Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
Posts: 4,123
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Post by Water Dumple on Apr 16, 2008 17:35:08 GMT -5
I disagree with most of it, but the review didn't suck. This. Unfortunately, there were a few parts, like the SSE, that I agreed with.
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Post by layze on Apr 16, 2008 18:26:47 GMT -5
...wow. failure.
I'm just gonna archive this here to forever preserve the phail.
Ever since Electronic Gaming Monthly pulled the greatest April Fool's joke ever in 2002 --- a false code claiming to unlock Sonic and Tails in Super Smash Brothers Melee was printed --- Smash Brothers fans have waited in anticipation of SSBM's sequel. And why not? Melee was one of the best games ever made, and a simple remake into Melee Version 1.1 would be a slam-dunk follow-up. Fans got their wish at E3 2006, and before long anticipation for the game reached record levels. The game's creator, Masahiro Sakurai, even created a web site with daily updates for the upcoming Brawl, which he was able to keep going for almost a year before the game's ultimate release. But after almost six years of waiting, two of which being pure hype fed to Smash fans, and then a two month delay for the American release, Brawl finally hit our stores. Once we were finally able to bring the game home, it was realized even the best makeup cannot cover all sins.
The core ideal of Brawl remains the same as the last two games, insofar as you get a bunch of Nintendo characters kicking the crap out of each other on various Nintendo-themed worlds. A great appeal in any Smash game are the characters and levels, and to this end Brawl doesn't disappoint. There are 35 characters total (39 if you count Sheik, Zero Suit Samus and Pokemon Trainer's three Pokemon) and 41 stages. New characters range from Wario to Lucario to King Dedede, while all of the old staples from Melee return sans useless clones that no one liked anyway.
Fights play out in a part 2D fighter, part platformer style, with the main idea being to knock your opponent off of the stage you're fighting on. Attacks deal numerical damage, and characters are sent flying at an exponential distance proportional to increased damage. The higher the damage, the farther a hit sends someone, and the easier it is to knock someone off of the stage. Brawl also remains true to form in that there is a ton of unlockable content, be it characters, stages or trophies, or new unlockable content like the stickers or music. Unfortunately, this is about where the good aspects of Brawl stop.
Virtually all of Brawl's single-player modes range from barely average to completely and utterly god-awful. Classic mode, in which you fight through a series of enemies en route to the final boss, takes a giant step backward. In Melee, Classic was almost always random with enemy choice. Brawl, despite ten more characters, has a surprising amount of predictability. You'll always fight Zelda characters first. You'll usually fight a giant Yoshi second. And so on and so forth. This, paired with both bonus settings being target tests turns Classic mode into a chore very quickly. In Smash 64 and Melee, it was fun beating Classic with all the characters. In Brawl, it's tedious and boring, and just seems to drag. On top of Classic's step backwards, Brawl's version of All-Star mode is equally disappointing for similar reasons.
In All-Star mode, you pick a character and fight every other character in the cast in a series of 1v1, 1v2 or 1v3 battles, with limited healing items in between fights. Melee's order of characters fought was always random, began with 1v1 and progressed to 1v3 matches, and ended with a really fun battle against 25 Game and Watches. All-Star in Brawl is now set in order chronologically per the Nintendo franchise --- decent novelty act, but ends up making Brawl's version of All-Star inferior and repetitive. You'll always fight the other characters in the same order, and never will more than two enemies be on the screen at once. For the few battles against more than two enemies, such as in the fight against the four Zelda characters, you fight two characters at a time. When one dies, another switches in. Worst of all, All-Star concludes with a lone 1v1 fight rather than a massive multi-man battle, which makes All-Star's end very abrupt. All-Star was unbelievably fun in Melee, but is another game mode that somehow made a terrible transition between Melee and Brawl. Once you beat All-Star with a couple of characters, it becomes boring and pointless to keep going. In Melee, it never stopped being fun.
Ditto for Event Mode in Brawl. Melee's event modes were unbelievably creative, whereas Brawl's events come off as very uninspired. On top of the number of events reduced from 51 to 41, most are either bad upgrades from their Melee counterparts, or just bad outright. In Melee, the final event was an always-fun fight against Giga Bowser, Mewtwo and Ganondorf. In Brawl, it's a fight against Giant Mario, and regular-sized Solid Snake and Sonic. It's Nintendo's "we think we're twice as big as everyone else" message more than a final fight, and the rest of the events aren't much better. Furthermore, the addition of 21 co-op events seemed like a good idea leading into the game, but was also an uninspired effort through and through. The only co-op event that's any good is the final one, but even that is just a glorified multi-man Brawl.
Despite the flaws with the aforementioned single player modes, however, nothing --- NOTHING! --- comes close to how freaking terrible the Subspace Emissary (SSE) is. SSE, the supposed upgrade from Melee's supposedly bad Adventure mode, is by far the worst part of Brawl. SSE is a story mode in which the characters of the Smash universe set out to save the world from the invading Subspace army, which mysteriously seeks to suck all of the Smash character's worlds into a black hole known as Subspace.
It starts out as a typical save-the-world sequence, but soon turns into eight hours of completely horrendous fanservice for all the game's characters at seemingly the same time. The story (more appropriately, the lack thereof) tries to do too many things at once with too many characters at once from too many angles at once. There is no branching, no dialogue, and most of it makes absolutely no sense by the end. Sakurai ended up posting an explanation of the SSE's story on his Smash Dojo site, and admitted that the SSE's story was incomplete drivel. An exact quote from Sakurai: "...there may have been some story-related items that didn't fully make sense. So let me tell you some of the story background you couldn't have gleaned from the movies". On top of this, scenes were cut that could have shed serious light on the background of SSE and certain character motivations. In SSE, gamers are fed an unfinished product and the parent company offers a follow-up explanation a month after the game's stateside release. Gamers don't mind delays in release dates if the end result is a better game --- Zelda: Ocarina of Time being the single best example of this --- but a delay yielding such glaring oversights is unacceptable. The one bright side to the SSE story is that the cutscenes portray the Smash characters in an incredibly funny and/or badass light, but this only serves to blind the viewer from an overall very lacking storyline that requires outside information to fully understand. The PC industry was crippled by the mentality of releasing fixes and patches after the fact, and console gaming could be wise not to follow the same path.
The SSE story might be bad, but actually playing through the SSE manages to be worse. SSE is essentially a bad beat 'em up sidescroller, made worse by characters whose fighting style doesn't fit in well with said genre. Most characters play very awkwardly during the platforming aspects of the SSE, and fighting enemies can feel even weirder. The platforming in general is some of the worst in gaming; it's a bunch of pointless, repetitive, tedious and linear door-hunting. All "puzzles" consist of carrying a door key a few inches, hitting a very obvious switch, or opening a door by hitting three nearby switches. That's it. There's little to no variety, repeated ad nauseum for about eight hours. The whole while, you'll have far too many enemies unique to the SSE thrown at you, including very annoying sections where you have to stop and kill a set number of enemies on a screen before advancing. The SSE enemies are eerily similar to the Heartless in Kingdom Hearts, only they aren't the least bit fun to fight against and there are a lot of sections in the SSE where entirely too many enemies pop up on-screen at once. There are occasional breaks in the monotony for actual Smash-style fights or for boss fights, but for the most part the SSE is repetitive, pointless nonsense. There are too many enemies, it's too big, it takes too long to finish and there are too many gimped platforms throughout for the gameplay to be at all fun. Worse yet, a good deal of the unlockable characters are unlocked via having them join your team in the SSE, which completely ruins the stigma of the old "New Challenger Approaching" screens of the older Smash titles. Even if you grind through VS matches to bypass SSE unlocking, three of the characters are only unlockable upon clearing the SSE, then reentering, finding their hidden doors and defeating them in fights. It's not too big a deal unless you're very nostalgic about unlocking characters, but independent of this the SSE and its gameplay are the worst thing in Brawl by quite a lot.
Multiplayer could have saved the game, but it too is a total failure. In Brawl, Nintendo makes a giant effort to perfectly balance the game, yet managed to ruin the gameplay beyond repair. The game plays slower than even the original Smash, and there is now a ridiculous overemphasis on defense. To remove the wavedashing glitch, air dodging is now predicated on aerial character momentum. This would have been fine, only your character isn't disabled after an air dodge anymore, granting what is essentially perfect aerial defense. On top of this, edge-guarding was made far too difficult. Most of the stages in Brawl have little air space on either side of the stage, most characters can recover with one basic jump, and the new air dodging makes it too easy to avoid being edge-guarded to death. Edge games are now virtually irrelevant save on a few select characters.
Furthermore, the lack of hitstun is the big offender for why Brawl's multiplayer is bad. Combos are next to impossible against someone that can DI properly, and there are very few guaranteed combos in the game that are worth their effort in damage. The lack of hitstun also creates limitless defensive potential, including the ability to throw a shield up in the middle of some characters' basic A combos, and shielding or air dodging directly after almost all attacks. It adds too much defense to an already too-defensive game, and when factored in with how slow the game plays it ends up dragging out most matches. The lack of hitstun alone turns Brawl into Campfest 2008, but it gets worse.
The balancing of the game ends up removing all of the old advanced tactics from Melee, which is good in that matches don't all come down to who can pull off Infinite Drillshine first with Fox on Final Destination. Unfortunately, the balancing effort takes out too many useful techs from Melee. There's no more crouch canceling, no more L-canceling, and throws now have too much knockback to prevent chain-grabbing and easy combos. And even that wasn't done right, because King Dedede and Falco can both chain-grab heavy characters. With Dedede in particular, 0 to death chain-grabs are impossible to DI out of on stages with no pitfalls, or any stage with a wall in it. There's also a very useless tripping feature in the game, in which your character has a 1% chance to trip and fall upon dashing. It usually doesn't make a big difference, but a forced random element is pretty ridiculous.
The removal of L-canceling is equally annoying, mostly because it was removed in favor of lazy auto-canceling aerials. Not all aerials auto-cancel, of course, so if you use the wrong aerial you'll be defenseless for quite a long time upon hitting the ground. At least in Melee, canceling required skill. Now, aerials are all about finding the ones that auto-cancel and almost never using the other ones. In turn, fighting in general comes down to auto-canceling aerials and grab attacks, with a ground attack mixed in whenever possible.
The items and random whacky stuff on the battle stages, aspects of Smash that always existed to make things chaotic and fun, are at their absolute worst in Brawl. Items are insidiously broken this time around, and a good deal of them will kill people from 0% if used correctly (or if the game pulls the old bomb-in-the-middle-of-an-attack trick on you, which you can expect to see a ton of in single player modes). Worse yet, there's a group of items --- Deku Nut, Franklin Badge, Screw Attack and Motion Sensor Bomb --- that look almost exactly alike. And the highly touted final smashes, hyped for months prior to the game's release, are totally out of balance. Some, like the Landmaster, are amazing and can score two kills on one character before the duration ends, while others, like Zero Suit Samus and Jigglypuff, are lazy novelty acts that barely do anything. The new Pokeballs are the worst of the entire series, rendering the once-fun Pokeball-only match fairly pointless. The new Assist Trophy item, which is basically a glorified Pokeball that has non-Smash characters pop out and attack, was a good idea on paper. But similar to Pokeballs, most of the Assist Trophies are either weak, easily avoidable or completely pointless.
There have always been a lot of bad stages to fight on in Smash titles, but Brawl crosses the line from bad to broken beyond repair. A lot of the levels, like Spear Pillar, Rumble Falls and New Pork City, make no sense being in existence at all. Others, like Castle Siege and WarioWare, are glitched to hell and back and can kill you for no reason. And the worst are levels with lips for edges, like both Pokemon Stadiums and the new Final Destination. It all adds up to the worst collection of levels in the entire Smash series, which one would assume isn't possible given that the game has 41 levels to choose from.
The last aspect of multiplayer, the much-anticipated online play, is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of them all. Even though companies have been doing online well for years, Nintendo refuses to get with modern times. The friend code system is beyond pointless, as is using WiFi as a matchmaking online service. Brawl online is laggy, chaotic nonsense in which the best strategy is to pick a character, spam his or her two most broken moves, and to never play more than one person if you can help it. The lag is bad enough in 1v1 matches, but the game slows to a near stop if three or four people are in a match at once. The slightest bit of lag will cripple any attempt at playing a fighting game, and Brawl is no exception to this. Online play, be it against friends, random people or the sandbag in the online Home Run Contest, is wholly pointless. The only mode that's at all fun online is spectator mode, in which you watch matches from other people, bet coins on who will win and can earn some coins or stickers.
Speaking of stickers, the unlockable content in Brawl goes well past the breaking point into the completely obnoxious. There is entirely too much, and the vast majority of which is tedious and not at all fun. There are 544 trophies to collect, and to get all of them you'll have to go through classic, all-star, boss rush and 100-man brawl with every character on various difficulties, turn every Subspace Emissary enemy (including bosses) into a trophy via the trophy stand item, and do all 175 possible target tests, among a ton of other things. Trophying enemies in the SSE is particularly obnoxious, even if you use Big Boss stickers to increase the drop rate of the trophy stand item. Enemies will only get turned into a trophy if the item causes enough damage to kill them, effectively forcing you to play Pokemon with them. It also forces you to reenter the god-awful SSE in the first place, which is absolutely never a good thing. And if you turn a enemy into a trophy but fail to pick it up, which is to guaranteed to happen if you go after Meta Ridley, it's too bad, so sad, no trophy for you. As for randomly found trophies, the old coin lottery was done away with in favor of a Galaga-wannabe coin launcher. In Melee, you could throw as many coins as possible into a slot machine for a higher chance at getting the rare trophies you're missing. It wasn't the best feature, but the coin launcher makes Melee's coin lottery look brilliant. Coin launcher is fun for a little while, until you realize that there's no way to make the percentage on your rarer trophies increase.
258 total songs are in Brawl, the majority of which are unlocked via picking up CDs during multiplayer matches. This actually isn't so bad a task, because CDs on the battlefield almost always net you a new song. CDs will drop less as you get closer to getting all of them, but it's not so bad a task as it looks, especially if you build yourself a factory in stage builder. The real killer however lies in the 700 stickers that can be picked up. All of them are found randomly during various forms of gameplay, and the grind to get all of them is completely ridiculous due to there being no real way to increase drop rates on the stickers you're missing. Worse yet, the stickers are completely useless outside of the Subspace Emissary. In SSE, you can slap stickers on your chosen character's trophy stand to increase various character effects. The overwhelming majority of stickers are completely useless, and once a sticker is placed, it cannot be removed without disappearing entirely. It's a lame, pointless and forced RPG effect that would have been better not existing at all, and is a big testament to the overkill that Brawl offers with collectables.
Aside from the major issues with Brawl, there are also a lot of little things wrong with the game that add up. Masterpiece mode, which is where you get to play old games that some Smash characters came from, was a decent enough idea gone wrong. The demos are much too short, effectively turning Masterpiece mode into a bad advertisement for the Virtual Console. The trophy case is ordered and presented very badly in this game, and there's no option to view everything alphabetically. Stage Builder mode is a very good idea, but the buffer zones for stage pieces is entirely too large and there's no way to sort your levels if you build a bunch of them. Saving replays is a nice idea as well, but the three minute limit is too small and again, the lack of any sorting options cripples those with large numbers of replays. Co-op play was introduced for most of the game modes, but adding co-op to bad game modes doesn't make them good; you just end up playing something bad, like the Subspace Emissary, with two people instead of one. The 4 ways to play gimmick was introduced for the four possible controllers used for Brawl, but the Gamecube controller is the only one that feels intuitive. Wiimote, Classic and Wiimote on its side are all pointless to try and play with, and the aforementioned points are only a few of the little things wrong with Brawl. Overall, the game simply is not fun to play.
But in fairness, it's not all completely bad. Brawl has a large and beautiful soundtrack, and the My Music section allows you to turn off any songs you don't like. The challenge wall details virtually all of the game's unlockable content and how to get it, and for the truly ridiculous achievements like getting all 700 stickers or beating 100-man brawl with all characters, you're given a total of 5 golden hammers to use on any non-boss-related box on the wall. This allows you to get the 700 sticker trophy, for instance, without really earning it. The graphics are absolutely top-notch, and to date are by far the best seen the Wii. Stadium mode remains fun outside of the target tests, including a more challenging set of enemies in multi-man brawls, the new Boss Battle mode and a blast shield in the Home Run Contest that can prevent the sandbag from being knocked off of the platform on purpose. The game also has complete customization, right down to the long-overdue addition of changing controller layouts.
Unfortunately, it's all not enough to save the game. Brawl ranks with Chrono Cross, Fable and Warcraft 3 among gaming's all-time biggest disappointments, and the best part of the game is when you realize it's bad, stop playing it and go back to vastly superior Super Smash Brothers Melee.
Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 04/14/08, Updated 04/15/08
Game Release: Super Smash Bros. Brawl (US, 03/09/08)
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Water Dumple
SMKW God of the Wars
Expert Debater
Whatever do you mean, Commander Pierce?! Anglo military intelligence is second to none! Fire!
Posts: 4,123
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Post by Water Dumple on Apr 16, 2008 19:28:36 GMT -5
So, just for fun, which one is worse?
A few several weeks ago, I went into a store to by a gun since as an American I can have a gun. Inside I asked for SMG, and I got this game instead. This game is not a gun, in fact it does not even have guns; it has Mario. Mario is an old and often fat plumber man, but this time he's in space. This SMG which is not a gun lets Mario breathe in space and he has to fight Bowser. Oh no! This game is bad.
In this game of games you start by seeing Mario pretend to be a plane, but you don't get a wing cap. Peach is in her 3000th new castle and Bowser has a pirate ship. He takes he to this place where she sends Mario mushrooms and Mario goes to a dark observatory flying in space, where he can breathe.
To rescue yonder princess, Mario who can breathe in space has to get these fun yellow stars, except they aren't fun. Stars are hot and big and not five-pointed; they are balls of hot big gas. Why can Mario find them and pick them up? You get these stars and then can fight Bowser, who jumps around and breaks things on mini suns. Why does this game which isn't a gun not use new ideas, like fighting a person who isn't Bowser in not space? That would have been more fun.
This whole game is really not realistic at all. There are black holes which are kinda red which are everywhere, enemies live on tiny planets where they have no food, there isn't water on most planets except some which are only water, the same people and turtles and things are in the space as well as Earth or wherever these other Mario things are, and you can breathe in space. Mario can somehow jump and fly from the observatories to galaxies, but how? Our galaxy bulges in the middle 16,000 light years thick, you can fly across that? Nintendo didn't bother to make this game actually seem like it could happen, so you just go around space.
Also, what will the sequel be? If you go through many galaxies you must be in the universe, so where next? Will it be Super Mario Other Parts of the Universe or Super Mario Parallel Universe where everything is a shade of purple and Mario is a lemur? That's dumb.
See, in space you can move a lot. Actually you can't, since you can't breathe, and it's cold, and you die, but Mario should be able to move, but he can't. All the planets and things in the space are tiny and small and tiny, so you just jump a lot while finding coins which are in space, wherein Mario can breathe. In fact, space is like Earth in this game, since you have ghosts and penguins and those caterpillar things which get mad if you jump on head flowers. It's just like Earth, and there's no reason to be in space unless this was what happened in Ninty studios:
Shiguru: “I can't make a Mario game.” Iwata: “Make it in space” Shigururu: “I'll make it in space!”
And then he made SMG, which is not a gun, and is lame.
See, all the stars in a galaxy are a lot like the others, only sometimes you have to rescue green Mario. There isn't variety, since all the galaxies are like the other ones and you have to keep doing the same things many times. Stars don't take too long to get but you have to go along the same path many times until you're like “I've gone down the same path many times.” At the point, you go off and play a fun game.
This game is mostly SM64. They didn't want to actually change things, so they keep doing the same things. This time, though, they also stole from SMB3 and 1, since you have to jump over fire sticks, you get to shoot fire and have other lame powerups which you only use a few times, and you might as well have W-blue sky lives since Peach sends you letters with a lot of lives in them. When you fight Bowser it's even mostly SM64, but without keys. You just get bigger stars, which are the same as smaller stars. Why are they bigger then? I don't know.
You get those lives, and so you probably won't ever die, since the game is easy. The only times the game is hard is when you have to hold the remote in some weird way to ride a ball or do something weird, and even that is easy. In most of the levels, you'll just jump a lot and maybe press some switches or fight Bowser while breathing in space, but usually you won't.
Let's talk about multiplayer, except there isn't any. You can't go online because of some reason and if you buy a second controller and friend you can have him shoot star bits or make enemies not move, but he can't shoot them with not star bits. See, this game doesn't have any ways to kill things except two: you can jump or you can shake and dance and spin around and kill them. The first is lame, because how can people jump so high. Mario is fat, and he shouldn't jump, unless he has the super duper boots which let him do so and breathe in space. For the second, not only is it a ripoff of Dead Rising's Double Lariat, but it shouldn't work and makes Mario seem like he's decided to try Ballet. I didn't want to dance, I wanted to play a game, and I didn't want this game, but I have it, and I don't like it, because it's lame.
I don't know what else to say. The graphics are obviously bad, since this is a Nintendo game, and the sound is obviously bad, because people don't talk much and the game I think is MIDI. Maybe I should mention replay value, which this game has enough of not enough of. In other words, none. See, you only have a couple of stars, and you can play as a lamer guy and get the same stars again, but you can't go online and play Capture the Flag or jump on each other's heads many times. There aren't any achievements or unlockables or a level creator. There's no harder difficulty which would make the game actually hard, and nothing in this game was fun enough for me to say “I want to do this several times again” upon seeing.
Mario has been around for too long, and his games just aren't all that fun or new. Why doesn't Nintendo make new things and do fun things with them instead of doing the same things but now in space? The last fun thing Mario did was be in another dimension of three, but since then he's just played sports and carried around a water gun. Maybe he should do things that are fun, like not be in games any more. Ninty should make the next platformer game they make involve other and better things, like guns and online multiplayer.
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Post by tinfoilman on Apr 16, 2008 20:22:07 GMT -5
The second one is funny.
Sadly, I agree with most of the Brawl review. It wasn't outstanding. I guess hype killed it, but... I agree with: --SSE is a stinker --Too much stuff to collect (which you'd think couldn't be true) --Too short masterpieces --Bad stage design --Lagging online (not Brawl's fault, Nintendo's: catch up with the times) --Classic isn't random enough --Too much relies on defense
Although I wouldn't have been as harsh. I'd say 7 out of 10.
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