Homelessvagrant
Smash Lord
If you’ve been to Smash Boards lately, you should be familiar with all the Sakurai-bashing as of late:
<blockquote><em>“Sakurai, oh why?”</em>
<em>“Sakurai, how could you?”</em>
<em>“This week sucks, curse you Sakurai!”</em></blockquote>
We can’t deny we’ve been in a drought of real Smash updates–by this, I mean “high priority” updates. The new characters, the earth-shattering game modes, and the mind-numbing extravagances have blown away. Smash flaunt has passed us by altogether, and it’s affected people in the worst way. People want updates they can talk about, something they can speculate and dream about. A normal Smash fan would pass up a Sandbag update any day for a Ridley confirmation, so they blame the Dojo and Sakurai himself for the “dreary” updates he’s been giving us. But the question is: is it the updates that need to change, or is it the way people view them?
<p align="center"><img src="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/sandbag.jpg" /></p>
<p align="center"><strong>I’d like to introduce to you a short series I call “Defining Priority.”</strong></p>
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If you’ve listened to Show Me Your News, you probably know something about priority in Dojo updates: characters are the highest priority, with game modes, techniques, and everything else at lower priorities. If you look at the Dojo, Sakurai even has the section links listed in order of priority. However, there is a difference between in-game priority (the updates that will mean the most when the game comes out) and other updates that have what I call “speculative priority.” These are the updates that say the most and either tell us something great or hint at a new mode, characters, or other extras in Brawl.
This can be taken into account when we compare a character like <a href="http://www.smashbros.com/en_uk/characters/diddykong.html">Diddy Kong</a> to an update like <a href="http://www.smashbros.com/en_uk/gamemode/modea/modea07.html">Team mode</a> in the Subspace Emissary. Because Diddy is a character, he should have priority over the Team update. However, on Smash Boards the Diddy update was met with nothing more than “ZOMG” comments or personal opinions. The Team update brought multiple areas for the reader to speculate about: it not only told us about teams, but also showed us Sonic 2 relations (allowing for speculation), gave us the world map (which itself is massively insightful), showed us the new difficulty settings, (which brought more speculation), and hinted at a new type of attack that has not been previously been seen (even more speculative material).
This, of course, is only a simple example among many other more in-depth comparisons. Even the team mode update is high priority (though not as high priority as a character update). Let this be a prologue for future updates of mine–something to build a foundation upon. In the next few updates I will attempt to go over these overlooked “low priority” posts to dig up patterns, hints and even try to get into the mind of Sakurai….to prove that not every good update is a character update. Until then, I leave you to think about some low priority updates and consider if they really are as useless as you would assume. And by the way, I’ll be going over the E-for-All leftovers as well.
<p align="center"><img src="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/lowtire.jpg" alt="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/lowtire.jpg" />
<strong>Tires Don Exits</strong>
<blockquote><em>“Sakurai, oh why?”</em>
<em>“Sakurai, how could you?”</em>
<em>“This week sucks, curse you Sakurai!”</em></blockquote>
We can’t deny we’ve been in a drought of real Smash updates–by this, I mean “high priority” updates. The new characters, the earth-shattering game modes, and the mind-numbing extravagances have blown away. Smash flaunt has passed us by altogether, and it’s affected people in the worst way. People want updates they can talk about, something they can speculate and dream about. A normal Smash fan would pass up a Sandbag update any day for a Ridley confirmation, so they blame the Dojo and Sakurai himself for the “dreary” updates he’s been giving us. But the question is: is it the updates that need to change, or is it the way people view them?
<p align="center"><img src="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/sandbag.jpg" /></p>
<p align="center"><strong>I’d like to introduce to you a short series I call “Defining Priority.”</strong></p>
<!--more-->
If you’ve listened to Show Me Your News, you probably know something about priority in Dojo updates: characters are the highest priority, with game modes, techniques, and everything else at lower priorities. If you look at the Dojo, Sakurai even has the section links listed in order of priority. However, there is a difference between in-game priority (the updates that will mean the most when the game comes out) and other updates that have what I call “speculative priority.” These are the updates that say the most and either tell us something great or hint at a new mode, characters, or other extras in Brawl.
This can be taken into account when we compare a character like <a href="http://www.smashbros.com/en_uk/characters/diddykong.html">Diddy Kong</a> to an update like <a href="http://www.smashbros.com/en_uk/gamemode/modea/modea07.html">Team mode</a> in the Subspace Emissary. Because Diddy is a character, he should have priority over the Team update. However, on Smash Boards the Diddy update was met with nothing more than “ZOMG” comments or personal opinions. The Team update brought multiple areas for the reader to speculate about: it not only told us about teams, but also showed us Sonic 2 relations (allowing for speculation), gave us the world map (which itself is massively insightful), showed us the new difficulty settings, (which brought more speculation), and hinted at a new type of attack that has not been previously been seen (even more speculative material).
This, of course, is only a simple example among many other more in-depth comparisons. Even the team mode update is high priority (though not as high priority as a character update). Let this be a prologue for future updates of mine–something to build a foundation upon. In the next few updates I will attempt to go over these overlooked “low priority” posts to dig up patterns, hints and even try to get into the mind of Sakurai….to prove that not every good update is a character update. Until then, I leave you to think about some low priority updates and consider if they really are as useless as you would assume. And by the way, I’ll be going over the E-for-All leftovers as well.
<p align="center"><img src="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/lowtire.jpg" alt="/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/lowtire.jpg" />
<strong>Tires Don Exits</strong>
