Super Smash Bros. 3DS / Wii U

[Glen-i]

Hmm. In case anyone is interested, a technique virtually identical to wave dashing (but easier to perform) has been confirmed in some new hands on footage of the game. It looks as though it will certainly help out the slower/heavier characters.

 

I wonder how it's done? After all, this has the Brawl air dodge.

 

I'm all for easier wave dashing, but not at the expense of infinite air dodge.

[Goron_3]

I wonder how it's done? After all, this has the Brawl air dodge.

 

I'm all for easier wave dashing, but not at the expense of infinite air dodge.

 

It's being called Pivot-dashing, where you can basically run in any direction but can cancel the run animation and activate any move (whereas when you dash, you are normally limited to just a dash attack or a run grab). It could be pretty interesting.

 

To be honest, I actually prefer the Melee air dodge and it introduced a risk-reward element. That said, I get that the Brawl air dodge is a much simpler mechanic and given the nature of the Wii's audience, it made sense.

 

Edited July 24, 2014 by Goron_3

[f00had]

Has anyone else noticed that Green Hill Zone is back as a 3DS stage?

 

 

It would be quite interesting if you can cancel the turning animation into a forward smash... that would mean dash up forward smash it'd be really good for characters with low range.

[Goron_3]

Has anyone else noticed that Green Hill Zone is back as a 3DS stage?

 

 

It would be quite interesting if you can cancel the turning animation into a forward smash... that would mean dash up forward smash it'd be really good for characters with low range.

 

Yes you can cancel it into anything, just as you can for a wavedash

[Glen-i]

Has anyone else noticed that Green Hill Zone is back as a 3DS stage?

 

 

Huh... Now that's strange...

I could have sworn that Sakurai said that the 3DS version would have Melee stages while Brawl's would be on WiiU.

 

What warranted this change of mind, I wonder?

 

That said, Green Hill Zone is an awesome stage, glad it made the cut.

(Still hoping for Spear Pillar)

[-Dem0-]

Favourite screenshot so far.

 

[Jonnas]

Awwww...

 

I liked super high Rayman!

 

He must've filed a complaint.

 

[Serebii]

 

Pic of the day. For the first time ever, I present to you…the main menu for the 3DS version!! The icons are even animated. The design concept may look similar if you've played other games I've worked on. But we had a hard time making this one because…

 

 

The bottom screen displays pictures matching each mode! This was quite a task for the UI (User Interface) designers, but they made it happen. Kudos to them! You can tap the screen to look up additional info like how to play--complete with diagrams.

[Retro_Link]

Blurgh... I hated how the menu's got all boring/generic/casual with big simple buttons in Brawl.

[Glen-i]

Blurgh... I hated how the menu's got all boring/generic/casual with big simple buttons in Brawl.

 

It's one thing to not like them. But don't go blaming Brawl for it.

 

 

Kirby Air Ride was doing that long before Brawl.

 

It's not just that, Meteos was rocking that look 3 years before Brawl.

 

 

I love the Sakurai's Wife Menu! (They're designed by his wife) It's a nice, simple UI. And I'm totally OK with it.

[Retro_Link]

At least put it on a colourful moving background that it looks like Meteos has.

 

Melee's menu's got me in the mood once the game booted up.

 

Brawls made me less enthused about playing.

[Jonnas]

I don't mind the menu, I just wish it wasn't identical to another game. But if the icons are animated, and each comes with an awesome picture, that's something different already.

[Mr-Paul]

At least put it on a colourful moving background that it looks like Meteos has.

 

Melee's menu's got me in the mood once the game booted up.

 

Brawls made me less enthused about playing.

 

How does this get you into the mood? It's so plain!

 

 

Really don't get how a menu looks can effect how you feel about a game, but fair enough, different things annoy different people!

[Goron_3]

How does this get you into the mood? It's so plain!

 

 

Really don't get how a menu looks can effect how you feel about a game, but fair enough, different things annoy different people!

 

It was ridiculously slick and the music was unbelievably awesome

[S.C.G]

Plus... that menu was clearly made for 3D! : peace:

[Retro_Link]

How does this get you into the mood? It's so plain!

 

 

Really don't get how a menu looks can effect how you feel about a game, but fair enough, different things annoy different people!

 

Looks more like a menu you might get in the cockpit of an X-Wing or something to me :p

 

Brawls (that menu style) just looked dumbed down, in-keeping with other casual Wii games.

[Mr-Paul]

 

But it has exactly the same functionality, so what's the real difference? You can prefer how the Melee one looks, that's absolutely fine, but the menu effecting your mood towards the actual game is baffling to me! Surely there would have been criticism if they kept the menu exactly the same from Melee? I just don't see what is wrong with it!

[Glen-i]

I happen to think Melee's menu is boring.

 

I like having all the options thrown around the screen! I like the colours. I like the little picture icons.

 

Dumbed down seems a bit harsh. Not everything has to be epic and hardcore, you know?

 

(And while Melee's menu music was awesome, I prefer Brawl's one. That tune is fantastic. Anyway, you could set it to play Melee's menu theme on Brawl anyway, so that's a moot point)

[Fierce_LiNk]

Hmm, a menu is a menu to me. Can't really say that one is better than the other. As long as it's simple to use, gives you the ability to customise your options and the load times are quick, it's all good.

 

Nevertheless, if we're going to criticise Nintendo for anything, Smash Bros. should be at the very bottom of that list. It's how Nintendo should be doing things, e.g. ramming the game full of content, incorporating all that made the previous games successful and building on that, whilst also including new and interesting features. It should be the WiiU's high point. Even if Brawl had some criticism with the way it played in comparison to Melee, it was still a very, very high quality game. It's the difference between arguing whether a game is a 9/9.5 or 10/10 for me. That sort of difference.

[Retro_Link]

 

But it has exactly the same functionality, so what's the real difference? You can prefer how the Melee one looks, that's absolutely fine, but the menu effecting your mood towards the actual game is baffling to me! Surely there would have been criticism if they kept the menu exactly the same from Melee? I just don't see what is wrong with it!

One is exciting and makes me think yay video games!!... and one reminds me of some sort of powerpoint/spreadsheet and tbh is a bit of a turn off.

 

It's not exactly a big point. I'm just saying, I didn't like the menu change.

[Goron_3]

The Melee theme fits in perfectly to the style of game and so does the soundtrack. The entire game has a cohesive theme and it works very well. Brawl doesn't have that, particularly with the menu and the music. Melee's theme is making everything look digitised and the theme and menu fit into that. Here's a post from a guy on GAF that sums up why it's so awesome:

 

So you start up Melee, what's the first thing you see? It's a statue of Mario, and then you see some weird technical magic sort of shit crawl up it bring it to life

 

That sparkly ring of light doesn't look very "techy" to me

 

Then you got the cool intro movie, and you never hear the song again until next time you play the game. The title fades in, then followed by the technical magic circles that presumably is what crawled up Mario and everyone else and turned them from figures into fighters.

 

What brought Mario etc to life was a white ring of light, these are fine color-changing lines.

 

And this is how the whole menu is themed, with that sort of technical stuff. Everything looks very digital, you got circles that look like the circles crawling up the trophies in the background.

 

Which imo doesn't fit the vibe the opening gives. After seeing the opening "techno" certainly was close to the least I expected to follow

 

It's cool. You don't really notice it, because it's not like distracting and it's kinda subtle, but at the same time your brain kind of does. So whenever you're navigating the menus and stuff, it feels like you're just setting shit up to bring the characters to life. It's really fucking cool to me, and it's something I feel the whole game was really well themed around. When you start a match or die, the fighters arrive on platforms that look like that technical magic shit. When you play on Battlefield or Final Destination, they look like stages made out of that technical magic shit. And when you play the multiman melees, the enemies look like that technical magic shit. It's really well themed around it in my opinions.

 

I'll give you that. After the opening the game stays pretty consistant with the techno style. Which is the whole reason I called the Menu design of Melee boring in the first place :P

 

Sure, there's no symbols or fun shapes in the menu, but it's still really clear where to go, because the text is really clear on where to go.

Also, and this is more of a sidething-I like the way the character select screen isn't perfectly even rows. It's cluttered and busy, and suggests a game with more going on in it by being busy. And that's good for a fighting game, to feel busy like that, because it's pretty fuckin' action packed.

 

Now, the other thing about Melee, is that I feel it's more cohesive, and this is because it's the first time seeing almost every character in this game is being seen in good 3D for their first time. So, instead of having to build the game around artstyles used in other games, or even being able to reference artstyles in games that lookes as good as gamecube games, they have to build a lot more shit from scratch. And because of that, they were able to build it around a more cohesive, semi-realistic (but not overly realistic) artstyle. And this shines through the whole game. The artstyle feels a lot more like 20 characters being imagined in the same universe for their first time, and it really blends well together.

 

Can't say I agree with this point. Your implication here is that the cast of SSBB doesn't follow a cohesive artyle, which I don't think is true when SSBB (especially during the time before PSASBR released, but also already before) was praised for managing to include even characters like Solid Snake in the game without them looking completely out of place and fitting into the artstyle nicely. I also think that Melee was targeting about the same amount of (let's call it like that, although I hate that word) "grittyness" as Brawl and was just limited by being a launch game on weaker hardware, it just couldn't display finer details and as a result the characters look more like plastic toys. But when you look at the actual colors also, they (take Samus for example, dark orange and bulky suit) are much closer to Brawl than to SSB4 (most colorful SSB game by far) and (also see points below) the stages reflect it as well. The perfect example is the Adventure Mode Legend of Zelda stage, which is more serius in design than anything SSBB has to offer

 

Now, let's compare this to Brawl-not really 64, because I'll be completely honest, I don't really play 64 often. Brawl feels like it has two different artstyles heavily conflicting with eachother-a really cartoony one, and a really realistic one. The menus, a lot of the music, some stages (the Animal Crossing, Electroplankton, and Pictochat ones, for example), and many of the characters look like they were going in a more cartoony and relaxed direction. Yet, at the same time, the main theme, the SSE, some stages, and some of the characters look like they're going in a much, much more serious, realistic direction. And it just sort of conflicts for me. Some of Brawl feels like a serious, action-packed game, and others feel like a more relaxed, more fun game. And while I like both, and both are absolutely fine things to have, I don't feel they work very well together.

 

That exact same criticism could be made of Melee as well. You have the very serious menu design, serious stage design (Battlefield, Temple, Venom, Brinstar (Depths)...) with appropiatly serious OST...and then you have stages like Pokefloats. This clash is just grounded in the original series of these contents. The only real big clash is indeed SSE, which is arguably the biggest flaw of Brawl, although even for SSE you could argue that accompanying the introduction of alien invaders which want to make the Smash Bros. world their own with a more serious artstyle in those parts is fitting.

 

Also, another side point, fuck the Brawl theme. It mismatches the menus horribly. It worked as the game's opening (except it didn't feel right to match it along a montage of clips from the game instead of its own CGI video), as a theme remixed into other parts of the game, and as the ending theme to the SSE. It does not work as a theme you hear repeatedly and constantly. It's meant to be epic, a celebration, like "holy shit, look at all these characters coming together."

 

That's entirely subjective. To me the menu remix of the SSBB main theme doesn't feel like it's trying to replicate the epicness of the opening version, with the different instruments and missing vocals it feels far more upbeat, which I think fits the overall menu design.

 

And, I mean, Melee's main theme is too. But it's actually effective in doing that because Melee's you only hear once every time you play the game. Brawl's you hear 1/3rd of the time you go to the menu, and every time you go to the character select screen, so it loses that effect of being epic, and turns into you wanting the people singing to stop fucking singing.

 

Pretty sure the Menu remix of the opening doesn't have any vocals.

 

NOW, in comparison to PSAllStars Battle Royale...there's just no theming in the entire game. It's never explained if it takes place in the same universe, or if the character's are all in a non-canon entry, or fucking anything, and the menus, while also being a list like Melee, do not feel busy at all, do not match the theme of the game at all, and do not in any way get you pumped to start playing a game. Going through them looks like selecting tasks from your computer with a static image of a game character you might like in the background.

 

Anyways, I've rambled on for a bit, and I'm sure you'll have counterpoints. But this is really why I feel Melee is a more cohesive game, art and music wise, than Brawl (and especially PSASBR).

 

EDIT:

Thought of a pre-emptive counter point.

So Brawl's menu is more interesting than Melee's, in terms of spacing and icons, but I don't think it works well with the half of the game that's really realistic and serious looking. Melee's really technical looking, and so the list looks more computerized, which, while maybe more boring looking in terms of icons and shapes and spacing, ends up fitting the theme of the game better. Plus, the really busy backgrounds to the menus help the computerized theme to feel exciting and get you pumped up for a match.

[Glen-i]

 

Couldn't resist.

 

I'll give it a read later, though. Maybe...

 

...Probably not...

[Goron_3]

I love that gif.

 

I've been thinking recently about how funny the whole concept of Smash is. The entire Wii Fit Trainer and Villager reveals were absolutely hilarious; you wouldn't get that with another game company. I mean for the star of Animal Crossing to come across as some kind of creepy stalker with those terrifying eyes...brilliant.

 

That's one of the reasons why I just didn't like Playstation All Stars..it just didn't look fun compared to Smash.

[Fierce_LiNk]

I love that gif.

 

I've been thinking recently about how funny the whole concept of Smash is. The entire Wii Fit Trainer and Villager reveals were absolutely hilarious; you wouldn't get that with another game company. I mean for the star of Animal Crossing to come across as some kind of creepy stalker with those terrifying eyes...brilliant.

 

That's one of the reasons why I just didn't like Playstation All Stars..it just didn't look fun compared to Smash.

 

You need the characters to make a fighting game work. What they probably should have done is rather than going down the smash route is to just make an entirely new fighting game and create new characters there with their own legacy/start their own legacy. Trying to imitate smash is folly as the characters have been around for decades, so gamers can already relate to them. (plus the game looked a bit shite, too)

 

The Villager memes were great. Although, Animal Crossing has already had tons of funny stuff like that. I seem to remember some hilarious diary entries about Tom Nook. May need to track that down.

[Wii]

 

 

I'm not dissing the menu, I like it but it does remind me a bit of.......