Although I don't appreciate the rip on Soul Caliber in there...
The SSB games are by far and away the most accessible of fighting games. I doubt you're going to enjoy ANY fighting game if you don't find a SSB game at least mildly entertaining. Soul Calibur is far less accessible than SSB, and Yahtzee doesn't like fighting games, so what'd you expect?
Unlockable characters are a staple of the SSB series (see the first few games if you don't know) so I wouldn't see why anybody would complain about that in the first place (lots of fighting games have these; not all but a good portion).
Just because it is a trope doesn't mean it doesn't suck. Yahtzee has pointed out on MANY occaisions that accepted as normal things in video games often suck, and the Escapist has an entire article about it. This is a good example of something which someone thought was a good idea, but is actually a really, really horrible one.
I think this was a totally valid point.
Mr Yhatzee has stirred a bloody hornets nest with this one. Standard rule of thumb, if you want to get a big thread going, say something that will really infuriate some whilst leaving everyone else jumping for joy.
Looking at the thread though, it is overwhelmingly people who are saying "YAY YOU BASHED ON ALL THE SSBB LOVERS", little realizing that they were as bad or worse than the SSBB lovers themselves by making the posts. Then there are a smattering of other people saying it was funny/saying it was not very funny/saying SSBB wasn't that bad in equal measure.
I do believe there is skill required to win and that you're just suppose to have fun with it and not take it seriously. My friends take it way too seriously, look up tier listings and I STILL kick their ass. It's all about skill! Randomness such as items make it more fun, believe me. Ok so they don't hold items in tournaments and only play the Final Destination stage because they can't have any "arbitration." Guess what, the trip event is arbitrary and by their logic this game shouldn't even be admissible in video game tournaments!
Tier lists are totally pointless to the average player; they're only helpful for determining how healthy a game is. Choosing a top tier character won't make you a better player, which is really what helps you beat your friends anyway.
This review was the most hilarious of all.
Do you know what's even even more hilarious than that?
Tasting sweet fanboy tears such as yourself.
You enjoy tasting your own tears?
Thing is, I don't care if he doesn't like the game. You do. Therefore, you are a fanboy. Therefore, you are what you claim to hate. I suggest you read through the Something Positive archives, I'm pretty sure he has suggestions for people like you.
My complaint about the review was that I did not find it funny. He basically spent all his time swearing and ranting but not actually being funny. Yes, the Groundhog's Day reference was funny, as were some other points, but a lot of it just wasn't very humorous. Anyone who thinks that just yelling a lot, ranting, and swearing automatically makes something funny is retarded, and I think he knows it as well as I do and misjudged the line (or simply didn't care in this case). These are all great additions TO humor, but in and of themselves simply lack the shock value anymore to be funny to a large segment of the population.
I don't comment on his videos normally, because I enjoy them; I only commented on this one because I didn't. I really enjoy Zero Punctuation typically, and its something of an annoyance when something which comes out once a week and makes me normally laugh with glee simply falls flat. Yes, I can be doing other things with my time, but I'd prefer to have my high-fun entertainment.
A review really shouldn't alter your liking of a game. The point of a review is to advise those who have not already played it.
Indeed.
Personally I'm growing bored of the argument here. Yahtzee said it best: The people who already love Brawl aren't going to change their mind after seeing the review. People here are just arguing in favor or against the video based on their subjective views, instead of the facts presented.
I am not "arguing against the video"; I'm saying it wasn't amusing to me because he didn't put in enough funny. He sacrificed humor for vitriol, and it showed and the review suffered for it. Its like the game designers who sacrifice fun for commenting on X; you aren't complaining for the commentary but because they sacrificed something else which was more worthwhile for it.
1. The single player campaign is long - frankly, too long
I disagree. The game is primarily a multiplayer game; who is going to play the single player campaign? The guy who enjoys fighting games and doesn't have any friends. That is who the campaign is for (as well as the nintendo fanboys), and to that group, longer is better.
2. The "fighting" kind of sucks a whole lot for a fighting game, to the point that it lacks any kind of obvious control. His point about the camera being zoomed out and the action obscured could only have been made clearer if he'd said what I'm (probably not everybody else) all thinking - you never feel like you're really in control of your character, or having much influence on what's happening on the screen.
He didn't complain about the control. He did complain about the visuals, which may or may not be a valid complaint. I agree on the camera angles sucking sometimes, though.
And saying "you never feel in control of your character" actually says "you suck at this game", because plenty of people DO feel they have control over their characters. However, he never SAID that he did not feel he was in control of his character.
He did complain about button mashing, but people who don't play fighter games, and don't want to learn how to (which is understandable), will resort to it and not have much fun. Shock and surprise! It is like someone not learning how to aim in FPSs because they find them insipid.
3. The game has unlockable everything falling wholesale out of its sensitive bits, which he construes as horrible. As a tremendously anti-social gamer (also a self-diagnosed Aspy, lest anyone think I'm denigrating his disease) who still kind of enjoys a good fighting game, unlockable stuff is wonderful. I like finding out that something I did reasonably well made more content happen. It's like that feeling you get when you finally finish putting together your PC and it turns out to be more than the sum of blood and frustration you just had to sit through. But he makes a fair point - in a game that is at its best when you know precisely dick about what you're doing in the first place, putting in a bunch of incredibly obscure (I had to look up who Marth was, though I managed to guess all the Earthbound associates) unlockable crap that you don't actually get access to until ten hours in - or approximately two and one half parties' worth of coherent play - is the kind of stupid that's normally reserved for reality programming on basic cable, and the only reason Nintendo can get away with it is that it has such a massive and rabid base of fans dangling from its genitals that they could make the game explode in the console and burn down your house and only expect to hear mild complaints. Unlockable anything in a casual multiplayer game is criminally stupid.
I don't mind unlockable stuff, but he's absolutely right that unlockable characters (and to a lesser degree, levels) is annoying. It is a party game, and the purpose is to have fun with it. There's nothing more complex about playing Sonic than Mario, so why is Sonic locked, especially when a number of people bought the game to beat up one or the other? Exactly.
4. His frustration also proves a point - specifically, that this ridiculous excuse for a game seems to be all anybody is talking about. Well, two weeks ago, but you get the idea. When enough people are discussing something like this, you expect it to be either really good or really bad, and this game is neither. It's a barely tolerable platformer strapped to a fighting game engine more interested in mascots and bright colors than it is with gameplay. That's the formula for below average. This is nothing anybody should be going on about. It is not revolutionary. It is not an affront to God. It's just a thoroughly meh game, and the fact that the gaming community, at least temporarily, was gripped with the sort of rabid obsession over the title that normally leads to restraining orders is incredibly frustrating and annoying to those of us who "don't get it." I can only imagine what it's like when you're a guy who's expected to write one funny review every week and read it over the air with clever and entertaining accompanying animation and you realize that, like it or not, you're going to have to address this.....thing whether you want to or not. It says something about the culture - probably not complimentary - and we deserve to be chastised for it.
This is just dumb. His frustration is pointless, because, let's face it, huge numbers of people really enjoy the game and thus, objectively speaking, it must be good as otherwise people wouldn't be tarding out over it. Really, there is no other way than popularity and influence TO judge a game by. I think this is just sour grapes - if you don't like fighting games, you probably won't like SSBB, but that doesn't make it a bad game.
And the SSB series is, in many people's opinions and probably in terms of sales as well, one of the best if not THE best fighting games around.
Claiming that it is a meh game is to show your complete, total, and utter ignorance of reality - I am not one of those people who praises Halo, but a game does not sell as many copies as Halo did (or as many SYSTEMS as Halo did) if it isn't enjoyable. I have played Halo 2 and I found its highly intuitive control styles to make the game a lot more fun to pick up and play with your friends. I suspect that, along with running around in power armor and presumably something cool in the single player campaign, are what makes the game popular.
SSBB is simply a sequel in a successful francise and it brings back and updates many things people love. Claiming that it sucks is to simply claim that people are cretins. The reality is more complex; people are cretins, after all, but oftentimes things which are genuinely good are in fact genuinely well-regarded. It is like the retards who claim to hate Tolkien yet own the books, watched the movies, and constantly are engrossed in the modern fantasy genre which largely grew out of LotR. You're pretending to be all elitist when the reality is you're just trying to prove how alternative you are. Sorry, but you aren't elite, especially if you cannot accept reality.
The reality is that people like the game for a reason. YOU may not enjoy the game, as a person, but that doesn't make the game bad. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, either, just that you aren't in the target audience. You'll never understand games, though, if you don't understand why games like Halo and SSBB are successful.
