Super Smash Bros 3DS (...and Almost Good Games)

I've noticed a pattern when I review video games; I tend to give more backstory than actual review.   In my blog about Injustice: Gods Among Us, I spent as much time talking about the history of Mortal Kombat as I did about Injustice itself.  In my Alien: Isolation blog, I wrote more about the Commodore 64 Alien game than I did about Isolation.  I think this may just be my style.  If a game reminds me of other games, I like to make comparisons.  And don't get me started on ramblings where I talk about how I blog, such as this paragraph.  So if you want to skip to where I talk about Super Smash Bros, just scroll down to the bolded part.

Anyway... Before I write about Super Smash Bros for the 3DS, I want to talk for a minute about games that are awesome... except for the "game" part.  Games where the programmers went all-out in making the game as complete as possible, but still failed in the basic aspects of making it fun.

A lot of my examples are going to be from the Commodore 64.  The C64 was a peculiar machine - it was a computer that wanted to be a game system, or possibly vice-versa.  It had graphics that were a fair bit better than the Atari 2600, but not quite as good as the 8-bit Nintendo... except when they were.  Some programmers managed to get more out of the graphics than others.  Well, that's true of any system, but it was particularly glaring on the C64.  But the C64 controls were even more erratic.  It had ports for Atari 2600 joysticks, which aren't the most precise controllers in video game history anyway, but used on the C64 they were particularly mushy.

So anyway, the games:

Project Firestart (C64, 1989)

As far as I'm concerned, Project Firestart was the first "Survival Horror" computer game.  If ever a game came out that could be called "Resident Evil in space", this is it, and it was released years before the first Resident Evil.  You're sent to investigate a deep space research station, which sent out a distress call before going silent.  You dock with the station, and the first few halls are completely empty.  You hear nothing but your own echoing footsteps. Then you enter one room and see the mutilated body of a scientist, who used his last bit of energy to write a warning on the wall in his own blood.  The game shows you a quick closeup of the body as the music plays a scare chord.  As you continue to explore the station, you find many more bodies.  You access computers to find clues.  One one computer you find some journals that explain what's going on - the scientists had created some creatures for labor purposes, and those creatures got loose.

That's when you finally see the creatures themselves.  These tall, green tentacled monsters show up and you have to run or fight.  You encounter them several more times during your explorations, and several plot twists keep you from just running back to your ship and hightailing it out of there.  All told it's not as long as Resident Evil, and it does resort to backtracking to prolong the length of the game.  But for the time, it was revolutionary.  The graphics may look ancient now, but at the time it was some of the best I'd seen.  All in all, it was a brilliant game...

 
...except for the gameplay.  While I loved exploring the space station, fending off the creatures was annoying because the weapons were terrible.  There were a couple of different types of guns you could pick up, but they were really more like cattle prods.  Instead of firing any sort of projectiles or beams, just the tip of the gun lit up and became lethal.  Safety-wise, this actually makes sense not having weapons that could breach the hull.  But gameplay-wise, it was way too difficult killing monsters this way.  If you were close enough for your weapon to hurt them, they could hurt you as well.  Now if the game were more of a run-and-hide style game like Alien Isolation, this would still be fun.  But Project Firestart often put you in situations where you had to fight to survive, by putting monsters on both sides of you with no other ways out.  This issue is the only black mark on a game that was otherwise years ahead of its time.

Mail-Order Monsters (C64, 1985)

Buy a monster.  Customize him with bio-upgrades and weapons.  Take him to the arena to fight other monsters.  Use your winnings to upgrade your monster, or to buy more monsters.  There's been a few modern attempts at similar games, but none of them have had the charm of MOM.  It was so fun playing this game with my friends, each of us loading up our own monsters and making them fight.  I spent hours cheating by playing the two player mode by myself, winning battle after battle so I could earn enough money to build an entire menagerie of fully-powered beasts.  It was a wonderful experience...

...except for the gameplay.  While the build process was well-done and had decent graphics, the actual battle part was pretty dull.  Each player controlled a tiny solid-colored sprite, trying to get close enough to the enemy to hit the button for a melee attack, or trying to line them up for an easily-dodged ranged attack.  I know I shouldn't expect much from the C64, but there were plenty of other games that managed to make this kind of combat exciting.  I just wish the programmers had worked as hard on the fighting as they did the construction mode.

Autoduel (C64, 1985)

Based on the tabeltop RPG "Car Wars", Autoduel was an open-world vehicular combat game set in a Mad Max style future.  The freedom was incredible - you're just a guy with a car, what you do next is up to you.  Enter a demolition derby to earn more money.  Or take a courier job, braving the lawless streets to deliver packages to other cities.  Or go bounty hunting, living off rewards for the outlaws you defeat.  Use the money to improve your car, buy better cars, and equip them with the best weapons.  The game came with an instruction booklet as thick as the RPG itself, designed to look like a vehicle owner's manual.  I'm not sure I've ever seen so much stuff you can do in a C64 game.  It was an incredible sandbox game...

...except for the gameplay.  The cars moved too sluggishly, making it very difficult.  It was hard to practice enough to get better, because of the extraordinarily long loading times.  The rules were as harsh as an RPG - if you died, you had to make a new character.  So a typical game session might go like this:  Wait 10 minutes for the game to load.  Start a new character, spend several minutes making your first car.  Several more minutes getting your first courier job.  Leave town so you can drive to your courier destination.  Wait 5 more minutes for it to load the area between the towns.  Get attacked by outlaws.  Try to flee, because the starting cash isn't enough to buy weapons that don't suck.  Get killed because your car is slow and hard to control.  Realize you have to start the entire game over because of the harsh death rules.  Play a different game because this one is so frustrating.

WWE All-Stars (3DS, 2011)

But games that are almost perfect aren't limited to the C64.  More recently I owned "WWE Wrestling All-Stars" for the 3DS, and it was nearly incredible.  It had an impressive roster split between classic and modern wrestlers.  The classic wrestlers included all my favorites from my teen years, with multiple outfits to represent different years of their career.  We have Andre in his classic black on-strap leotard, but we also have him in his early years, with the long hair and the more traditional briefs.  There were multiple rings, a create-a-wrestler mode, and all the match types I've come to expect from wrestling games (singles, tag team, steel cage, etc).  In short, it is the perfect WWE game...

...except for the gameplay.  The matches just feel slow and tedious.  To be fair, I haven't had a lot of luck with wrestling games, even the ones that received great reviews.  So this is probably just me.  I haven't played a wrestling game I liked since the days of 2D sprites.  Something happened when they converted to polygons - they stopped being fun arcade button mashers and started becoming wrestling simulators.  Which is fine for a certain type of gamer, but I don't think I'm the target audience.

Super Smash Bros for the 3DS

Still reading this far?  Cool.  So anyway, the new Smash Bros 3DS game.  I'm really enjoying this game.  It has a lot going for it.  For one thing, it has a huge roster of fighters (51 once all are unlocked), with several alternate looks for each.  Some of those alternate looks are practically new characters.  For instance, instead of alternate colors, Bowser Jr's alts are the other 7 Koopalings.  A couple of the characters have male and female versions, Little Mac has both his NES look and his green wireframe arcade look, one of Peach's alts is Daisy, one of Fox's alts is Wolf, and so on.

The game has a ton of modes, and hundreds of unlockable things, so you never run out of things to do.  If all you feel like doing is random fights, you can just go to the highly-customizable Smash Mode.  But there's also Classic Mode where you fight a lot of different types of matches until you get to the boss.  Not to mention Smash Run, where you run around a level fighting enemies like a traditional platformer, collecting powerup icons, until it ends with a traditional Smash battle using the powerups you collected.  It even has a mode where you fight every fighter in the game, in the order their games were released.  With characters like Pac-Man and Mr Game & Watch, it's practically the history of video games in the palm of my hand.

The addition of Miis is particularly nice.  I always like Create-A-Fighter modes, so the ability to put myself into SSB is wonderful.  You start with any Mii in your collection, then choose three basic fighting styles - fists, sword, or gun.  Then you can choose from a few special moves, pick some stat-boosting icons to help you specialize your character, and pick an outfit and head accessories (more of which are unlockable).  It's not perfect but it's a really great feature.

All in all, I'd have to say it's the perfect Nintendo fighting game...

...except for - you guessed it - the gameplay.  Now to be fair, I enjoy this game's controls more than any other game mentioned in this blog.  It is highly polished, and everything I dislike about it is just personal taste.  I still think it deserves all the 9 star reviews it's getting.  Unlike the C64 examples, this game's controls were not a casualty of limited technology; this is exactly the game the programmers were intending to make.  However, I personally hate being forced to play 2D games with the circle pad.  I have a firm belief that 3D games work better with analog pads, and 2D games work better with d-pads.  Fighting games in particular should be mapped to d-pads because they require a lot of precise button-tapping, and often involve a lot of pounding that's harsh on the more delicate analog sticks.  And before you think I'm being paranoid, there have already been a lot of reports of people breaking their circle pads playing SSB.  I really hope these breakages cause Nintendo to release a patch that lets you use the d-pad.

I also have trouble keeping track of my character in the chaotic battles.  The game does attempt to make this easier for you: it has a couple of options for putting an outline around characters, and it puts "P1" above your head at all times... but it's still easy to lose track of where you are.  And while the game has a lot of different play modes, most of them aren't very good.  I'm glad they're there, but after trying each once, I generally found myself going back to the plain old Smash mode over and over.  Some of the minigames in particular are tedious - I've hated home run stadium since the last game.

But despite these shortcomings - most of which are really my shortcomings - it's a fantastic game.