It’s been a month since release and I’ve been playing this game on and off and must say, I’ve never, in my 25+ years of playing video games, ever played a game this popular that controls this poorly. The characters and idea are appealing, but the controls are so terrible I can’t fathom how this series has garnered the massive fanbase that it clearly does have.
The SSE mode is well done, except for the fact that the characters control like hell when attempting any sort of platforming. The jumping, to me anyways, is about on par with the original Ghouls and Ghosts.
When the screen zooms out so you can see all 4 brawlers at once it turns into a giant button masher.
Jumping. Jesus. No matter what controller scheme I use the jumping sucks. Why on earth don’t they let you do your double jump at any point during your first jump? Why make us wait until the apex of our jump? Easily the worst thing about this game.
The characters get stuck in animations so that when an opponent runs through you to your backside you can’t turn around to fight, you have to wait until all your
animations wrap up and in the meantime get wailed on by your enemy.
Finally, what’s with the limited blocking? It’s a totally unnecessary limitation and damn near ruins the game for me. The blocking bubble thing recharges so slowly that I never really recover it during a fight.
So, that’s my review from a month later. Clearly I am in the tiny minority with the negative review, as the interwebz are littered with frothing at the mouth SSB fanboys who love this game to death. I really want to like this game because it is a nice premise and the graphics are nice. I like the characters too. But the controls keep me from playing this thing for more than 5 minutes at a time.
(I don’t know if being a big Street Fighter fan is what’s throwing me off. I play this like SF)
This is pretty true. Although the better you get, the more able you are to play zoomed out.
Huh? I don’t know what’s going on with your controllers but this isn’t true.
This is an added level of complexity to the game. Some moves take longer to recover from (generally smash attacks vs. regular directional attacsk). Also, some characters have slower recovery than others. In general, the rule is the stronger the attack, the longer the recovery.
Do you use dodging? (Holding the shield and then hitting a direction)…
Apart from the jumping, you seem to dislike a lot of the things that I love about this game. I think that playing it like street fighter is definitely throwing you off. I suspect this might be where the majority of your frustrating is coming from.
I will agree that the controls are a little awkward during the platforming parts of SSE.
I have a few tips if you’re interested:
You should be dodging more often than you are blocking. It lets you get around people’s attacks to get them from behind. Also, if someone connects with your shield, it will cause your character to brace himself/herself and you will have some recovery time.
Holding down (crouching) is sometimes a good replacement for the blocking. You’ll still take damage but it’s much harder to get knocked around (depending on the attack). Also, if I’m not mistaken, you recover more quickly.
Play with friends at your level or practice in Group mode against computers before going online. I find that online can have a slight delay between you pressing a button and your character performing the move. Also, the mandatory 4 person games will cause a lot of being knocked around. Maybe try practicing against a low level computer to get used to all of your moves and their speed/strength. Then you can add more computers as you become more experienced.
Part of the game involves being knocked around like a ragdoll in low gravity and you either have to learn to not be bothered by it, go crazy, or stop playing.
I hope you can come to enjoy this game. I think there’s almost a hump in the learning curve after which the game really starts to open up strategy-wise. It’s surprisingly deep. But obviously not everyone can like a game and if it’s not for you then it’s not for you.
Some might disagree, but I say they definitely are. Apart from some bells and whistles the game play is almost identical to the Melee which was made for the gamecube controller.
Or maybe I can’t get used to any other control scheme because I played Melee so much.
I will try the dodging. Maybe that will help because I am mostly just blocking.
Like I said, I know I’m in the minority here. I want to like this game. I’ve been playing with a wavebird since we got it. Should I switch to the Wiimote?
Let me give you an example of where I was getting aggravated:
At one point, earlyish on, when you get Ness and Lucas in SSE, you have to fight this spider thing that jumps up and lands on you, shoots rockets at you etc… It’s very tall. The only way to jump over it, I think is with the double jump, but I just couldn’t get over him and every time he charged me I would get smashed. Can I roll under him with a dodge?
I was able to beat him, and i tended to roll 2-3 times under him rather than over him.
Though my friend who was playing with Lucas at the time managed somehow to jump ONTO the guy and start wailing on him as well.
But yeah, dodging by ROLLING is MUCH more effective and quicker than shields. I tend to use the shield only to block projectiles, I try to roll through everything else.
Have you ever played a Smash Bros. game before? Because as someone who has played countless hours of various fighting games and was heavily into Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Capcom vs. SNK 2, and who played SSB: Melee to death, let me just say that you cannot approach Super Smash Brothers like Street Fighter anymore than you can approach Street Fighter like Mortal Kombat or Mortal Kombat like Power Stone.
You’re right on a few points. The controls for SSE are kind of clumsy. But SSE is just a big elaborate extra; it’s no more part of the game than Tekken 3’s weird beat-em-up mode was. Don’t get too hung up on it (and have a lot of patience saved up when you get to the Great Maze).
But I echo the comments of others regarding your issues. I’m not really sure what’s going on with the jumping at all; what you described is not how it works. I turn off stick jumping and just use the X button to jump; see if that helps.
Also, if you’re familiar with any type of fighting game, you should definitely already be familiar with being vulnerable during an attack animation after missing. That’s one of the fundamental principles of fighting games: Yeah, that Dragon Punch is really strong, but miss and you’re going to get Flash Kicked on the way down.
I’m not sure what size TV you’re playing on, but zooming out during 4-player matches really isn’t that bad unless you’re playing on New Pork City. You should eventually get used to controlling your character even when he’s tiny.
Oh, God, New Pork City is terrible. It’s like Hyrule Temple, only even bigger, and there are so many little platforms that it’s really easy to fall off and die without even noticing.
Do you know about third jumps? With the exception of Yoshi (who can not be knocked away during his second jump) every character has a “third” jump with their Up + B move. For Lucas and Ness it’s the most difficult to use as you have to control their range attack, make it loop around you and hit yourself from the bottom. You can see what I mean about the looping around here.
Also, with dodging you can dodge down while on the ground and you basically just dodge on the spot (no rolling). Also, you can dodge in the air but you have to land on the ground again before performing any other action.
I don’t find Hyrule Temple to be bad at all, but New Pork City is just a pain in the ass. I think it’s because the platforms blend in with the fanciful background and even if all the players are next to each other, the stage remains permanently zoomed out. What an awful stage design, and it bothers me because I want to hear the Earthbound/Mother music. :mad:
I think Hyrule is often very annoying because it’s easy for people to run away, and the Tunnel of Life makes it very hard to kill people, so matches can take a very long time. I’ve seriously seen a guy manage to get up to around 300% in that area, simply because he was good at DI-ing attacks aimed at him so that it either didn’t hit, or didn’t knock him out of the safe zone.
I like Hyrule Temple because I generally like long matches, but New Pork City is just insane. And while I like its color scheme and music (and the Ultimate Chimera), the whole thing is so busy and colorful that it’s hard to see exactly where the platforms are when, say, a Smash Ball appears in the upper right corner of the screen and everything zooms out while everyone rushes toward it.
I do have to say that I’m happy that the Ice Climbers got a cool stage after being burdened with the crappy upward-scrolling stage that nobody liked (and in which it was very easy to accidentally kill yourself if you were playing as the Ice Climbers) in Melee.
The problem that ruins the game for me is that it seems like I have to release directions to change them. For instance, if I was moving right and needed to do an up attack, I would have to stop moving, let go of the joystick (let it return to center), and then hit up and the attack to get it to do anything other than the right attack. And since using a joystick makes that pretty much impossible, I started losing interest. It was unbelievably frustrating to recognize openings for a particular move and not have it work because a different move went off that I didn’t intend to do. it was basically the worst controlling game I’ve ever played (that was really popular). On a side note, I was never able to “dodge” once. (My guess is that I was holding a direction when I hit the shield button, and I’d have to release it and repress it to do the maneuver, ugh.)
Oh, and character balance is so broken and hopeless that once you find the “good” characters, you might as well not even bother playing others anymore.
In other words, I’m really, really bad at this game. And I’m generally pretty competitive in fighting games.
I don’t know if that’s the case with this game yet… I’ve been playing with my friends, and though we each have our characters that we REALLY like and do really well with, it’s not a consistent guaranteed win sorta deal. There always seems to be another character that’s out there to counter a specific character. So if I’m up against a consistent Dedede player, I just turn to sheik or Sonic, and I have a much better time vs. them, but then they may switch to a Luigi or a Samus character, and I’ve got to figure out another way to defeat them. When all else fails, there’s my trusty ice climbers to try to break up the chaos.
I thought the game did a pretty good job of balancing. Same with Melee- It had some characters that were easy to play with and easily able to be powered up- so that we’d always have matches where someone was Fox, Sheik, or Luigi just due to the skill and ease they could use them. But that wouldn’t mean that weaker characters couldn’t be just as effective and we’d end up having Jigglypuffs, IceClimbers, and other characters that seemed “weaker” on first glance being mastered and being JUST as powerful as the other characters.
The key is to master the Dodge, and it REALLY helps to get familiar with the controls- such as the Shake smash feature or the lil’ yellow wavebird joystick for instant smashes to fix your “return to center” joystick issues.
I would actually be disappointed if all characters were equally powerful. After a threshold of enough good characters in a variety of playstyles, adding mediocre or bad characters adds more value than another good character. Having a few mediocre or bad characters allow experienced players play against new players without the new players getting obliterated or the experienced player getting bored. The only real downsides I see to having some characters is new players accidently picking bad ones, or getting emotionally attached to a bad one.
I notcied the exact same thing about making your character recognize a change in direction. It’s especially bad when using a picked up gun item. You really have to wait a good second before you can face the other way after you finish firing a gun.
I have figured out the dodge a little bit. It’s not terribley consistent though. IT seems as though I throw up the shield and stand there most of the time because I guess you need to hit the shield and direction buttons together at the same moment.
I’ve gotten better at recovering from smashes though. The little tutorial someone linked to above was helpful. I’m getting further thru SSE but the controls still don’t really work for it.
I find the worst thing about this thing is the Nintendo WFC. It is so unreliable it’s pathetic. I try to connect and will either sit on the connect screen for 5 minutes most of the time or when I do get through and start a match no one ever joins me.
I’m gettting the controls down though a little better so it may get better for me. I didn’t know you could use the yellow stick for smash controls. I’ll have to try that.
