Super Smash Bros. General v24: Joker Waiting Room, Please Take A Number
999 replies, posted
why even bother linking this
it's bad. shitty forced humor and most of the vid is just retelling ultimate's story leading up to release. it's his worst video ever
eh it could be worse, it could be DKC cartoon DK.
I think it's less about tech limitations and more about art style. Metroid Prime 1 and 2 were both at the boundaries of performance and they look waaaay better today due to their art style, plus some engine tricks.
After months of no uploads from him, the first thirty seconds convinced me to unsubscribe. These days, if I want to know about a game's beta content I'll just read TCRF.
The lines are from Brawl and the weird voice seems to be a deliberate design choice on Sakurai's part (among other things like Bowser and the Kongs having half their personality ripped out of them by using generic roars and actual monkey sounds), all his voice clips in Odyssey are new afaik and sound completely normal.
I completely agree about Melee's aesthetic, in regards to the discussion a bit ago. It has this weird 2000's "dark digital surrealism" to it, in every aspect, from the way the menus look, to the way the announcer sounds, to the sound effect choices across the whole game.
The best I can describe it is that it felt uncomfortable, it felt janky and artificial, but in a really compelling way. Hell, if you've ever used Melee's debug menu, it doesn't even FEEL that different from the game's intended presentation, what with its light blue pop-out menus and hard-scifi font. It even still keeps the menu music playing, and uses the same sound effects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0lH-ktJK7s
This reminds me of how the original paintings in Luigi's Mansion clearly used default Photoshop filters .
Piranha Plant is Best Girl (Linked cause thumbnail is kinda-sorta spoilery)
It's weird how so many games in the early 2000's era went for that sort of style. I kind of miss it.
The debug menu is a whole other can of worms, and I find it so intriguing that I still stream it on occasion. Also, I first learned about the debug menu through a guide hosted on Detstar.com, which had an equally creepy (if basic) aesthetic:
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/200485/5df36650-44db-491a-9af7-9f7b67180710/image.png
Holy fuck, that website screenshot just unleashed a boatload of nostalgia for tinkering with Melee using Action Replay.
Melee Fox will always be the Fox design for me. He's never felt right since.
I feel this with his voice, nothing will come close to Melee's voices for a lot of characters that lost them on the way to Ultimate.
...except for Luigi's, screw pitched-up Green Mario
It's because the design of Melee and Brawl was a lot more grungy. Smash 64 had a clear western comic influence in the art released alongside it (Fox's design in particular looks awesome in 2d, one of my favorite drawings related to smash), but Melee and Brawl were fare more "gritty" and realistic. Hence the realistic designs on most of the characters, hence Fox and Falco looking so... odd compared to the 64 designs and artwork, hence the gritty techno FD and Battlefield .
I was kinda hoping the menu/aesthetic of Ultimate would follow the same tone as the teaser and the monochromatic logo. The final menu/aesthetic is okay, but imagine how cool it would've been to have the semi-ominous tone from the teaser, or the monochromatic logo, being reflected elsewhere.
This video (created around the time of the teaser) that tried to recreate the main theme from the teaser is a good example of what I mean.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpwSCpDq1Sg
Probably would've been more engaging than the current aesthetic/theme, both are already absolutely grating and i've played ultimate for a fraction of the time i played melee, brawl, and sm4sh. i'm already absolutely sick of the main theme and the leitmotif of notes that pops up fucking everywhere, and i never had that problem with the other 3.
Found this on KYM.
https://twitter.com/ScruffyTurtles/status/1092645899531177984
I guess Lisa Lisa (who is WFT way more thanks to her ribbon move and, y'know, being a girl) and Male WFT are both chopped liver, then?
I always felt that Brawl got the Spacies voices down perfectly, but there's an undeniable charm of "ahta! Cahm on! FIYIAH!! Mishun comprete!"
https://clips.twitch.tv/PatientPlumpSalsify4Head
Yeah, I actually think Brawl had the best voices for the Star Fox characters, though Mike West's redone Fox voice in Ultimate is far better than his Smash 4 attempt was. Jim Walker does a really good Fox, though. But I also really love Assault, so that's part of it. Plus Brawl was the only Smash where Falco had the heavy Brooklyn accent, which I found very endearing. Brawl Wolf and Ultimate Wolf are so different that you can't really compare them; they're both going for different things.
Aesthetic-wise, I agree Melee's menu and original environment aesthetics are great, but its character models aged very poorly for me. But the cybernetic feel and holograms did have a certain charm to them that you really haven't seen Sakurai try to recreate since. Brawl to this day still looks good, at least fidelity-wise (seriously, Brawl's models were so high-quality that they could've worked fine in a PS360 game; I remember importing them into Gmod back in the day and it's insane how well they held up). I don't get the people who say the aesthetic aged badly (especially when they say so in comparison to Melee) - I get that the art style isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I liked the unifying aesthetic it gave everything and it gave the game its own character that also hasn't been recreated since - this is gonna sound weird, but I almost get a Central American vibe from a lot of Brawl's original environments, at least in SSE. Brawl is also the codifier for modern Sakurai menus; we saw the first hints of that in Kirby Air Ride with the vector look and then Meteos brought us even closer, but Brawl is what we'd end up basing both Uprising and Smash 4's menu's off of - Uprising pushing Brawl's pastels even further and with curvier shapes, while Smash 4 went the other way with vivid colors and hard corners. Ultimate took the Smash 4 angle and added shading and some cool background animations, plus the thing where all the submenus are just zoomed in bits of the main menu are a cool touch.
That being said, Smash 4 bringing back the high vibrancy and being more faithful for cartoony characters was probably the right call, and proved that all the art styles can still work well together with enough care, especially by maintaining just enough extra details on the cartoony characters to keep them from clashing too badly (I love Rosalina's dress in Smash 4). Ultimate strikes a good balance between Brawl and Smash 4 by starting with the latter's base and then bringing it back closer to Brawl in terms of detail (helping everything feel a bit more unified again) and muting the colors a bit. That and the brand new lighting engine with liberal amounts of rim lighting is gorgeous to look at, although not always the most readable during gameplay.
And for thoroughness, SSB64 - love the '90s grunge look of the main menu and its sub menus while still keeping the vector vibe that feels almost Gran Turismo-esque, although the character select screen clashes with the rest of it something fierce. Art style can't really be commented on because the graphics are so primitive that you really couldn't convey much yet besides "this is how Mario/Link/whoever looks like in early polygonal 3D". The game still does manage to have its own vibe, though - an almost "calm before the storm" feel.
I think my ideal art style would be Smash 4's vibrancy at Ultimate's level of detail - pushed ever so slightly closer towards Brawl - and lighting engine, but with the lighting intensity toned down slightly. Though Ultimate as it currently stands is a very good candidate if you needed something to point to and say how a Nintendo character definitively looks (barring how some characters have entirely different outfits or incarnations than in previous installments, like Zelda or Star Fox).
Personally I think Ultimate goes slightly too far in unifying the visual style of every character, but I still think it has the best art direction of the series.
Y'see, Smash 4's effects were actually the boldest in the series at the time. It's understated nowadays, but I kept a log of this jawn up to the game's release, and there was a lot of character in Smash 4's effects compared to Brawl. We got the bright launch trails, the critical hit lightning, more "cutting"-looking attack effects and whooshes, bolder redesigns of certain items (home-run bat, bumper), the fancier respawn platforms, more characterized effects (Link's realistic slash effects vs. Toon Link's cartoony ones; FE characters' sword trails indicating which part of their sword is strongest). Compared to previous games, Smash 4 is actually a crash course in visual effects that make a lot of sense, as far as the in-game stuff is concerned. Having regularly went between Brawl and Smash 4 for a while, Brawl's special effects seemed limp. Smash 4 was itself very comic book-y for its time. To be fair, Ultimate keeps a lot of that going, but that's because far more in general was outright transferred between Smash 4 and Ultimate than any previous transition in the series.
Oh, and on the topic of UIs, here's that one video again comparing the games' menus up to Smash 4 (he doesn't mention the 3DS version, but it's pretty much identical to the Wii U one anyway):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PkOUsfWuPc
I was expecting this announcement with the release of Lego Movie 2. Good to see it actually happened.
Slightly off topic but I am so glad RelaxAlax' newer videos seem to have moved away from the style of comedy of *random Undertale/Doki Doki reference*
I dig the retro computer graphics aesthetic of melee. I feel like it’s gonna be a big trend in graphic design. A lot of apparel is doing sort of that retro computer graphics stuff.
This music video reminded me of the polygon dudes
https://youtu.be/iwzfR7-33Wc
Super Smash Bros. General v24: Joker Waiting Room, Please Take A Number
