nintendo’s implementation of online functionality is so broken/unintuitive/restrictive that it’s hard to understand why a kid would go through the effort to play socially in their walled garden vs. play fornite or whatever with their friends on their phone. my pet theory is that the function of contemporary nintendo 1st party is to make children’s games for adults (and for adults to buy their children who would rather play phone games or whatever instead)
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I think you’re right but also what a depressing worldview
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Wellll… I have the same suspicion about Nintendo games, but don’t think kids are as obsessed with social gaming as people want to make them out to be, either. Troy Total War is a single player game.
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I am somehow skeptical that your kid independently developed an interest in the Trojan War
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9 out of 10 kids prefer the Odyssey to the Iliad.
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From my experience as a second grade teacher, there are five games: Fortnite (affectionately called Fartnite), Roblox, Minecraft, Among Us and Sonic.
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That reminds me, breaking news
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Well it just happened to be the one I got for free on Epic. He woulda got just as into the Three Kingdoms one or whatever.
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in the original smash bros the analog stick was critical to executing smash attacks. it’s
not as true in subsequent release though, since melee they mapped them to the right analog stick as an alternative.
and I wanna say you could map tilt attacks to the c stick since like brawl or something, but mastering tilt attacks isn’t a barrier to entry unless you’re playing someone much more experienced. a lot of characters you can get away with a lot without ever needing to deliberately use tilt attacks.
like when I talk about barrier to entry I just mean being able to pick up and play and have fun with it. from there you actually have motivation to keep digging and learning more. I’ve never felt that way about street fighter bc just shooting fireballs has always felt unreliable and that limits me to only a few characters where I can actually just enjoy the base mechanics. and street fighter is far from the worst offender in this regards. on the other hand I’ve found that 2D fighters that don’t have this execution barrier just end up being button mashy with no sense of strategy or agency.
the sometimes finicky controls of smash can be a barrier but it’s still possible to have fun playing a casual match without mastering them. I have never found this to be the case with other fighting games. they just seem to be player hostile.
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Other analog input uses in Melee not yet mentioned:
- air dodge direction (and thus wavedash direction)
- directions of some moves (e.g. directional recovery moves like teleport or firefox (see image below))
- directional influence (holding exact analog directions the frame your character is hit changes the trajectory of your character’s knockback)
- walking/running/air movement speed
- crouching vs. falling through platforms
- slightly adjusting shield position while blocking vs. rolling or spot dodging or shield dropping
- shield size and shield strength (lightly pressed L button shield is bigger but has more hitstun, while hard pressed shield is smaller and has less hitstun)
- teching vs. L-canceling (tech is done only with a full L press, but L-cancel can be done with a light press)
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I love that implementation of analog + cardinal direction snapping and I think I could intuitively have explained it was doing that but it’s nice to see it actually on the page, very elegant
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I don’t think player hostile is the right word for it but I agree there is something unsatisfying about beginner level play in esports-style 2d fighting games, if you come to them wanting to have a meaningful match with an enjoyable internal narrative. The aesthetic of the fight tends to be slapstick, and of a sort that’s more deflating than funny because none of the moves are unbalanced enough for real comedy to emerge.
The “anime” fighting game solution to this doesn’t quite hit the spot for me either. But there’s a lot to be said for leaning deliberately into comedy instead. I rarely laughed harder in my life than when playing the Sailor Moon S fighting game on the couch with a few close friends. (And I think it’s part of Smash Bros’s appeal too, right?)
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Minor counterpoint: my kid and all his friends just play Fortnite on the Switch.
But yes, most Nintendo games at this point are designed for older Nintendo fans.
yeah i mean i think a lot of the reason why kids are playing Fortnite or Roblox or whatever isn’t necessarily due to some huge generational shift (though i’m sure they’re more acclimated to Games As Content Platforms but yeah) but just due to the fact they’re free to play games. like you don’t have to harass mom and dad to buy you a new game… which was always a situation of great anxiety/tension to me as a kid. you can just play however much you want and not have anxiety about needing to play a bunch of it before getting a new game.
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I look at this Smash Talk and Fight Games and go jimmy crickets this is why I played FPS because I only have to worry about aimming or positioning or alternately Dark Souls is way less input-complicated then this nonsense y’all go through.
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honestly the ridiculous emphasis on “grinding” in “the lab” is fairly new, like st has low execution characters you can absolutely be competitive with
but i mean that and most of the community’s naked desperation to get a twitch partnership is p much why i went from playing a bunch of these things way too seriously to ignoring the genre entirely (+ the games being bad lol)
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Local Belmont main restrains his consternation at this statement
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tempted to just tell people to play Nick Brawl or Brawlhalla, knowing full well that it misses half the point even though they address a lot of the criticisms being levied at Smash in this discussion
:cries in conc jumping/Mercy super jumping:
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This was actually my main gripe with the whole barrier to entry/input difficulty rathole in this thread. No one actually agreed on what “game”'s barrier to entry we were discussing, the barrier to entry for the casual game or the skill floor expected of competitive players.
I think a lot of what Smash does to make casual play accessible has nothing to do with its control scheme and mechanical complexity, and more so to do with stuff like:
- everyone needing to play a minimum amount of the game to unlock all the characters gives everyone baseline familiarity with how the game is played
- the game has a wide variety of single player modes for people to enjoy themselves in if they are not fans of being on the training mode stage 5 hours a day to deepen their familiarity with their character/controls
- flexible rulesets let people balance casual play to increase variance so less skilled players have a chance at winning against more mechanically proficient players
- because the game has succeeded at being an accessible party game for 22 years, the player population is immense (counting both active players and people with past familiarity with the franchise) so the likelihood of finding a player around your skill level is much higher than other games
Most other fighting games on the market ship barely able to do anything but the core versus mode experience against another human, and no effort whatsoever goes into trying to make casual play a meaningfully distinct experience from competitive play. Casual play in Smash is fundamentally a different game/ruleset in a shared engine, casual play in other fighting games is just being worse at it than everybody else.
As someone who has recently found a BBCF partner around my skill level with a good netplay connection, I think one of the most satisfying fighting game experiences you can have is getting to play long sets against someone you’ve got a decent shot at beating, and it has taken me literally a decade to finally experience that. Smash players are much more likely to have that happen to them, so no wonder they’re so satisfied with the game.
(this also explains why a lot of people are so excited about Japanese devs finally embracing rollback: widening the matchmaking pool means you are more likely to play people at your level, which means you’ll have more satisfying matches more often, helping player retention)
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All you gotta do in fighting games is aiming and positioning too 
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