Dantarion
Smash Champion
So, a lot of people are worried about what Sakurai has said in interviews about Smash 4 so far, but do a lot of you really think about what truly separates a competitive Smash player from a casual one? Is it the amount of time you spend playing? Not always. Is it the amount of effort you put into it? Not always. The main difference between casual and competitive in my eyes is exposure to other players. Did you learn how to play Smash in a vacuum?
Imagine this. You are M2K, and it is release day of Melee.
You go into a hyperbolic time chamber, and play Smash all day every day, and emerge today.
Is it even possible for you to be good at the game? Even if you spent all day playing it, since release, is it really even possible for you to make the amount of discoveries that take place instantly in an online community such as Smashboards?
I'm sure most of you would say no.
The truth is, anyone that plays Smash started in a vaccuum. Maybe you didn't play by yourself, maybe you played with your older brothers, maybe you played with a few friends. Maybe you even played at a game club or small tournament community.
Does anyone have any memories about what they thought about the game back then? What was OP, what was cheap, etc? I am sure a lot of you remember some thing or another you thought was the best way to win that now seems silly, like spamming moves(64 kirby fsmash, shiek dash attack, marth fsmash, peach dsmash) that just seemed to be the BEST way to play.
But you could stop there. You could accept the current state of the game in your eyes and enjoy it like that.
If you are on this site, it means you probably had a moment of truth sometime in your Smash life where someone, or something, completely blew your mind about what Smash was. Your years of experience playing the game shattered by someone that simply learned smash in a bigger vacuum than you did.
Smash 4 is coming, and none of us on this site are arguably the target audience.
We can no longer enjoy the game inside a vacuum, because our vacuum has expanded into an online community that wants to tear apart the game piece by piece. We want to compare it to the previous 3 versions of the game, and hold it on the high pedestal of what the original games meant to us in our lives.
There is a large chance that no matter what they put on that game disc we all purchase, we will never have that feeling again.
In fact,I would even say that this doesn't apply to smash specifically, but to all of gaming in general. The thing that makes this harder for us is that while other competitive games have grown with their audiences, Smash has primarily stayed the same.
If you look at the evolution of games, you can see that the "casualization" trend is not just affecting smash, but almost every game genre in particular. The demographic for "gamer" has opened up to the world, and we are now in the minority.
Smash 4 will almost, without a doubt, be an extremely high rated game, with 9/10 reviews, and universal appeal. But a lot of us are looking for a game that Nintendo isn't trying to make.
A lot of you guys play Melee still. A lot of us still play Brawl. If Smash 4 isn't fun for me the way I want it to be, it may lead to be dropping Smash completely, and a lot of people already dropped Smash from their lives. With EVO coming up, there are a lot of big names popping up, but there are a lot of people missing, that for some reason or another, moved on from this game series.
I am not saying "SMASH 4 IS GONNA SUCK OMG I HATE SAKURAI" I'm just saying as a community its nice to look back and see what really got us into this series, and maybe prepare for what could be the nail in the coffin of a generation of smashers.
Imagine this. You are M2K, and it is release day of Melee.
You go into a hyperbolic time chamber, and play Smash all day every day, and emerge today.
Is it even possible for you to be good at the game? Even if you spent all day playing it, since release, is it really even possible for you to make the amount of discoveries that take place instantly in an online community such as Smashboards?
I'm sure most of you would say no.
The truth is, anyone that plays Smash started in a vaccuum. Maybe you didn't play by yourself, maybe you played with your older brothers, maybe you played with a few friends. Maybe you even played at a game club or small tournament community.
Does anyone have any memories about what they thought about the game back then? What was OP, what was cheap, etc? I am sure a lot of you remember some thing or another you thought was the best way to win that now seems silly, like spamming moves(64 kirby fsmash, shiek dash attack, marth fsmash, peach dsmash) that just seemed to be the BEST way to play.
But you could stop there. You could accept the current state of the game in your eyes and enjoy it like that.
If you are on this site, it means you probably had a moment of truth sometime in your Smash life where someone, or something, completely blew your mind about what Smash was. Your years of experience playing the game shattered by someone that simply learned smash in a bigger vacuum than you did.
Smash 4 is coming, and none of us on this site are arguably the target audience.
We can no longer enjoy the game inside a vacuum, because our vacuum has expanded into an online community that wants to tear apart the game piece by piece. We want to compare it to the previous 3 versions of the game, and hold it on the high pedestal of what the original games meant to us in our lives.
There is a large chance that no matter what they put on that game disc we all purchase, we will never have that feeling again.
In fact,I would even say that this doesn't apply to smash specifically, but to all of gaming in general. The thing that makes this harder for us is that while other competitive games have grown with their audiences, Smash has primarily stayed the same.
If you look at the evolution of games, you can see that the "casualization" trend is not just affecting smash, but almost every game genre in particular. The demographic for "gamer" has opened up to the world, and we are now in the minority.
Smash 4 will almost, without a doubt, be an extremely high rated game, with 9/10 reviews, and universal appeal. But a lot of us are looking for a game that Nintendo isn't trying to make.
A lot of you guys play Melee still. A lot of us still play Brawl. If Smash 4 isn't fun for me the way I want it to be, it may lead to be dropping Smash completely, and a lot of people already dropped Smash from their lives. With EVO coming up, there are a lot of big names popping up, but there are a lot of people missing, that for some reason or another, moved on from this game series.
I am not saying "SMASH 4 IS GONNA SUCK OMG I HATE SAKURAI" I'm just saying as a community its nice to look back and see what really got us into this series, and maybe prepare for what could be the nail in the coffin of a generation of smashers.