Has anyone tried Squad Strike or Smashdown with friends? Smash with KoF teams at least sounds fun.
I have done both. Both modes are pretty fun, though you want to have at least 4 players (including CPUs if you need to) for Smashdown or else it takes FOREVER. The last few rounds are fun though, as everyone is picking people they suck with and trying not to lose and it is good times.
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you know, it’s only through the filter of a day wherein Nintendo gets blown up for having a tutorial on where to find the Smash Ultimate tutorials (“tutorials”) and watching maximillan, someone who is good at regular ass fighting games, struggle around some stuff that I find trivial, that I realize that Smash is weird and obtuse and a little incomprehensible and how the hell do normal, non-brokebrained people ever get into and figure this game out and go “I want to to play this at a high level”
I’ve been smashing for too long and destroyed my empathy
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Hah I’ve been watching my lil brother trying to get his head around Smash the last couple days
Like “what’s a hadoken in this” and I’m “no see it’s”
I completely suck at all of them but have consumed enough providz and trivia to regurgitate stuff
Protip: normal people never even think of things like “playing at a high level”. Really, that is a big part of it. And it’s nothing against the people who do think of it. It’s just a lot of people play the thing to have fun and as long as they can do that, it is ok.
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Smash has the worst menu design of any game in existence, and it has gotten worse every iteration. In this one, the main menu is arranged in a circle, but hitting the stick in the direction of an option doesn’t actuallly go there! No, you have to navigate in a relative sense, so hitting down if you’re in the upper left brings you to the lower left, but in the upper right, it goes to the lower right.
Why is it arranged like a circle then? Who knows??
The submenus are so annoyingly deep and nonsensical as well. It’s the first of many barriers of trying to get anyone else to play this game with me who is not already intimately familiar with the concept.
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why are you slandering the menu design skills of Sakurai’s wife
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She designs extremely aesthetically pleasing menus that are totally unusable.
This is arguably more intuitive and accessible though.
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I agree that this method is intuitive and accessible, except that there are three options on the right and two on the left, so there’s no way to move to the middle option on the right from the left, making that menu weird to access, and kind of implying that I should rotate the stick to use the menu. You also cannot move diagonally. It mostly means that the intention I have when I move the stick is not matched by the action on the screen, like, 20% of the time. I actually hate radial menus though, this layout is just kind of bad.
Also, after everyone is ready on the character select screen, hitting A on the giant “start” thing that takes up most of the screen will start the match, UNLESS you are still hovering over your player select chip, which will then pick it up, which is most of the time since you just picked your character.except all the characters are obscured by the giant ‘start’ banner.
ALSO also holding B to exit some menus but just briefly tapping B to exit other menus, but also there’s a button in the upper left to exit, but only some of the time.
It’s juuust off enough to confuse me regularly
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It occurs to me that Smash was doing a mouse cursor interface on console years before Destiny popularized it, and while it was never as smooth as Destiny, it was tuned well enough to not be frustrating to move the cursor around.
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Just put the cursor on all the menus, that’s what they should do
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there are benefits to using a cursor after your interface gets complex enough.
it actually really bugs me that modern consoles use web-style layouts that are not optimized for digital input. there’s almost always ambiguity as to where a direction press will take your cursor. if that’s the case, then just use a damn cursor. or create your layouts to be more linear.
I feel like smash ultimate uses reasonable compromises most of the time. I agree the holding B thing is annoying, I think it’s in place on any menu where you might have multiple controller inputs. in past games it was a frequent annoyance that two people would try to cancel out a menu at nearly the same time, causing you to back out of two menus.
Holding B to back out only happens on menus where you’re deciding something directly related to the game (rules, stage, fighters) and it’s the most elegant solution to “whoops I backed out by accident” that doesn’t involve the game treating me like a child and asking if I’m really sure
Inconsistent menu behavior is definitely an inelegant design, the kind you arrive at when you need to solve a problem but haven’t designed a solution yet. I’m guilty of asking for more HUD elements to express systems even though I know I shouldn’t and always turn that off in games I play.
I will counter that they’ve been doing this for the past couple of entries and, as previously stated, I am far too gone and don’t consider these things as incomprehensible as they actually are to normal, sane people
For reference, I find it absurd that Sakurai revealed that pivot grabbing extends grab range in the same game where grab ranges were nerfed across the board but won’t tell players basic things like about edge trumping or the unfathomable specific but inportant fact that people grabbing ledges have 2 frames of vulnerability, a thing the CPU uses regularly so clearly someone knows about it
EXPOSE ALL THE DUMB SYSTEMS AND MECHANICS YOU ASSHOLE
Dear anyone who wants to learn how to play smash
Buy rivals of aether and play the tutorial
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I think professional consensus is that we have very few ways to communicate this within the text of the game without scaring normal players. So we’ll sometimes dole it out in community videos like the League of Legends character videos.
Or, it’s unclear how much of this information is for players to discover on their own, and how much enjoyment they derive from that. Certainly in this case, knowledge about edge trumping is distinctly unhelpful to 99% of the game’s audience, while those who aspire to be competitive learn it as part of their induction into the competitive community, serving as part of the social bonding experience. Talking about obscure mechanics is A Thing To Do for expert-level players in a way that a dev giving the correct explanation would destroy.
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My problem is less “tell me all of your secrets” and more “why you tell me this but not that”
I should also point out that Sakurai is choosing to tell players these things in tooltips during loading