Smash Brawl Competitive discussion
 

Figured it's been a while so now would be a good time.

Well Brawl's been out a while now, so things have started changing. For one, there's a big old Tier List v1.0 out. Good to see my boy ROB at the top, though I do have a certain sadness for Lucas and Ness down there at the bottom.

Brawl plus hacks, called Brawl+, has been popping up too. Thread for that here. Features two different types of cancelling - Melee style L-Cancel, and new and improved easy-peasy S-Cancel. More on that later.

Here's a video with Brawl plus Wavedash and L-Cancel, and here's one with S-Cancel and WD. Heavy hitters with this mod are scary.

People have been arguing about this for months, but now it's finally being brought to the table, Metaknight is being considered for banning. First post linked sums up my feelings well. There's a podcast debate that some of the Smash Back Room members have brought up but I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.


So about the hacks: L-Cancel brings back the same stuff from Melee, where if you do an aerial attack, then hit L as soon as you touch the ground, it cuts the landing lag in half. S-Cancel is further than this, because it makes it so it stops the lag landing animation completely.

I'm still kind of on the fence about it.

Metaknight being banned I'm all for because of the same reason SamuraiPanda specified. He summed it up well for me.

So, thoughts?

If you want to play Brawl as Melee, why not just play Melee instead?

Oh, right, should have answered that.

Because A - Brawl has all sorts of character balance changes, among them Captain Falcon is currently ass, B - new characters and stages, C - the physics in the game have been tweaked (IE able to dodge in air without making yourself vulnerable), and D - Wii is easier to hack.

But it isn't like the Smash community is embracing that. This is just a fun on-the-side project some Smash Directors are doing.

EDIT: VV Completely agreed.

While I can't help but agree with that in general, let's not turn this into yet another competitive vs. casual Brawl thread. There are millions of those all over the internet and the outcome is really always the same.

Right but you kinda play the game for the game's changes, at least as far as competition goes. It's also unfair to used a modded game in competition for those people that have a really nice Brawl Marth game or something, and then they go to a competition and find that the game's modded, so they get owned because they're not used to it.

I can't say I'm happy to see that people are TRYING to bring back Wavedashing, considering what it did to Melee (ie. made all but a few characters nearly inviable, created a massive gap between casual and competitive players). I would be happy to see the removal of tripping, the balancing of certain characters (Captain Falcon up, Metaknight down), and maybe a few other fixes. However, I don't think it's necessary to make Brawl more like Melee.

For the record, I usually play as Lucas or Pit, but not competitively. I find that they are both pretty well balanced, and therefore the tier list is stupid (in my opinion).

Not going to get into the "Brawl is better/worse than Melee" argument, but I'm really against Meta Knight's ban for the same reason that Chun-Li/Yun/Ken are not banned from 3S. A character being the best at a game doesn't mean he/she has to be out of range for anyone to pick him/her up. Unlike Akuma, who was deliberately designed as a godmod, Meta Knight still has enough weaknesses to be beatable by everyone, although at different levels of effort.

To be fair, the tier list (where I read it) had the explanation for why it existed and controversy around it. Basically, it's an overall look at who is most likely to win in the Competitive Metagame.

For the record, I play Marth, and I just play with the guys down the hall. Although to call it casual is questionable, because we play a lot and are competitive about it. One of the guy's friends is also a pro player (quit college to make money off playing), and a few of us have beaten him online (although the claim to beating him is questionable because goddamn that lag is tragic).

EDIT: Metaknight is also banned in Italy, apparently. So people HAVE gone through with banning him.

Oh good lord. I need to visit my college next week so I can see this stuff in action.

I know at least one of 'em will be bringing the necessary tools.

Heh. I usually play G&W or Lucario and sometimes Gannondorf or Peach. The lower-tier characters seem to be there because some of their attacks rely on luck or distraction to be really good, i.e. Gannondorf in a 4-player game, runs around using Warlock Punch all the time.