MK26
Smash Master
yo anthony i wrote up a new section
the rest of you help me out
im not 100% sure if it's accurate and stuff
...Collectively, how stupid can we possibly be that we'd all do this without any potential gain coming out of it?
[collapse="new stuff"]For those who lament the necessity of re-introducing glitches into this game in order to stimulate competition: Let me give you a history lesson. In 1991, a game called Street Fighter II came out. It followed many of the conventions of its predecessor, but it unintentionally changed the concept of a 'fighting game' forever. One fateful day while debugging the game on its car-breaking bonus stage, its head developer made a startling discovery: one of his coders had accidentally allowed some characters' moves to finish before their opponent's hit stun wore off. Thus, the character could attack a second time and his opponent would have no hope of escape. Though it was not intended, the developer decided to leave the attacks' interruptability in the released version of the game; he dismissed it as too difficult to reliably use but kept it in as a hidden trick nonetheless. Being members of a fighting community, people discovered the developer's trick and began to implement it into their gameplay. And thus, the combo was born.
Fast-forward to 2000. Combos are an integral part of every fighting game since SFII. The follow-up to the monumental Nintendo 64 success that was Super Smash Bros. is being developed for the Nintendo GameCube. One new inclusion is a directional air dodge, providing a short movement in any direction in the air combined with temporary invincibility, at the cost of being unable to attack or dodge again until touching the ground. During pre-release playtesting, a developer realizes that, if air dodging at an angle downward right before landing, one can slide a small amount toward the angled direction. The head developer decides not to remove this feature from the game, and it makes it into the released version of the game.
Once again, the members of a fighting community reveal what the developers have hidden. Potentially the first discovery of this technique was the result of a failed attempt to catch a thrown item - another feature of this sequel, impossible in the original, was the ability to catch an item in mid-air, but it was mapped to the same button as the air dodge. Thus, if mistimed, an attempted catch would turn into an air dodge. One such mistimed catch low to the ground resulted in the same discovery as that of Melee's developer, but nobody could predict the effect it could have on the game. A jump, quickly canceled by an angled air dodge, became an effective spacing maneouvre - the triangle jump. A jump, instantly canceled by a downward air dodge, became unarguably the most important technique present in the game. Providing a near-limitless number of applications, from spacing to comboing to simply general maneuvering, the ability to move and perform a variety of grounded attacks generally only available while standing still forms the basis of just about every facet of competitive Melee. A huge number of combos are made possible by the wavedash. It changes every single aspect of the game, bar none. I think it's safe to say that Melee would not have the following it does, ten years after it was first released, were it not for a developer that accidentally implemented a mechanic and another who noticed it but didn't try to take it out. That sounds kinda familiar, to be honest.
For those who don't plan on reading the website and will bash anything without bothering to learn about it: the demo has 14 characters. Rest assured that the full game will have 40+ characters, every stage from Brawl (including a bunch that have been edited to be more competitive), most of the ones that were removed from Melee, and even a few returnees from Smash 64. There is a difference between an unfinished demo containing a small selection of near-finished characters as opposed to a full, polished game...[/collapse]
EDIT: help me cut some stuff, that third paragraph is kinda big
EDITEDIT: imma rewrite this, it kinda sucks
