Currently I've got an idea brewing for a video in the style of Totalbiscuit's "WTFis" series, which were always great for generating publicity for the games he covered. Basically it's an "assume no viewer knowledge on this subject" approach where we could explain exactly what made Melee great and unique, and by extension why somebody would want to play Project M. We'd then go on to explain exactly how to install Project M on an SD card and get started.
I've started writing some stuff for it when I've had time to bother. I guess this is as good a place as any to share it. We'd of course want some illustrations consisting of staged stuff explicitly for this purpose as well as examples from some famous tournament videos for maximum hype. Unfortunately I have no experience actually putting together videos in the slightest, so I would need help from others in the community. Any volunteers?
Some stuff... Not the introduction, but the beginning of the digression into Melee:
Before we get into too much Project M itself though, it will help to have some background on the Super Smash Bros series. Project M's existence is a result of developments within that series that newcomers will not understand. Many of you will be wondering why anyone would want to play a mod that does not, on the surface, appear much different from the original. The answer to this question, though, is an amazingly complex issue that I can only hope to communicate adequately in the short time I will spend on it.
Many of you will have played a Smash game before. The series is of course very popular as a fun diversion among Nintendo fans especially, but what many folks may not have realized is that amidst all the chaotic explosions and colorful palette can be found an intense and rewarding competitive game, capable of drawing large crowds, even across international borders.
The second installment in the series, Super Smash Bros Melee-- usually referred to as simply "Melee--" is beloved by many for its blistering speed and the feats of technical skill that are both possible and applicable within it. As both speed and technical skill can be found in many other games, I'll not dwell too much on those but instead discuss some things that are wholly unique to Melee. These, I feel, are the real reasons someone who has never played high-level Smash before might be interested in giving it a shot; they are the things that are great that you won't find anywhere else.
In the interest of brevity I will talk about three major gameplay elements only, so know that there is a whole lot more to this game than I'll cover here.
A bit about Melee's combos, which are one of the "three major gameplay elements" the video would talk about:
Fighting game players are familiar with the term "combo," referring to a string of moves that are absolutely guaranteed to hit your opponent once the first hit connects. In a true combo, the opponent is incapable of responding in any meaningful way.
Not being a traditional fighting game in any sense of the word, Melee has very few combos by this definition. Instead, most of the attacks in melee cause your opponent to move somewhere that is not completely predictable. Your opponent is capable of changing the direction he will move slightly each time he is hit. This is commonly known as "Directional Influence" or "DI" by Smash players.
You can use DI to make your opponent's job much more difficult, but make no mistake: DI does not guarantee your escape. In Melee, your opponent is often capable of adjusting his combo on the fly as a response to your DI. Against a strong player, certain DI paths can even put you in an even worse situation than if you hadn't used any DI at all!
In addition to these "DI-chasing" combos, Melee also has a very interesting set of mechanics that results from the relatively common "tumble" animation that follows most hits. When a character hits the ground during this animation, they have a limited number of options for standing up, all of which leave them vulnerable to subsequent hits.
Clicking a shoulder button with proper timing as you hit the ground will cause you to perform a handspring maneuver to recover your footing. Smashers refer to this maneuver as a "tech." When you perform a tech, you can hold left to roll left, right to roll right, or input no direction at all to tech in place. All three of these options are followed by a significant amount of downtime where your character can do nothing at all. Failing to perform a tech, intentionally or because you missed the timing, causes your character to bounce off the ground briefly, then fall prone. During this bounce you are vulnerable, but after it you actually have few more options than if you had teched. Once lying prone you can, at any time, simply stand up, roll left, roll right, or perform a get-up attack. Again, however, each of these options is followed by downtime that a strong player can exploit in order to continue hitting you.
Forcing your opponent into the ground and then correctly responding to the manner in which they stand up is called "techchasing," and it can be every bit as deadly as keeping your opponent in the air.
Because of DI and "techchasing" mechanics, Melee's combos are not simply a test of one player's ability to execute a rote series of inputs. They are a branching interaction between one player's use of DI and tech paths, and the other player's ability to react to them in order to keep the combo going. Combined with positional play through platforms and other stage elements, along with knockback that changes with how much damage your opponent has taken, these interactions produce an immense amount of variety and reward creativity from players. Every once in a while, when two very strong players are pitted against one another, you get to see things that nobody has ever seen before, even 10 years after Melee's release.
The other two "major gameplay elements" will be edgegames and shield mechanics, which I've not written yet... Later it will go on to explain how Nintendo, in the interest of protecting new players from getting trounced, deliberately removed or drastically altered all three of these great gameplay elements, producing a game that, although some enjoy it very much, is not at all what drew many of Melee's most passionate competitors.
Project M is an attempt by those passionate competitors to effectively update Melee by modding Brawl. Melee is a game that, while great, is far from perfect, and can be improved, and bringing a bunch of new characters, stages, and other neat things from Brawl won't hurt either.
The goal is to create *the* definitive smash game for competitive-minded players, and anybody interested at all in competitive smash can't possibly go wrong in giving it a shot.
