly became one of my favorite FG characters of all time:
Even though I don’t play Melee at all anymore, just the idea of gracefully swinging Marth’s sword around with dedicated spacing brings a certain degree of mirth. There’s nothing like it in any other FG. I fell in love with this character purely due to his gameplay. My ever increasing love for how Marth played increased my passion for the game, which helped me develop the drive to win. I never even heard of Fire Emblem prior to Melee and have had no interest in touching the series till’ this day. 95% of my love for Marth comes from how he plays in the context of SSBM.
So yeah, nostalgia definitely had a hand in recruiting a lot of Melee’s competitive army but the gameplay made us dedicated soldiers.
Smash took off because it took Nintendo’s legendary game icons and put them together in a game that combined the time-tested elements of Nintendo’s great platformers with the style of a beat-em-up fighter, and Melee just happened to be an incredibly deep competitive game. It attracts casual and competitive players alike.
I get the distinct impression that people who insult Smash Bros either haven’t seen a competitive match or have seen one and the sight of all the tech at work made their balls shrink and they’re living in denial ever since.
I don’t really insult, Smash Brothers, but after quitting it and switching to proper fighting games I no longer have respect for it. They all have their valuable points in competitive depth, but honestly, the game as a whole just doesn’t do it for me after I learned to play real fighting games.
Maybe if SSB4 is designed from the ground up with competitive play in mind – so that the tier lists and the stages get better designs, but if it continues in the vein of Brawl then the series is never going to be any more respected.
And frankly, after having watched TONS of competitive matches back when I wanted to try and break into playing hte game competitive – there’s nothing about them that I actually like. Especially when Brawl’s MLG scene basically turned into a joke of being able to predict who’d win based on the characters and the stage.
*Like it or not, MLG was where the money was for the game – and as a result, that’s what people will reference for competitive play for the game. *