@stan_boyd @DinoFarmBlake Not hating. I'm speculating based on the evidence which is this footage and 99% of modern video games. I'll be happy to retract my statement in the face of new evidence.
I never understood asymmetrical forces in "empty the sacks of HP" games. If it's about emptying the HP sacks, there is inevitably 1 character who does the highest damage/fastest rate/lowest cost. Since I assume the game is balls-easy, and there's no actual consequence for dying, the mini-maxed character is raph, since his slowness won't matter in a system with no consequences.
So, unless you come from a position of "flavors of winning," Raph is the dominant strategy, presuming he does the most damage.
He's a pathological narcissist. The only reliable means of dealing with a tantrum-throwing worm like him is to ignore him. He'll come crawling back after he is forgotten and ignored. The faster you ignore him, the faster you'll get your next gimmick-based puzzle platformer,
It just FEELS like garbage to play these. It's in the physics. He just stops on a dime and sort of LURCHES around. Mario 64 has a more fluid feel. The body has inertia, even though it's not about "speed."
If you build that kind of speed you have to take a little to slow down, or if you hit the "breaks," there should be a lot of physics and natural feedback for that. Moving sonic in these games feels like moving a cursor with an "accelerator" in those SNES games where you enter your name on a keypad with the Dpad.
The moment at 3:53 is a perfect example. You're going SO fast only to stop on a dime like that and LURCH your way into another direction. It just "feels" so, so bad to play these. Does anyone agree? Know where I'm coming from?
To me, it's common sense. But they need everything to look cool and cinematic and canned, so everyone gets the same experience. Leave more to physics, natural movements, and have complexity emerge from a solid fundamental system rather than canned, scripted events.
"varied content" is not a SOLUTION TO A HOLISTIC PROBLEM. Does tetris need "more content?" Howbout chess? Go? Tennis?
Design an interesting, original, emergently deep system, and you won't need to resort to the game industry's standard tactic, "distract the player from how boring your system is with a mountain of assets."
@Link2666 @DinoFarmBlake The system itself was designed with these new loosening, softening agents in mind. Tweaking the damage threshold does not solve a holistic problem.
Obviously, items should be very low or off entirely, and the only items active should be items which support positioning and tactics like green shells and mines(provided they were more visible).
So, your argument is, "I like x?" I mean, what if someone else "likes" tossing the game disk around like a frisbee? Does that mean that it should be explicitly delineated in the game ruleset that you "should" do this? Does that statement benefit a discussion on design?
Well, mystery solved. And here I thought that what made smash 64 magical was just lightning in a bottle, and the decisive steps away from what made the game special in the first place was a haphazard series of blind attempts to increase usability. Now I know it was on purpose.
Smash 64 is full of flaws, but it was the only truly great stab at a brilliant new system. Every iteration has become looser and more of a slap fight in molasses. Every step towards "mass appeal" has been a step away from the tense, magical moments of 64.
The system was flexible, emergent and deep. You could get spiked at 40% damage if you weren't careful. Edge grabbing and recovery was tense and tight, rather than every character having electromagnets on their hands. Attacks were LETHAL, they packed a "crack" to them. It was scary and brutal.
I watch pro matches of brawl now(or as I like to call the game, MetaKnight vs. Diddy Kong:The game) They take these top tier characters and GRIND and GRIND and GRIND the damage down until they squeeze a kill out the the opponent like blood from a stone. I can just see the competitor sweating and laboring AGAINST this system designed to pad the walls for babies, to extract some lethal, tense action from it. But it's boats against the current.
It would be music to my ears to see the new Smash have fewer characters than even 64, but they were tightly balanced. To see the game that is mostly like 64, but taken into the OTHER direction of refinement. Eliminating the infinite juggle problems, but keeping the tense, tight, lethal force that actually makes positioning, timing and creative play matter.
The mention of a relay race is not a justification for making your system's decisions meaningless with a bunch of randomness and floaty slap fighting. Make your decisions matter, and reward creative, emergent decision making. Eliminate as much dexterity-based exploits as possible and make it MORE about positioning as a resource than memorizing high DPS combos.
To summarize, here is a good abstraction of what it "feels" to play these games, despite their respective flaws.
Smash 64-A baseball bat cracking into a baseball Melee-a wiffle bat hitting a beach ball Brawl-A shoestring whacking a bowling ball slowly across the floor Smash Bros U-probably a Piece of yarn thwacking a boulder.
Graphics are 60% of the game...if the game is an unoriginal reskin or variant of the same 5 game designs we've been playing for 20 years. If all you have to bring to the table in terms of design is a new gimmicky input mechanism or "new guns," slapped onto the same core design we've played 500 times, then you're pretty much FORCED to dazzle the audience with technological spectacle.
A good idea, an original game design, something that is...not unbelievably derivative or boring, and is interesting in and of itself? You don't need a 10 million dollar art budget. Spelunky, Minecraft, Outwitters, etc. They are infinitely replayable and engaging and have primitave or otherwise simple graphics.
We are so unbelievably indoctrinated at this point to marvel at the continual effort towards fantasy simulation. Fantasy simulation is not game design. There are still 1000000 original, lasting, amazing game design ideas just waiting to be discovered that could still be accomplished on NES technology.
The write of this article is so short-sighted, and so misguided as to what game design actually is that he himself has, without knowing it, admitted "video games are so boring that we have to distract players from how boring they are with spectacular graphics." I'd say, in his purview, "60%" is actually conservative.
Picture Crysis 3 with graphics technology from 2001. It can totally be done. Would anyone play it? No. It's because it's a generic, balls-numbingly easy, paint-by-numbers, art-by-committee, cynical waste of time(the single player, anyway).
Hopefully in our lifetime, we'll be reminded of what it's like not to be bored into mania by generic, "square peg-in-square hole" patronizing mass market shlock, and realize that good ideas are free, and go a long, long way.
Yes I have, but the discussion should have nothing to do with whether I have or have not, or how much I have played the game. Arguments stand or fall on their own two feet, regardless of their source.
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