Fortunately the new Smash came out and quite blew away all of my expectations, so I'm happy with that (and it ACTUALLY WORKS ONLINE... whereas Brawl was... a slideshow).
It's amazing that you call most fighting games (like SF4) too slow, showcase your utter hate for Melee (in some ways it's shared), then praise Smash 4 as a good game? Smash 4 is possibly the slowest fighting game of all time. The only thing potientally slower was Brawl. The game has almost NOTHING to do with combos, reflexes, tech skill, or anything of that nature. It's almost completely about timing and taking advantage of the game's physics. Which is fine, these are "skills" of their own I suppose, but they only require time to master, not the utter dedication, blood, sweat, and tears of some of the more legendary fighting games. I have no idea how you could be okay with the speed of the new Smash game, then complain that other games are too slow. It is slow by definition. Hell, even the REACTIONS are slow. When a character gets hit, there's like a second delay before the impact even takes effect. Then your character has to go flying. Then you have to float back down to stage. As many problems as Melee has (and there are many, though it's an extremely old game and was never meant for competitive play), speed is not one of them.
And note that I have no consideration of Project M. My thoughts are pretty much the same as always: If a game needs to be modded to be balanced/good, then to me it is bad, and I want no part of even the modded version. It's either good to START with, or it can go jump off a cliff. Besides, by the time that appeared, it was too late anyway.
It's somewhat difficult for me to understand this attitude. Some of the best competitive games of all time such as DotA and Counter-Strike, as well as dearly loved casual mods like Natural Selection, Brutal Doom, Eastern Front, and countless others did NOT come from bad games. Half-Life, Company of Heroes, and the original Doom were bad games? I think those are hailed as some of the most memorable genre masterpieces of all time.
All I'm saying is that just because a game has been modded, does not mean the original game was bad. Even if the original game WAS bad, it does not mean the mod is bad. It just seems silly to me to instantaneously throw your hands up in the air whenever you see the word "mod" attached to something, and say, "Nope, not playing that."
Project M takes all the best things about the Smash series and combines them into one game. It is free to do so precisely because it is a mod. Precisely because there are no developer time constraints or desires to make money. It's just passion for an art in its purest form. You want to tell me that a corporate entity whose primary goal is to make a buck can compete with that? Dream on loverboy.
Note, I dont play Smash as seriously as I do the others. One way or another... it aint one of Arc's games, or similar titles (Melty Blood, Arcana Heart... and so on). And I aint the sort to get into frame data or all that gibberish. Dont care. For Arc's games in particular (and again, those like them), I've never needed that. So I dont get into the habit of doing it in Smash either. Taking advantage of physics or teching or whatever.... either I"m doing it already, or I dont do it at all. I only do whatever seems to work, which is how I've always approached things. This being the case, I have no view on any of that. Particularly as, again, there really arent any other alternatives. With something like Street Fighter, THERE I can be super nitpicky, because there's LOTS of other 2D fighters out there to pick from. But Smash? No. ALL there is is games from that same series.... of which there are exactly FOUR. 1 of which is too damn ancient and uses a controller designed by a madman, and another of which I just dont like. And then Brawl is... Brawl. Slow and cant go online. So right now... that's all there is. It'll do.
That being said, for the sort of game that it is, AKA, not a "pure" 2D fighter, for whatever reason the speed of that series doesnt bug me AS MUCH. Brawl, yes, Brawl was.... slow. I put up with that one though since, well.... there wasnt much other option. Smash 4 may not be quite as fast as I like, but frankly, nothing really is. But it's as good as it's going to get while maintaining that style of gameplay, so.... it's that, or nothing.
Understand also that I play these VERY differently than most players. And I mean all fighters. Guilty Gear, for instance. That's the one I'm best at, and I've bloody well MASTERED it (as opposed to say, Tekken, which I'm fantastically awful at, as with most 3D fighters... no, I dont know why). I've had... alot of chances to prove this, I'll just put it that way. BUT. I dont approach the learning process like other players do. Typical fighting game fans will do things like go into training mode, and spend a million years repeating combos and all that stuff. Me? I'll use training like, ONCE, for every character, to learn the special commands, and that's it. I can learn nothing else there. It doesnt work that way for me. I've often wondered if the damn autism is part of the reason for this, but... whatever. I just learn by diving in and attempting to smash other players. That part kinda comes from playing all of the shmups... they dont give you an easy learning curve. The boss starts out as a horrible screaming nightmare ball, and you learn to live a few seconds more by zooming straight at the horrid thing, over and over and over, dying a million times. So that's what I do in fighters (the process is MUCH easier in fighters). Even combos, I learn purely by doing. Trying to read combo notations gives me a headache and I cant remember them 3 seconds later ANYWAY, and I get bored watching match videos online (and again, couldnt remember the damn things even if I wanted to copy them), so... the only way is to evolve my own combos (which can be a little strange) over normal play, over a length of time. So yeah... doing all of that without any of the usual tools and such, but I can still get to the level I'm at, so I do indeed know quite what can go into fully learning one of these games, and just how deep any of them can be.
Even despite all of that though... my thoughts on the 4th Smash VS the others just dont really change. Maybe it aint the deepest one ever.... but that's fine. Smash, at the core of it's design, isnt really meant to be. It's meant to be accessible and fun, whereas something like Guilty Gear basically beats you over the head with your own face and then covers you in bees. I play Smash partly BECAUSE of this; I need a break from the usual "OMG COMBOS" of the other games. So while, yes, I can get to that high level of play in Smash in general, I end up having a bit of a different view of it.
Not to mention that by "speed" I dont just mean pure movement speed or such. I consider Smash 4 faster than SF because of the pacing. In SF, well.... to me, that game is notorious for "footsies overload", where half of the "fight" is each player sort of wobbling in place, maybe vaguely almost sorta kinda possibly sticking a foot out in the almost general direction of the enemy on rare occaisions. You cant really be aggressive in that game unless the character is very specifically designed for it (and even then, not THAT much). The pacing of the fights is just too slow for someone as hyper-aggressive as myself. Smash as a whole allows for constant aggression and me going berserk, so it works out well enough even if the execution of it isnt quite as fast as I'd like. The "overall" speed of it works out. And one way or another, even in Melee, you do have to "wait" for players to launch around the screen after impacts, and such as that.
....I will say though that one OTHER consideration is that I also dont mind Smash not being as technical as other games for one very, very, VERY simple reason: I hate analog sticks. ALOT. Mastering a game that forces the use of one IRRITATES me. Melee stopped being fun for lots of reasons, and THAT was one of them. The more technical I got with it, the more annoying and the less fun it was, because of that goddamn thing. It's the same as with a shmup... sure, I CAN play it with an analog stick. But will I enjoy myself? Or do I WANT to? Ye gods, no. Smash 4 doesnt emphasize the techy crap as much with a goddamn stick, so... I can cut it some slack. But again, Smash as a whole doesnt need to be hyper techy to begin with. Not to me, anyway.
Now, understand something about the mods bit. You mention games like Dota, and Counterstrike... I never played those as mods. What *I* know of, as Dota, is not a mod, but a seperate game (as I've only played Dota 2, not the original). Even if it WAS a mod though that I was playing, it's a mod OF A PC GAME. To me, that's a CRITICAL difference. I'm actually very familiar with mods for alot of games on PC... I've been into that for a long time.
BUT. Read again what I wrote. "If a game needs to be modded to be balanced/good, then to me it is bad". I want the BASE game to be good. And THEN modded. It just BUGS me otherwise. I look at all games with mods this way. If it HAS to have a mod in order to not suck.... then screw it, I'm finding something else, because I may not ALWAYS want the damn mod on. And also I just hate supporting games like that. Now, if it's a good game that then also has mods that may make it even better... that's different. THAT, I'll do. I understand that you may not see it that way, but that's my own view on it. Hell, the new upcoming Doom game, for instance. What I've seen of it so far, I frankly dont like. I'm not expecting much out of it... I'm not going to detail why, that'd go too far off topic. But I've stated this opinion elsewhere, and was met with comments like "Well, the game will be moddable, so that can fix it, so you should get it", and I had the exact same reaction I have here, which is NOPE. Not happening. I'd stick to the original games or Hexen or Heretic or whatever, before I'll do that. Again, may not make sense to others, but it makes sense to me.
Also note: Project M is a mod OF A CONSOLE GAME. That.... I'm not touching with a 10 foot pole.... even if it was good as a base game and better with a mod. I dont care how good it may make it, or how good the base game is. I wont do it. I refuse, absolutely refuse. I use consoles, yes.... but not much. To me they exist for fighting games, and shmups, and not much else. The PC is 98% of what I use for gaming. Consoles, to me, are screwball machines made of crazy with interfaces made up by deranged monkeys with hammers. My experience with going "outside the normal use" for games with consoles (which mod use would be considered to be, for me) is.... not good. I could go into a lengthy and often nonsensical story here, but to sum it up, that bad experience involved TEN PS2s breaking down, because I just HAD to try going outside the norm (and because once I start on something I dont give up easily). It just.... ugh. TEN. I have an absolute loathing for the whole idea now, and simply will not do it. Doesnt matter how it works or how easy it's supposed to be.... I just dont care. I wont. There's too much hate there, way too much. And I say this as someone whose default stance on basically everything is negative to begin with.
And hell, THAT game is on a console I disliked completely to begin with, which just makes it worse (never did like the Cube or Wii, as Nintendo's consoles go.... everything else is fine, but I hated both of those; they are the only 2 consoles I've ever owned that I sold off). And it'd be bloody annoying to play with friends with something like that, as I know them all well enough to know that they would NOT go and get it for themselves (it's difficult, and requires the internet, which is complicated.... sigh.... you probably know the sort I'm thinking of) and I'd have to drag it with me every freaking time.
And all of that for a game that I just dont like to begin with... yeah. It's not happening. Modding some of my favorite games, like Minecraft, Doom, whatever? You betcha, I do those OFTEN, and have an interest in making some of my own (which I'm very, very slowly working on learning). Again though, those are all PC games. Yeah, they can still be irritating when something goes wrong, but I know PCs as a whole WAY better than consoles, and can fix the issues on my own. And I'm just used to it, which is important for me.
....ugh. didn't mean for that to be so rambly, but then, I expect most on here that know me at all are used to it by now.... sigh. I apologize if some of it didn't entirely make sense.
