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
