• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Project M Demo: Smash Bros. Brawl with Melee Gameplay! [Update: Out Now]

Niblet

Member
Came into this topic thinking "pfft, fan project. Why bother?" My second thought was "why can't they have fun with the game as it is?". Then I read the OP, skipped to the newest posts and saw the demonstration videos of Lucario and Charizard. Holy shit, I'm totally in support of this project. I was fine with Sakurai's team making the game deliberately off-putting for competitive play, but I now think that this viewpoint was deficient. It is plain to see that an important chunk of players were very much alienated with the release of Brawl. This is almost never a good thing. The amount of work to try and "fix" the game is a testament to how dedicated a fanbase the competitive community is for this game. In retrospect, it is very disappointing that Sakurai made such bad decisions in the design of brawl. It screams to me that Sakurai does not support his game being played as such.


Has Sakurai ever gone on record about the competitive play of Smash Bros.? I want to hear his reasoning for making brawl so frustrating for competitive play.
 

Boss Doggie

all my loli wolf companions are so moe
Barrow Roll said:
Then play Brawl or one of it's many mods? The Charizard video perfectly explained why they were split: so they could further develop each Pokemon. Cutting the gimmicks like the stamina system and switching on death for 3 new well rounded characters sounds like a damn good trade to me. Also, due to technical limitations, each Pokemon could not have a new Down-B if Pokemon Trainer was kept.

You're probably right that these Pokemon would not have made it into the game by themselves but they're far more iconic to any long time Pokemon fan than Pichu or Lucario so I don't really see the problem here.

And conversely, what if people just want to play 1 or 2 of the Pokemon without having to switch? I hate Ivysaur but I love using Squirtle and Charizard.

Except that you could just remove the stamina but keep everything else intact, you know? Pokemon Trainer is essentially about having different mons that support each other's weaknesses by means of changing, after all.
 

Anth0ny

Member
Bryan1321 said:
Quick Question:

The OT says UPDATE (im reading the OT again) and im not finding any updates for the proyect M demo that was released some time ago

Does anyone have it?

Or it wasnt updated at all ?

When this thread was originally made, the first demo was not released. After a couple of days, it was released, and the title was changed. I'll make a new thread when the full version is released.

Niblet said:
Came into this topic thinking "pfft, fan project. Why bother?" My second thought was "why can't they have fun with the game as it is?". Then I read the OP, skipped to the newest posts and saw the demonstration videos of Lucario and Charizard. Holy shit, I'm totally in support of this project. I was fine with Sakurai's team making the game deliberately off-putting for competitive play, but I now think that this viewpoint was deficient. It is plain to see that an important chunk of players were very much alienated with the release of Brawl. This is almost never a good thing. The amount of work to try and "fix" the game is a testament to how dedicated a fanbase the competitive community is for this game. In retrospect, it is very disappointing that Sakurai made such bad decisions in the design of brawl. It screams to me that Sakurai does not support his game being played as such.


Has Sakurai ever gone on record about the competitive play of Smash Bros.? I want to hear his reasoning for making brawl so frustrating for competitive play.

Hmm...kinda.

Nintendo's classic GameCube scrapper Super Smash Bros. Melee was "too difficult", according to the game's creator, and any future title in the series will not be aimed at the same hardcore crowd.

Masahiro Sakurai told Famitsu (translated by 1Up), "I had created Smash Bros. to be my response to how hardcore-exclusive the fighting game genre had become over the years. But why did I target it so squarely toward people well-versed in videogames, then?

"That's why I tried to aim for more of a happy medium with Brawl's play balance," he explained of the excellent 2008 Wii follow-up.

"There are three Smash Bros. games out now," he continued, "but even if I ever had a chance at another one, I doubt we'll ever see one that's as geared toward hardcore gamers as Melee was.

"Melee fans who played deep into the game without any problems might have trouble understanding this, but Melee was just too difficult."


"If we want new people from this generation of gamers to come in, then we need it accessible, simple, and playable by anyone. You can't let yourself get preoccupied with nothing but gameplay and balance details.

"That's where the core of the Smash Bros. concept lies, not on doggedly keeping the game the way it was before," he concluded.

While he might have overdone it with the difficulty curve, Sakurai went on to explain that he's still a big fan of his 2001 masterpiece.

"Melee is the sharpest game in the series. It's pretty speedy all around and asks a lot of your coordination skills. Fans of the first Smash Bros. got into it quickly, and it just felt really good to play."

Sakurai also revealed a little about the effect the game's intense development period had on him.

"On a personal level, Melee had an extremely grueling development cycle. Some of my other games did, too, but Melee sticks out far ahead of the pack in my mind.

"I worked on that game for 13 months straight, after all, without a single Sunday or holiday off that whole time. During parts of it, I was living a really destructive lifestyle - I'd work for over 40 hours in a row, then go back home to sleep for four."
 

Acerac

Banned
I know I'm a bit lttp, but I finally got around to downloading this.

HOLY SHIT. IT'S SO AWESOME.

Any other Melee players of old would be doing themselves a disservice by not getting this amazing mod. This is what Brawl should have been.

My only problem? It's not finished and I want to try out all the awesome! Is there any idea when the latest build will be widely available? I heard that a build with far more characters than the 15 on the beta was being played at a recent tournament, is there anywhere I can get my hands on that?
 

TreIII

Member
Acerac said:
My only problem? It's not finished and I want to try out all the awesome! Is there any idea when the latest build will be widely available? I heard that a build with far more characters than the 15 on the beta was being played at a recent tournament, is there anywhere I can get my hands on that?

The "ready for mass consumption" final version won't be ready for a while. It's officially operating under "when it's ready" as a release date.
 

Acerac

Banned
Fair enough. The fact that the project is progressing is awesome news, and I'm extremely happy to be able to enjoy what's already available.

I'll just busy myself with the characters available until the devs feels that more of the cast is ready for play by the masses. Any patch that covers new characters will be my most anticipated game of the year, though if I have to wait until the game is finished I understand.

I'm not sure who exactly on the dev team reads these forums, but you guys are awesome! Keep up the great work! It's awesome to play the sequel Melee deserved.
 

TreIII

Member
Ahhh...hearing that kind of stuff really gets me amped to play this, once it's finally done. If nothing else, I could certainly see my circle of friends having fun with this for a good, long while.
 

Revven

Member
hmmm does this mod work if you load games off a hard drive?

Stupid dual layered dvds always fail on me T___T.

Yes, you can play this with the game off of a hard drive, as long as you know how to load the code set with the loader you're using anyway (and said loader needs to be able to load more than 256 lines of code with the gameconfig.txt provided).
 

Schnei871

Member
I always wanted to play the first demo but never got around to it. I'm gonna jump at this one though. Been playin brawl lately with Dolphin. Super pumped
 

TreIII

Member
Huh. And here, I was wondering when we were going to hear anymore about this. I look forward to playing the new version of Bowser!
 

Mistake

Member
hmm, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Brawl+ kind of gives me the best of both already. It's a little faster than Vanilla, and more balanced. Obviously it's no Melee, but I think it's best for my group of friends (they hated me before brawl). It looks really good though. Using the Hackless method, is it possible to load on the same SD Brawl+ is on? I can imagine it would create issues, so if not, I have a second one anyway that I can try it on
 

Revven

Member
hmm, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Brawl+ kind of gives me the best of both already. It's a little faster than Vanilla, and more balanced. Obviously it's no Melee, but I think it's best for my group of friends (they hated me before brawl). It looks really good though. Using the Hackless method, is it possible to load on the same SD Brawl+ is on? I can imagine it would create issues, so if not, I have a second one anyway that I can try it on

It would be best to have two separate SD Cards.
 
Is there any word on whether they're working on a patch for PAL versions of the game? Admittedly don't take COMPETITIVE SMASH seriously in the slightest but still greatly admire all the modding work behind Brawl and would be interested in giving Project M a try.
 

udivision

Member
Y'know, it's pretty sad when the developer comes up with the Homer Simpson "Throw it all in there" design and it's up to the fans to create the sleek and refined sports car. oh well.
 

Hero

Member
Let me know if Ike and Sheik are better.

Y'know, it's pretty sad when the developer comes up with the Homer Simpson "Throw it all in there" design and it's up to the fans to create the sleek and refined sports car. oh well.

Except Sakurai even admitted that Brawl wasn't aimed at the hardcore crowd which Melee was. I don't see how that's sad at all because the project's goal was not to continue upon that.
 

BGBW

Maturity, bitches.
Y'know, it's pretty sad when the developer comes up with the Homer Simpson "Throw it all in there" design and it's up to the fans to create the sleek and refined sports car. oh well.

If your refined sports cars are equal to removing Wario's bike then I'm sticking with the bus.
 

udivision

Member
Despite what I said, I like Brawl. Brawl+ and P:M are good for the novelty but after using those mods a couple of times we went back to vanilla without a blink. In fact, my biggest gripe with the game (other than online) is simply that other people don't like it.

Brawl's direction would've made a lot more sense if Melee had bombed, people had hated it more than 64, and in a frantic bit of over correction Sakurai headed the series down a more casual friendly path.
 

SykoTech

Member
Man, it looks so much better than the original game already. Definitely want to try it.

Y'know, it's pretty sad when the developer comes up with the Homer Simpson "Throw it all in there" design and it's up to the fans to create the sleek and refined sports car. oh well.

Heh. I guess Nintendo knows what it's like to be Sega in this instance.
 

Revven

Member
Why not keep both? It's his bizarre standard B chomp move that irks me about vanilla Brawl Wario. Replace that with his shoulder barge.

The thing is, Bite is actually a good move when used well. Bike's only purpose was for recovery, for balance reasons and to stick to a more Wario Land stylized moveset they went with Shoulder Bash as Side B. Plus, it makes tons more sense to be mapped to Side B... because he's traveling forward while doing it.

There's no way in keeping both when this game is supposed to be balanced. If he had both, he would have quite the ridiculous recovery. He could theoretically pull off something as ridiculous as this: bike > jump > side B and half the time he wouldn't even need to use Side B afterwards because of how much horizontal air the bike covers, never mind verticality once he jumps off of it.

Side B as shoulder bash is a lot more fun seriously, especially since you can jump (only from the ground) and continue it into the air and the way it works is just all kinds of awesome.

A ton of work has been put into this mod and a lot of thought has gone into each character, people really shouldn't scoff at it or be upset over a certain character's move getting axed, give it a try when it comes out and then make your deliberation.

Hero said:
Let me know if Ike and Sheik are better.

Sheik is her Melee self, so yes, she's automatically better than she was in Brawl. As far as Ike goes, he's certainly much better than he was in Brawl but where he fits with against the rest of the cast remains to be seen (though he can pull off some pretty cool stuff, so it's definitely worth anyone's time to mess around with him a bit, namely his grounded Quick Draw jump cancel).
 

WillyFive

Member
I wasn't a fan of the changes made back when the demo came out (especially what they did to the gravity), but I guess I'm up for a new Smash Bros. experience.
 

Revven

Member
Is there any word on whether they're working on a patch for PAL versions of the game? Admittedly don't take COMPETITIVE SMASH seriously in the slightest but still greatly admire all the modding work behind Brawl and would be interested in giving Project M a try.

Unfortunately, a PAL version doesn't seem to be in the works. I'm sure the team wants to, but the codes made in the last year have not probably been ported to PAL, on top of all the character changes that would need to be ported as well to the PAL character files.

You could always get a NSTC copy of Brawl through certain means (I'm sure you know what I'm referring to) if you have Homebrew installed. But that's totally up to you.
 
The thing is, Bite is actually a good move when used well. Bike's only purpose was for recovery, for balance reasons and to stick to a more Wario Land stylized moveset they went with Shoulder Bash as Side B. Plus, it makes tons more sense to be mapped to Side B... because he's traveling forward while doing it.

There's no way in keeping both when this game is supposed to be balanced. If he had both, he would have quite the ridiculous recovery. He could theoretically pull off something as ridiculous as this: bike > jump > side B and half the time he wouldn't even need to use Side B afterwards because of how much horizontal air the bike covers, never mind verticality once he jumps off of it.

Side B as shoulder bash is a lot more fun seriously, especially since you can jump (only from the ground) and continue it into the air and the way it works is just all kinds of awesome.

A ton of work has been put into this mod and a lot of thought has gone into each character, people really shouldn't scoff at it or be upset over a certain character's move getting axed, give it a try when it comes out and then make your deliberation.
Well said. It would be completely redundant to have two B moves that propel Wario forward and aid in recovery. The shoulder charge is a more balanced and riskier recovery, has more applications on stage and is more iconic of the two moves. Why they only made it his forward smash in Brawl is honestly baffling.

I wasn't a fan of the changes made back when the demo came out (especially what they did to the gravity), but I guess I'm up for a new Smash Bros. experience.
Then you probably won't enjoy the gravity settings here. For Melee veterans, data was pulled and imported directly from Melee so gravity and fall speeds will match exactly. Brawl newcomers were tinkered on a case by case basis but expect their fall speeds to be more in line with Melee veterans.
 
Is every stage other than Final Destination the boring old Battlefield layout?

No.

I assume no items, either?

You're free to tweak the settings to your liking as you would in regular Brawl. I do remember reading something about Lucas' Final Smash being used to create his Offense Up and how this might cause problems move but I don't know if this is still the case.
 
What is forward smash A?
Addressed in an earlier post.

Is every stage other than Final Destination the boring old Battlefield layout? Yawn. I assume no items, either?
As Holy Order Sol already said, no. But you could at least try to keep an open mind about it.

But the mod is geared towards competitive Melee players so it's no surprise that a montage of clips from a playtester would mostly consist of tournament legal stages since that's what they enjoy playing on. You'll still have your goofy stages and items to play with though.
 

Revven

Member
You'll still have your goofy stages and items to play with though.

Yeah, you'll just... have to be aware of the fact that some items are likely to be broken due to any possible variables or such may be used from them to create certain codes and so forth.

And by broken, I mean broken in the sense that they might not work. At all. Keep in mind, the team isn't (currently) interested in keeping items in good enough states to play with. When they reach a point where they're done with changing the game's engine, then they will likely try to make sure all items work fine for the final release.

But until then, if you want to play with items, just be aware not all items will be bug free.

Also, there are definitely some aspects of this mod that do appeal to players who aren't interested in the game for competitive reasons. It may be geared for competitive players, but there's definitely things in this that should appeal to any Smash fan.

Like I said earlier, there's absolutely no reason to scoff at this mod if you're a Smash fan. If you don't believe me, you'll just have to wait and see when the second demo comes out.
 

Majukun

Member
so it's basically brawl with all the glitches of melee that were corrected in brawl but people stilll want to use them and call them "advanced tecniques"?
 

Riposte

Member
so it's basically brawl with all the glitches of melee that were corrected in brawl but people stilll want to use them and call them "advanced tecniques"?

"Exploits" aside, Melee had a different set of physics that made for a very different game. It was faster, ring outs were more brutal and combos were actually possible.
 

vertopci

Member
so it's basically brawl with all the glitches of melee that were corrected in brawl but people stilll want to use them and call them "advanced tecniques"?

Dunno what glitches you're talking. Unless you consider being able to combo effectively a glitch.
 
Top Bottom