Originally Posted by Mirai Gen

But cheapening the character? When has Samus ever had any 'character' anyway? The most dialog she's ever had was in Metroid Prime 3 and the self-reflection in Zero Mission and Super.

Originally Posted by Selfish Philanthropic

Everybody's all "SEX OBJECT!"? Because she isn't presented as such? The game has to grow with the audience, right? Pfft.

It's cheapening the character. I don't remember Samus ever having sexual overtones of "watch me take my armor off". She was a bounty hunter in power armor who happened to be a female. The whole "Samus Gender Revelation" was to be different and shock the audience.

I'm not prudish, I'm not naive, I'm not against sex. This is just selling out the character to get a few extra sales.

Originally Posted by Regulus Tera

Originally Posted by mudah.swf

Kirby's Final Smash has an annoyingly large radius. You have to be miles away to not get sucked up by it.

Originally Posted by Regulus Tera

Originally Posted by Meister

INDEED I DO THANK YOU VERY MUCH

Does anyone still check the Dojo by the way? I do. And today it's Falco, with a special emphasis on how his Final Smash is subtly different from Fox'. Which is pretty neat I think.

Originally Posted by Dojo!, regarding Luigi

Opponents who set foot in the Negative Zone are plagued by a random assortment of effects including:

* Drastically reduced attack power
* Greater launch distance when hit
* Increased likelihood of slipping
* Steady increase in damage percentage
* Flower growth on head
* Dizziness
* Uncontrollable taunting
* Sudden sleepiness
* Decreased movement speed

Originally Posted by IGN

Originally Posted by IGN

Originally Posted by IGN

Originally Posted by IGN

Originally Posted by IGN

Originally Posted by mudah.swf

Tim Roger's hard hitting review of Brawl: http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=324#more-324
tl;dr "this game isn't super mario 3 fuck this shit".

Originally Posted by Tim Rogers

To be fair, Super Smash Bros. isn’t a platform game; it’s a fighting game that is occasionally a hit at parties. Still, that the team felt it crucial to include a twelve-hour-long mode consisting of side-scrolling stages interrupted by the only computer-animated cut-scenes in the game is proof that a lot of work went into this. Which is a shame, because all this mode really does is highlight just how dull the game’s core engine is. Why can’t it control just like Super Mario Bros. 3? Some of these level designs are okay, I guess, though when they start breaking out the Super Princess Peach-like “puzzles” (giving you a key literally two feet in front of a door), the air all around you may or may not become polluted with groans.

Originally Posted by Tim Rogers

I don’t want to be rude — okay, maybe I do, just a little bit. Though yeah, some of this music is pretty bad.

Originally Posted by mudah.swf

Also a little tidbit about SSE mode: The plot is "written" by a one Kazushige Nojima. "Who the fuck is he?" you ask? Well he wrote the plot to one little game we know as Kingdom Hearts 2. Yeah.

Originally Posted by Mirai Gen

He acts like the properties of the game are so blindingly random that things just happen and he has no control over it!

Originally Posted by Tim?

...stuffing it full of more playable characters, more collectible items, more gameplay modes, and more Kingdom Hearts-influenced scenario...

...giant Castlevania-like “exploration” maze...

Originally Posted by phil_

In summary, the guy wrote a bad review for Brawl to get his site some hits. Oh boy, isn't he a super special internet super-star with such an original idea? Man, now I'm embarrassed to have even commented. I'm embarrassed to have gone back and read the rest after my first attempt.

Originally Posted by Demonlink2

RT, the ONLY point I grant this man is the KH2 Parallel, mostly because I noticed that too.

"OH HEY ENEMIES APPEAR FROM DARKNESS TO CONSUME AND KILL YOUR MAIN CHARACTER"

"DARKNESS"

*Bad KH/KH2 Memories go here*

Originally Posted by Demonlink2

So anyways, I gotta ask: Why is it that the underappreciative assholes get games before people who might, y'know, enjoy the game within its own genre.

Originally Posted by Loyal2NES

It's a Sudden Death. Note that Bowser was definately on top with the last one.

Still seems pretty overpowered all things considered though.

Originally Posted by Moynahand

Earlier in the thread, when the 100 Kirbies picture was posted, someone said they wanted a Red Mage Kirby.

Well, it's not the best quality, but here:

http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/8...erscopyjg2.jpg

Originally Posted by Sakurai from RT's recent link

They placed the "utmost importance" on character individuality, Sakurai said

Originally Posted by POS Industries

Well, what do you expect? All three of those characters pilot starfighters in a universe where not one of them has a unique special power of any sort. Granted, Wolf in a Landmaster is pushing it a bit, but Starfox never needed three characters worth of representation in the first place.

Originally Posted by Regulus Tera

If Sakurai really cared for the individuality of all the characters he would know Falco hates the Landmaster.[/rant]

Originally Posted by Regulus Tera

How is Lucario a Mewtwo clone except for his Neutral B and skeleton? From what I've seen he plays way different from his predecessor.

Originally Posted by Mirai Gen

Just disagreeing on the terms that Kirby and Jigglypuff are completely different in just about every single way.

Originally Posted by POS Industries

I really was quite shocked to see Jigglypuff in Brawl.

Originally Posted by Thinkaman

This year, I attended Game Developer's Conference (GDC) '08 as a Conference Associate (CA) helping run the conference. I was able to attend and help run a certain session at 10:30 in N135, by a certain Masahiro Sakurai.

To say that I met him is perhaps a stretch, given that his English is token at best so I obviously didn't get to talk to him or even try. However, I did stand right in front of him and keep other people from trying to talk to him! (Including one really annoying guy with a Kirby doll...) Nintendo let press take pictures while he was setting up, and I might actually be in a lot of those photos by him if the shot is wide enough.

However, he did sign my controller, which makes it count.

They played the opening movie, and at the end Sakurai comically started singing the song before the speech. The speech was specifically on the characters in Brawl. I'm going to go through five major points that I feel are extremely applicable to everyone on the boards.

1. Sakurai is More Hardcore Than You

Playing one-handed is hard, playing with the right hand is even harder, and the hardest ask for two controllers.

Sakurai takes three.

I honestly don't think anyone else outside the other three decent smashers there even noticed or realized that during the live demo part, Sakurai was playing as Sonic, Snake, and Pit on Battlefield ALL BY HIMSELF. Some was slow, showing off one character at a time, but I was watching him before the speech doing much faster, crazier stuff with all three. He was playing the three GCN controllers (two silver, one black?) like a keyboard all lined up in a curve in front of him, it was wild.

2. The Game We Study, Sakurai Created

Masahiro Sakurai personally decides and programs every piece of frame data in the game.
If you are a competitive Smash player, your mind was just blown.

I cannot stress how important this is, how ridiculously crazy news this is: Sakurai himself and himself alone balances the entire game of Super Smash Bros. Every parameter of every move he poured over. He spent endless amounts of time testing and watching others, seeing how players worked with different timings on every attack. He practically devoted his life to this, working into the night analyzing and tweaking the parameters to be "perfect". He stressed to us game developers that not taking this sort of care dooms games to failure.

When he showed a chart of Fox's up-smash, showing the frames 0-44 and which ones hit, I think most of the crowd just saw it as a typical animation timeline. Samples from many other moves he showed I imagine they saw as just screenshots. We see them as the game itself. So does he.

It gives me a headache to even think: Every time I throw out a f-smash, it was Sakurai who spent time watching testers to decide exactly what the start-up, duration, and vulnerable frames should be, not some arbitrary number put in by some junior programmer that happens to work out. Every time I have to decide between a nair and a fair, it is Sakurai himself who stayed up at night deciding what the exact difference in duration and knockback should be. (I suspect l-canceling now was removed because he was able to decide on precise and unique lag times for every aerial in the game according to their balance, which certainly seems to be the case. The ability to half or otherwise reduce these carefully crafted times across the board would defeat the point.)

Smash is our life, but is his entire existence. Sakurai knows this game infinitely better than you or I ever will.

3. The COMPLETE Roster was Finalized in 2006

The exception, actually, was Sonic. Sonic was not in the original complete roster, and was only added later in 2007 because he was the most demanded character and they were able to work it out with SEGA. Since he was so important and wanted, they were able to put in a lot of extra work and get him in.

Everyone else was in the game, at least in some state of readiness, in 2006. The original design document, the bible laid out by the designer by which ANY game is planned, included figurines in poses of EVERY MOVE IN THE GAME. That is how much in advance everyone had to be laid out.

Warning: Keep in mind that I am extremely tired because I spent the last 5 days non-stop at lectures and tutorials about game design, especially the development process, timelines, and testing/QA. The first person who suggests that they could have easily added more characters "omg wtf they had over a year!??!" will be ignored; not because I don't want to reply, but because I was arrested after hunting you down and trying to stick a crowbar where your brain should be. Ignorance of the game design process and the amount of people, money, and time it takes to work on games will simply not be tolerated. (Man, the amount of work the art team did on the models, textures, and animations for Pit alone was just crazy, he talked about it...)

4. The Dojo Was More Than We Deserved

Not much to say here besides that he emphasized how much work it was to maintain, even though he also emphasized that it was worth it. He personally did indeed write EVERYTHING, but mainly emphasized that the staff had to go way out of their way to get special shots for everything, not to mention make the videos. He said on busy days it was referred to as sending team members to "Dojo Update Hell".

And we just had to press F5! :chuckle:

5. "No Matter How Many Times People Hear Something, They Will Not Believe It Until They See It."

He said this towards the end in closing, connecting with why the Dojo was worth it. I suddenly had all these simultaneous images in my head: Me and my friends long ago wondering if smash 64 would be any good, noobs insisting they can beat pros, pessimists yelling brawl will never be played competitively. I had this sudden realization that there are simply times when it is literally impossible to make an argument, because no argument can possibly do anything.

All you can do is wait for them to live their life to a point at which they are brought to whatever truth it is, as you have. That, is what I learned from Masahiro Sakurai.

Originally Posted by Thinkaman

Sakurai had 4 criteria that all characters must observe in order to be considered for being added:

1. The character's inclusion must make people want to play the game.

This is infinitely harder than you and I think, because we are so jaded by our own perspective. I would insist that Viewtiful Joe would be the best character ever, but I'm not sure people would really want the game more. Neither of us would have ever thought of ROB, and yet "ROBOT" was the CROWD FAVORITE by FAR in the GDC matches the CAs had. Everyone loved him! We as gamers are way too biased to make this decision easily.

2. The character must be unique.

The character must have identifying features and abilities that would make them different from existing characters, so that they add something to the game.

3. The character must fit into the style of Super Smash Bros.

The character obviously has to be able to fit into the framework of how smash works, obviously Pac-Man and L Block would not work. Personally, I never saw Mega Man working for this reason. No, I don't want to debate it.

4. They must contribute to the game balance.

Everyone has to fit together. Every new character must counter some characters and be countered by others, and they must fit in one giant contiguous mesh.

-----

It is this sort of specific consideration and decision making that game designers have to adhere to, there must be reason and understandings established about both the mind of the player and the constructs of the game itself.

Originally Posted by Ryong

Yeah, so, you know when is Brawl coming to Brazil? Mid-June. Since most gaming stores here aren't part of chains, we don't get tournaments either. I guess that's what Brazil deserves from the raging game piracy?