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Friday 22 February, 2008
GAME PLAY 2
The second round of play changed somewhat. As I don’t personally own this game I was not able to get two consecutive play sessions rather this one happened roughly a week later with the same 4 players. It was clear that the other three had been playing a lot in the week that had passed and were all now playing what they had determined to be their best character. I too decided I would stick to one character, one that they had not yet unlocked at the previous gaming session. I chose to play as (SPOILERS FROM HERE UNTIL --- Wolf, Fox’s rival in Starfox 64. I liked the feel of this character, while he was slower than Fox or Falco he packs a punch and has many tricky special moves which were fun to attempt to master. Additionally many of the items had been turned off for this play session as they had been deemed unnecessary and also a hindrance to game play. Finally they had settled on only playing Final Destination… but I got them to play some of the unlocked new levels such as the arcade Mario Bros map and arcade Donkey Kong map. --- SPOILERS END HERE.) This second session while much more intense was enjoyable nonetheless.
DESIGN
The design of all the Smash games is fairly simple. The game has single dimension cardinality with jumping to simulate the simple platformer feeling of most the characters came from. The single player presents some challenges, but often times the AI is outwitted simply by making them traverse dangerous sections of the map multiple times. The true challenge of the game presents its self when the player is faced with another intelligent human player. Items can prove to be either an enhancement to game play or an annoying means to gib another player when they shouldn’t have died yet and thus giving people an arbitrary advantage. The movement of most characters is really smooth and additional techniques like the roll dodge, air dodge, and the new to Brawl running grab and head jump serve to make play all the more interesting. Additionally to correct the fact that large characters like Donkey Kong and Bowser were bad in the previous game in Brawl the designers made it such that large characters aren’t pushed around by lighter attacks. That is a quick flurry of blows from link wouldn’t even make Bowser flinch as he moves in for a devastating smash attack. The wave dash was removed in this version of the game to mixed reactions in the gamer community… Some who had mastered the technique mourn it’s loss however those who have been owned by the advanced technique feel that it was unfair in the first place. Overall the game built upon what it did right in it’s previous two installments and worked to correct it’s flaws and ended up with a game that is sure to be a favorite just like it’s predecessors.
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