The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

[Armando]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

After doing some more digging, his lemons are just the beginning of his unconventional moveset. Turns out his sliding kick is actually his down tilt (even though it acts like a dash attack), and his Mega Upper (the MvC2 shoryuken) is his up tilt (even though it acts like an Up B/Up Smash).

More interesting tidbits I've found in Smashboards:
* You can throw Metal Blades at the ground to hold them as a regular item, to use them in a similar manner as Link with his bombs.
* You can alternate Metal Blades and Crash Bomb.
* You can do retreating jumping shots by holding back after your first shot.
* Hitting with a jumping pellet up close has high knockback. It seems you can even kill some opponents by pushing them off the edge with running shots and then hitting them with an airborne pellet after you run off the edge.
* You can do a retreating charge shot when turning around from a dash.
* You can transition pretty smoothly from pellets to slide kick or forward air (the flame sword) to slide kick.
* It seems you can interrupt the slide kick early with a jump or an attack.
* Up Smash (Spark Man's attack) reaches through the platforms in Battlefield. You can punish techs that way if you predict which way they'll roll (e.g. after an up throw).
* Rush Coil can break you out of weak combos.

It's also worth keeping in mind that you can customize the special moves of all characters, so he might have different versions of Metal Blade/Leaf Shield/Crash Bomb/Rush Coil that are more beginner-friendly or work better together.

[Malacite]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Awesome. MM

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Villager can pocket pretty much everything and boring people turn items off so that doesn't really matter much.

Ftfy

[Armando]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Ftfy

Calling people who like to play the game competitively boring is about as productive as tournament players harassing casuals for playing non-competitively.

If you don't particularly mind: whether you win or lose; if you lose due because a Home Run Bat spawned right next to someone else or because Critical Hit is a guaranteed kill; if one of the people in the free for all camps until a good item spawns; I'm not gonna judge. Use whatever rules you want. Most people don't care either way, and that's fine. But then why even care if the old characters were good or the new characters suck?

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

I know why people do Final Destination/no items just like I know why had set strategis for Dynamis. It doesn't make it any less of a wet blanket. Items disrupt tiers and force people to improvise. They also help even the odds at time. All the "skills" you have don't mean much when a newer player gets the DK mallet.

I hate Halo's current multiplayer because it's so formulaic, that H5 is going back the more chaotic arena style is more exciting because again, it forces improvisation where EXP grinding and loadouts make things too vanilla.

The only stuff I even bothered from SSBM on Evo were the matches where people played against tiers rather than adhere to them. It can be fun, but I just get bored when "competitive play" becomes what everyone defaults to.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

They also help even the odds at time. All the "skills" you have don't mean much when a newer player gets the DK mallet.

So long as you realize there are both pros and cons to this. While you get a much more effective party game that players of all skill levels can and should enjoy, it's less effective at actually testing and honing said skills than the standbys of the competitive scene. While you can argue that item use in and of itself is a skill, the fact remains that the items are still more-or-less randomly distributed without regard to any given player's skill--there are fewer races to grab the hammer than there are races to get somewhere the guy next to the hammer can't subsequently reach.

That being said, the aforementioned standbys of the competitive scene are far from the end-all be-all for skill-testing, either. It actually bugs me that Nintendo went with giving the stages a "Final Destination" version since being a long, flat platform inherently favors the very character archetypes you incidentally happen to see topping the tier lists--the Foxes, the Snakes . . . and I'm sure pretty soon, the Little Macs. Battlefield is a much better example of a balanced stage--characters more specialized in aerial tricks can more adeptly pull them off between the platforms. Furthermore, as much as I like the Stock battle format personally, religiously following it might blind one to the fact that, at least for multiplayer fights, it's more liable to promote turtling/durdling than the default format, which only awards points for actually scoring kills. Presumably there's a reason the announcer refers to them as "Survival" and "Free-for-all," respectively, given that the objectives for each are effectively just that.

I'm fine with people doing as they please, so long as they know what they're doing.

[Etra]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

I really never understood why people disable items in the game and then call it "competitive." If you were good at the game, you'd be able to win without disabling half the battle system.

Just saying.

...Bitches.

[Armando]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Items disrupt tiers and force people to improvise. They also help even the odds at time. All the "skills" you have don't mean much when a newer player gets the DK mallet.

Which is precisely why they don't make sense competitively. The point of competing is to win; something that makes you lose to a worse player at random is the exact opposite of what competitive players want. You don't see random hazards/bonuses on the Super Bowl, World Cup or the Olympics. (I realize video games aren't sports, but sports are the most socially recognized and accepted form of competitive gaming.) Even the games with random elements (e.g. trading card games, deck building games) at least put the player in control of which cards are available and how likely they are to appear, and have rules to handle extremely unlucky situations (e.g. mulligans at the start of the game if you don't have enough resources).

If you find Melee boring because you always see the same small handful of characters, the solution is to balance the characters. Smash 4 has 51 characters if you count Mii Fighters separately and each character has 3^4 = 81 combinations of special moves. Assuming it's fairly balanced, you won't be able to rely on memorizing a dozen common match-ups. That keeps things fresh and interesting without turning it into a slot machine.

I really never understood why people disable items in the game and then call it "competitive." If you were good at the game, you'd be able to win without disabling half the battle system.

Let's say you and I want to prove who's the best Smash Bros player. With items off, playing best 2 out of 3 is probably enough to decide that. With items on, whomever wins or loses is partly random. Assuming we're both equally likely to get items, and that our characters stay balanced with items on, we could find out by playing multiple times.

The first problem is that we're not equally likely to get items. Fast characters are more likely to get items than slow characters. Smash Balls are sometimes given to the losing player for free.

The second problem is that characters don't benefit from items equally. Most items double as deadly projectiles so every character with a weak or predictable recovery is suddenly super easy to kill even by characters that have no built-in ranged attacks or that don't have the air time to chase people off the stage. Final Smashes are also very hit or miss: some are ridiculously good, some are garbage, and some only make sense in Free For Alls.

The third problem is that some items are so good, it makes no sense for either of us to try to beat the other the old-fashioned way. We both want to win, and the best way to win is to avoid contact with the other person until a strong item appears, and then be the first to grab it. That's not fun for the competitors or the spectators.

The fourth problem is that tournaments already take a long time to run. Even small tournaments tend to be all-day events (while they have less competitors, they also usually have smaller venues and less TVs/consoles). Tournament organizers can't afford to let people play against each other 3+ times to be sure there wasn't a fluke.

So the end result is tournaments that take forever, less viable character choices, and a ton of camping. It's not fun. You might be able to come up with a subset of items that aren't completely broken, but it'd be incredibly difficult to get everyone to agree on precisely which items to include. Hell, banning Meta Knight was a huge decision that took almost 2 years of discussion to pass and the community was still torn over it afterwards. Half the tournaments allowed Meta Knight, half didn't.

It actually bugs me that Nintendo went with giving the stages a "Final Destination" version since being a long, flat platform inherently favors the very character archetypes you incidentally happen to see topping the tier lists--the Foxes, the Snakes . . . and I'm sure pretty soon, the Little Macs.

Agreed. It was a really dumb decision. If you look at the Project M mod, which is the best manifestation of what tournament players wanted out of Brawl, there's 42 stages that they consider tournament-viable and all but two have platforms.

[Malacite]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Feba's point is actually why I stopped caring about competitive Halo in MLG because they disable over half the weapons. Map control is a big part of that series and by just inherently removing aspects of it like that is crap.

Items in smash are another story though. They're totally random and can swing things wildly. It's OK to have some level of variance in a competitive game to keep things interesting, but Smash kinda takes it to the extreme so items being disabled is a must for tournaments.

[Feba]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Feba's point...

Holy fucking shit, Mayuyu.

Just wow.

[Etra]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

God, Feba. Stop being such a hooker. We all know your point was scandalous.

[Feba]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Holy fucking shit, Etra.

Just wow.

[Etra]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

[Firewind]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Extra Credits - Randomness in Esports - How Chance Affects Competitive Play - YouTube

Seems relevant.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: The AKB48 Joins the Fight! And Other SSB Demo Info.

Seen that video before, it lays out the problem with how the competitive players approach games more than the problem with random elements. If anything, that makes a case for how it should be done rather than how people try to balance it now.