The Crimson Blur, Has Smash Melee Sabotaged Itself?This is a FANTASTIC Conversation, even if you aren't plugged into Melee we discuss a lot of relevant topics about game design and competitive integrity. In today's episode, @TheCrimsonBlur and I talk about the current state of Super Smash Bros Melee and have an open conversation about many of my thoughts and critiques of how things are going in competitive Smash right now. I have followed Melee for over a decade now and in this time I think the scene has become increasingly insular and unable to see some of its decisions and ideas from an outside perspective, so I think if you are a fan of Melee or not this conversation is going to be a breath of fresh air outside the usual talking points that you hear repeated on Twitter and on streams over and over.
We cover a lot of subjects, but some of the main topics are: Who is Melee's REAL father? As I feel Sakurai is heavily over-creddited for the creation of what we love about Smash 64 and Melee. The nature of Melee as being a community made meta, rather than a natural meta, and how this leads to a lot of more radical decisions when it comes to rule sets (even going so far as to modify the game itself). I talk about the current culture of smash, that obsesses over the e-celeb aspects of its players and personalities, but largely ignores the actual tournament organizers and people who support the scene's infrastructure. Of course we touch on the Nintendo vs Melee community controversy and I share my thoughts on how the community should study Nintendo's motivations more, rather than always relying on social media and fan backlash to protect itself (which I do not believe will work forever). We talk about the recent ruleset changes to ban wobbling and add edge grab limits, and how I feel that these rule changes are reactionary and targeted, rather than being a fair case of assessing outliers in a ruleset.
Then there is the sanctioned cheating that is occurring in the ruleset in terms of allowing macros and input processing in the Smash Box as well as the Goomwave. I explain my philosophy behind genuine hardware mods (physical mods) vs cheating mods (introduction of electronics and input processing) and remind the world that Blur, many years ago, predicted these issues but was ignored.
Follow Blur at: https://twitter.com/OXY_Crimson
Awesome thumbnail by @boghogSTG
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00:00:00 Men of Taste Meet At Last!
00:03:00 CRTs Must Be Protected!
00:13:40 Melee is now a PC GAME
00:18:30 Sakurai Is NOT Melee's ONLY FATHER!
00:25:00 Melee is NOT an ACCIDENT! (Inspired by Virtua Fighter 3)
00:31:00 Melee and 64 Are DISTINCT from the Rest of Smash
00:39:00 Modern Smash is Competitive... With Supervision
00:44:00 The Nintendo Option Select, They Don't Actually Have to Support Their Games
00:50:00 Nintendo SAVED GAMES ... If You Ignore Arcades ...
00:55:00 Nintendo Vs Melee Community - Understand Your Enemy
01:04:30 Nintendo Vs Melee Community - Beware the Middle Man
01:12:24 Nintendo Vs Melee Community - The TRUE Heart of the Conflict
01:19:00 The Smash TO Brain Drain ... I'd Take the Check
01:26:00 The Benefits and Dangers of a New Indie Melee
01:31:00 Nintendo is Playing the Long Game, Slow Suffocation of Resources
01:36:00 Content Creators Can Support the Scene ... But Is that Sustainable?
01:47:00 Nintendo Want an Inside Man (Panda Example)
01:56:30 Don't Count on the Masses to Support Homebrew Scene (They Will Turn On You Eventually)
02:04:00 I Want Melee Closer to FGC and Away from New Smash (No More Kids)
02:09:00 Discussing Melee Ruleset - WHO MAKES THE RULES?!
02:16:00 The Tension of Rulesets, VISION VS CONCENSUS
02:23:00 LET'S BE REAL: The Smash Box is Legal MACROS
02:30:00 UCF Was a False Promise, So Now We Have Software and Hardware Mods
02:34:00 Blur PREDICTED the GoomWave, But No One Listened
02:40:00 The Modded Controller Arms Race is Sanctioned Cheating
02:46:00 UCF is Community Mod Over Game - Vanilla Melee Vs New Melee
02:51:00 Melee Caters Ruleset to TARGET the Art of War (Sharp Meta)
03:03:00 "Fun" is Too Subjective For a Ruleset, There is no LIMITING Principal
03:07:00 Since Melee is a Democracy, it Requires Extensive ORGANIZED Voting
03:11:44 Don't Be Tricked by Marketing, the Smash Box is NOT the Hitbox (For The Most Part)
03:19:00 I Don't Care About Dev Intent, I Care About Game Integrity (There is a Key Difference)
03:26:42 Blur's Final Thoughts (Follow Him, This Was a GREAT EP!)
#supersmashbros, #ssbm, #smashbox