You’ve got to read Sakurai’s take on serious Smash play.

Smash 4 producer Masahiro Sakurai announced he would be taking “an extended vacation” in a recent edition of his long-running Famitsu column, according to translators at Source Gaming. Please read the whole translation there, while I have linked two paragraphs, there’s plenty more in the original post that you should read.

At long last, the development on Smash for has ended!! To all of the staff who were involved in this project, thank you for all your hard work. To all who supported and followed the game and its development, thank you so very much. Personally, I’m happy I can finally take an extended vacation.

Going through the entire post, however, I ran across a larger theme for the article, which could be summed up as Sakurai’s reluctance to deviate from the tent pole elements of Super Smash Bros as a franchise. This next passage gave me the weirdest realization about casually accessible games becoming serious esports by its player-base’s sheer will:

What [the relatively high average playtime] means is that the game can wear you out pretty quickly every time you play. If you turn on items and visit a bunch of different stages while playing with a group, things will unfold differently every time, so there aren’t a lot of problems. However, there are a lot of people who enjoy serious matches, and in order to win, they’ll narrow down the number of fighters that can be used, and that diminishes some of the breadth of the game.

This sets up Sakurai’s explanation for how he has approached designing the game from the original releases to the most recent batch of DLC characters—including a certain witch—which is to say, he can’t be held responsible for what tournament organizers and theory crafters do to restrict the ruleset to make Smash 4 a fair game in the competitive scene.

There are other tidbits in there not just about stereotypical players of the greater competitive scene but more aspects of Smash 4 that have been even mildly controversial. Important Sakurai points to be on the lookout for include:

  • His insinuation that players who play only one game mode are not fans of the game
  • An assertion that including new fighters in the game is a serious branding issue
  • His claim that post-launch DLC fighters are intended to be more powerful by design
  • And more!

If I come back to Source Gaming repeatedly in the future, I’ll definitely be contributing to Source Gaming’s Patreon. If you read news from them on the regular, you should probably start pitching in, even if it’s just a little bit. The alternative is display advertisements… which ends up not really being an alternative at all.

The Hype Train: E3 2014 Edition.

bcdm_hypetrainNow that Nintendo’s pre-recorded E3 presser has been broadcast, the show is officially underway. The last of the five shows rounded out what could possibly be called the E3 Hype Train. There’s plenty of liveblogs out there that cover the five conferences, but here’s what I think are the biggest things to know from each.1

Microsoft 2

  • There’s a new Call of Duty. It’s called Advanced Warfare and it will be $60 USD of shooting people in the face circa the future. You can recreate the game’s experience by modding a Counter-Strike 1.6 server with any RPG mod you like along with HookMod.
  • Sunset Overdrive is oozing with style and should be one of the titles to watch out for that seems to be exclusively Xbox One. It’s Jet Set Radio with an extra ounce of kickass based on this trailer.
  • The new Fable game looks nice, but it won’t be outshining anything else. If you want a 4v1 game, wait for Evolve.
  • Halo 2 in the Halo 4 engine on the Xbox One? That’s reason enough to consider the Master Chief Collection. There’s also a pre-Halo 5 video series called Nightfall bundled in, but don’t worry about that. Dual wielding SMGs is officially back along with a ton of other stuff. Halo fans, get in line.
  • The Witcher 3 needs to be on your radar. IT NEEDS TO BE THERE.
  • The Division might seriously get some following on the Xbox scene, especially with how social the trailer shown off at this presentation seems to be. It took me a second to realize that these aren’t the characters in the game talking, the voice over in the trailers is meant to be coming from the players of those characters.

EA 3

  • Teased development and alpha assets are the new voice-over teaser trailers as far as video games are concerned. I’d rather a traditional trailer or two. See: Star Wars Battlefront.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition looks bad. Avoid.
  • The Sims 4 should be good fun, just don’t let your child play it. It’s not a child’s game, it’s for your teenager.
  • Any EA sports game that isn’t FIFA can be ignored as garbage. Even so, FIFA 15 is the first game in the series to be made for the current generation of hardware. It should look and run cleaner than it ever has before.
  • They made an Dota-clone called Dawngate. They claim that it has a meta. They probably expect you to pay for it. Go play Dota 2 or League of Legends instead.
  • The concepts for the upcoming Mirror’s Edge reboot are looking good. I hope they continue to invest in the development of the game. The world that DICE has dreamed up has a lot of potential and I believe you shouldn’t ignore this game simply for it being a first-person perspective game.
  • Battlefield: Hardline is a mod for Battlefield 4 that is being released as a whole new game. Avoid.

Ubisoft 4

  • FarCry 4 is another CryTek show-off fest and an edgy storyline. Just like FarCry 3. Just like FarCry 2. Just like… well, FarCry was okay.
  • The Crew is Ubisoft’s attempt at dethroning Gran Turismo or Forza from relevancy. They will fail if it has anything to do with Uplay.
  • Assassin’s Creed: Unity is supposed to be set during the French Revolution, in Paris… but not a single character is speaking French. How difficult would that have been?
  • A proper Rainbow Six game is being developed? BE STILL MY BEATING HEART. Siege looks likes it intends to undo every bad game made in the name of Tom Clancy since Rainbow Six, because they were all bad since Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon.

Sony 5

  • Destiny was the first game to be shown off, and for good reason. It’s going to be an important release for Sony console owners, with PS4 owners getting the first access to the game before the other platforms. A great trailer that explains the universe more than had been up to this point was released. Look forward to seeing leaked footage from the alpha all summer.
  • For non-PS4 owners, like myself, there’s a console bundle that will be available with Destiny. And I might pick it up. Because it looks pretty.
  • The Order 1886 is a game that looks like a CGI movie the entire time. It achieves this by being locked to 30 frames per second, but the graphics it can constantly produce make it worth while. It may be a gimmick, but it’s a good one.
  • From Software announced the spiritual successor to Dark Souls 2, a PS4 game called Bloodborne.
  • You don’t have to own FarCry 4 to play a multiplayer game with a friend that does. A huge feature that seems to be Sony taking a cue from Nintendo.
  • Double Fine is remastering Grim Fandango.

Nintendo 6


  1. Image at right completely lifted from somewhere on the Internet. I don’t own it. Chill out though. It’s an image macro. It’ll be okay. 
  2. Ars Technica: Microsoft’s pre-E3 2014 press conference 
  3. Ars Technica: EA’s pre-E3 2014 press conference 
  4. Ars Technica: Ubisoft’s pre-E3 2014 press conference 
  5. Ars Technica: Sony’s pre-E3 2014 press conference 
  6. Ars Technica: Nintendo’s pre-E3 2014 press conference