Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2021-12-12 11:45 pm
silveradept) wrote2021-12-12 11:45 pm
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December Days 2021 #12: A Social Console With A Fun Fighting Game
[Welcome to December Days, where I natter on about things organized around a theme (sometimes very loosely), one a day, for 31 days. This year, we're taking a look back at some touchpoints along the way of my journey with computing and computing devices.]
The Nintendo 64 predates my transference to university, and I distinctly remember playing one long enough to make it all the way through the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time before going to university, but I'm pretty sure I never actually owned one. Maybe I just borrowed one from one of my high school friends on a long-term loan to get through the game. And I also distinctly remember playing Star Fox 64 at a different friend's who also had one, and not necessarily doing that great at it even in practice mode. (Then again, the animation of the characters talking looked much more like they were headbanging at impossibly fast speeds.) While I had seen polygon-rendered characters as far back as Virtua Fighter 2, the N64 was one of the first consoles that went all out on the polygons, and as such, actually created a specific kind of look to their games, because of the texture wrapping on the polygon builds that made Quake look like it would have been right at home on that platform. (Because of the polygon rendering abilities at the time, women characters sometimes had disproportionately large triangles jutting out of their chest, which is how we got the idea that Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) and Tifa Lockheart (Final Fantasy VII) were massively endowed in the chest and why certain segments of their respective fandoms reached negatively to redesigns in remakes and alternate universes that bring the bust sizes down to something that would fit each characters more athletic and physical actions and builds.)
All N64 games are very difficult to play in the controllers that were designed for the system. The analog stick on the controller does not have great constitution, and so after slamming the stick around to try and succeed at games, the analog begins to drift or have much larger dead zones. Almost all of the games use the analog stick as a primary method of control, so it gets used a lot and loses the sensitivity it's supposed to have fairly early on in its life. I don't remember a whole lot of third-party controllers for the system, although I'm sure they existed. This system desperately needs one controller that can take the abuse that an average gamer applies to it and continue to work for years afterward.
The N64, as I remember it, was a bonanza for first party titles and less great third-party ones, unless you were Rare, and then you also had a whole bunch of hits. Goldeneye for the N64 became a standard of local deathmatch-type games, (Perfect Dark was also well-received, but the Bond license helped, I think.) Star Fox 64 put those polygons to good use, and many of its statements, like the need to do a specific action to deflect incoming enemy fire, became memetics, for good or ill, and for the first time, Super Mario Brothers was in real true 3D, which was both awesome (the triple jump, spinning Bowser around) and intensely frustrating (camera issues, the analog stick going in exactly the direction it was pushed, trying to figure out flying in a way that made actual sense, having to use Mario's shadow as the indicator of where he was in the world and whether I was actually in the platform I needed to be). And it seemed like the wider world found out about the Mario Kart series with Mario Kart 64, and a whole lot of fun was had throwing shells and bananas at each other for a good long time.
The N64 ends up being a transition system to university for me, not because I had it, but because one of my dorm mates did. (Catty-corner to my room, the man who wanted to be a walk-on football player had the PlayStation 2, but that system and generation has a separate story in this series.) So there was definitely some Mario Kart going on, but also, there was one particular game that came out for the Nintendo 64 that would start a good relationship between me and fighting games: Super Smash Brothers. Smash Brothers is a crossover fighter primarily between Nintendo properties, where the excuse plot, as it were, is that it's a child's playroom, and they have all sorts of dolls and things to put together, and through the power of imagination, these characters come to life on specific stages and battle each other.
There are three things about Smash Brothers that make it infinitely more appealing and interesting to a wide range of players. The first is that Smash Brothers default mode works on the mechanic of being knocked out of the stage, rather than running out of energy from taking damage. Most fighting games to that point (and plenty after them) work on energy meters for their combatants, and that once that energy meter is exhausted through taking hits, the fight ends in a knockout (and, in the case of a game like Mortal Kombat, at the end of the fight, there is a small window to input a secret command to do either a brutal finishing move or a non-lethal joke move, or some other thing). While some games will have multiple combatants available on different strengths, or allow for free switching between team members during the fight, the concept is still the same - exhaust your opponent's energy meter(s) to win the round, best Z of R rounds wins the match. In Smash, the more damage you have taken, the father you fly when you get hit or thrown, to the point where even the smallest of hits well throw someone out of the ring, costing them a life, but also resetting their damage meter.
The second interesting thing is that Smash relies on a limited moveset on the game. Other fighting games of its type have long strings of combos to memorize and input that would cause significant amounts of damage when executed well, but which also had to be input on a few frames' notice as either the beginning of an attack or as a counterattack to the attack being performed. (This was often the dividing line of skill for the "git gud" crowd - if you couldn't punish your opponent for their first mistake by hitting them with the appropriate unblockable combo, you weren't good enough to hang with them.) Since the combo system itself arose because a system could not process the inputs as quickly as they were being brought in, subsequent combo systems also have this delay window to input the next part of the combo so that it flows smoothly, but the window is generally small enough that you have to do it by rote memory. Smash, in the other hand, simplifies the controls so that you have normal attacks, special attacks, throws, shields, and dodges, and that's it. Combos are automatic by pushing the normal attack button in sequence, and while you can string some moves into others, it's not designed to be used to infinitely chain attacks together.
It's worth noting that the design of fighting games is such that at a certain point in all of these games, if playing single player, the computer opponent stops being limited and starts playing like a machine that can input on the correct frame (1/60th of a second on an NTSC machine running at 60Hz) and take the minimum number of frames to do that input. And, often times, the machine would be able to perform feats that a human would be prevented from doing, such as being able to skip the charge time needed for certain special moves so they could be performed back to back, or being able to use a block command on the exact frame needed to register the block successfully and then immediately drop the block and keep moving toward the player or unleash a counterattack guaranteed to hit while the player character is still in their recovery phase from the unsuccessful attack. (It turns out that making a computer player that makes human-like mistakes is very hard, and several different systems have been put into place to try and stimulate this idea, with varying levels of success.) Having an unbound computer also means that tricks that are designed to work on humans (such as two different moves having the same beginning animation, or a move that renders the character on screen invisible, or otherwise obstructs the view of the players) don't work, either, since the computer doesn't have to process anything visually to know what the state of the board is at any time. These games are still balanced for humans playing against humans more than humans playing against machines.
That said, because games are made by humans who program things, the same weaknesses that can be used to exploit AIs into patterns that will make them defeatable can also be used to make systems do things that are not intended. So that a game that tries to avoid infinite combo chains can be made to do them, with the appropriate abuse of glitches and unintended effects from the interactions of those systems. (And that is how the Stop Having Fun Guys managed to get into this game and turn it onto its own meme starting with the installment after this one. They had tier rankings and wanted to make sure there was as little opportunity as possible for anything other than "skill" to determine victory. Those same people also tended to adopt the "scrub/n00b" versus "gamer" dichotomy.)
The third thing that distinguished Smash Brothers from other games of its type was the copious amount of items available to the players, drawn from all kinds of Nintendo properties. Unlike other games that essentially meant a sequence of one on one battles with only the abilities of the characters available, Smash Brothers could hold up to four players all on screen together and gave them an arsenal of things to help heal their damage, grant temporarily invulnerability, or provide explosive impetus for sending people off the screen asking with a healthy dose of damage. It's exactly the kind of randomness and having to think tactically that the Stop Having Fun Guys detest and that makes Smash Brothers fun and balanced. (There's customization options so that you can select what kind of items you want to appear and how often, which allows for tailoring the experience for maximum fun.) It's great fun when you're losing, but then get to grab the big smashing hammer and even up the odds by sending everyone flying. And sometimes you're the one who gets hammered, but games are usually short and you can go back at it again in the next round with the hope that things will tilt your way.
Because of these three things, Smash is a much more accessible entry to fighting games of its type, which meant that when it came to my dorm room, I felt like I could play along and do okay. (It probably helped that I had a knack for the placement and timing of certain extra powerful moves that came with high risk for missing them.) I am a way better Smash player when there are items on the field than when there aren't, which I think is a testament that my play style is better suited to those kinds of games, rather than that I have lesser skill because I will always lose in no-item games. (This was also the time where I found out I could sleep through gaming sessions like this when needed, and probably should have been checked for sleep apnea at that point, but I didn't even know that the things I was doing around sleep were warning signs of it until a lot later on in life.) Dorm room Smash (and some other games, too) was one of the ways of getting along with the neighbors and getting to know my roommates and bond with them for the time I was there, and gaming helped introduce me to other groups on campus as well to make friends (along with other things that I did in my university experience. There are other things that come from this, but we're not to that part of the story yet.)
All in all, the N64 is a well loved and fondly remembered console for many, including me. The graphics were rough, but that was because everyone was still getting the hang of this polygons and 3D thing, and the controllers were not the greatest, but the software was often designed well, with good gameplay and understanding of what the system was capable of. And there were definitely enough people around who had it or who were familiar with it that it was a way to get to know each other. Bonding, over games.
- CPU: 64-bit NEC VR4300 (MIPS R4300i) @ 93.75 MHz
- Memory: 4 MB RDRAM, upgradable to 8 MB with Expansion Pak.
- Graphics: 64-bit Reality Coprocessor, running at 62.5 MHz
- Sound: 16-bit, stereo, CD quality, handled through the Reality Coprocessor as well.
- Inputs and Outputs: Some truly funky science fiction-style gamepads, consisting of a D-Pad, an analog stick, four C-buttons usually used to control a camera (but not always!), other buttons marked A, B, Z, L, R, and START.
Controllers also contained an expansion slot port that could be used for rumble features, for providing save space RAM so that summertime could play their faces or characters on a different console, or for transporting data from supported Game Boy games.
The Nintendo 64 predates my transference to university, and I distinctly remember playing one long enough to make it all the way through the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time before going to university, but I'm pretty sure I never actually owned one. Maybe I just borrowed one from one of my high school friends on a long-term loan to get through the game. And I also distinctly remember playing Star Fox 64 at a different friend's who also had one, and not necessarily doing that great at it even in practice mode. (Then again, the animation of the characters talking looked much more like they were headbanging at impossibly fast speeds.) While I had seen polygon-rendered characters as far back as Virtua Fighter 2, the N64 was one of the first consoles that went all out on the polygons, and as such, actually created a specific kind of look to their games, because of the texture wrapping on the polygon builds that made Quake look like it would have been right at home on that platform. (Because of the polygon rendering abilities at the time, women characters sometimes had disproportionately large triangles jutting out of their chest, which is how we got the idea that Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) and Tifa Lockheart (Final Fantasy VII) were massively endowed in the chest and why certain segments of their respective fandoms reached negatively to redesigns in remakes and alternate universes that bring the bust sizes down to something that would fit each characters more athletic and physical actions and builds.)
All N64 games are very difficult to play in the controllers that were designed for the system. The analog stick on the controller does not have great constitution, and so after slamming the stick around to try and succeed at games, the analog begins to drift or have much larger dead zones. Almost all of the games use the analog stick as a primary method of control, so it gets used a lot and loses the sensitivity it's supposed to have fairly early on in its life. I don't remember a whole lot of third-party controllers for the system, although I'm sure they existed. This system desperately needs one controller that can take the abuse that an average gamer applies to it and continue to work for years afterward.
The N64, as I remember it, was a bonanza for first party titles and less great third-party ones, unless you were Rare, and then you also had a whole bunch of hits. Goldeneye for the N64 became a standard of local deathmatch-type games, (Perfect Dark was also well-received, but the Bond license helped, I think.) Star Fox 64 put those polygons to good use, and many of its statements, like the need to do a specific action to deflect incoming enemy fire, became memetics, for good or ill, and for the first time, Super Mario Brothers was in real true 3D, which was both awesome (the triple jump, spinning Bowser around) and intensely frustrating (camera issues, the analog stick going in exactly the direction it was pushed, trying to figure out flying in a way that made actual sense, having to use Mario's shadow as the indicator of where he was in the world and whether I was actually in the platform I needed to be). And it seemed like the wider world found out about the Mario Kart series with Mario Kart 64, and a whole lot of fun was had throwing shells and bananas at each other for a good long time.
The N64 ends up being a transition system to university for me, not because I had it, but because one of my dorm mates did. (Catty-corner to my room, the man who wanted to be a walk-on football player had the PlayStation 2, but that system and generation has a separate story in this series.) So there was definitely some Mario Kart going on, but also, there was one particular game that came out for the Nintendo 64 that would start a good relationship between me and fighting games: Super Smash Brothers. Smash Brothers is a crossover fighter primarily between Nintendo properties, where the excuse plot, as it were, is that it's a child's playroom, and they have all sorts of dolls and things to put together, and through the power of imagination, these characters come to life on specific stages and battle each other.
There are three things about Smash Brothers that make it infinitely more appealing and interesting to a wide range of players. The first is that Smash Brothers default mode works on the mechanic of being knocked out of the stage, rather than running out of energy from taking damage. Most fighting games to that point (and plenty after them) work on energy meters for their combatants, and that once that energy meter is exhausted through taking hits, the fight ends in a knockout (and, in the case of a game like Mortal Kombat, at the end of the fight, there is a small window to input a secret command to do either a brutal finishing move or a non-lethal joke move, or some other thing). While some games will have multiple combatants available on different strengths, or allow for free switching between team members during the fight, the concept is still the same - exhaust your opponent's energy meter(s) to win the round, best Z of R rounds wins the match. In Smash, the more damage you have taken, the father you fly when you get hit or thrown, to the point where even the smallest of hits well throw someone out of the ring, costing them a life, but also resetting their damage meter.
The second interesting thing is that Smash relies on a limited moveset on the game. Other fighting games of its type have long strings of combos to memorize and input that would cause significant amounts of damage when executed well, but which also had to be input on a few frames' notice as either the beginning of an attack or as a counterattack to the attack being performed. (This was often the dividing line of skill for the "git gud" crowd - if you couldn't punish your opponent for their first mistake by hitting them with the appropriate unblockable combo, you weren't good enough to hang with them.) Since the combo system itself arose because a system could not process the inputs as quickly as they were being brought in, subsequent combo systems also have this delay window to input the next part of the combo so that it flows smoothly, but the window is generally small enough that you have to do it by rote memory. Smash, in the other hand, simplifies the controls so that you have normal attacks, special attacks, throws, shields, and dodges, and that's it. Combos are automatic by pushing the normal attack button in sequence, and while you can string some moves into others, it's not designed to be used to infinitely chain attacks together.
It's worth noting that the design of fighting games is such that at a certain point in all of these games, if playing single player, the computer opponent stops being limited and starts playing like a machine that can input on the correct frame (1/60th of a second on an NTSC machine running at 60Hz) and take the minimum number of frames to do that input. And, often times, the machine would be able to perform feats that a human would be prevented from doing, such as being able to skip the charge time needed for certain special moves so they could be performed back to back, or being able to use a block command on the exact frame needed to register the block successfully and then immediately drop the block and keep moving toward the player or unleash a counterattack guaranteed to hit while the player character is still in their recovery phase from the unsuccessful attack. (It turns out that making a computer player that makes human-like mistakes is very hard, and several different systems have been put into place to try and stimulate this idea, with varying levels of success.) Having an unbound computer also means that tricks that are designed to work on humans (such as two different moves having the same beginning animation, or a move that renders the character on screen invisible, or otherwise obstructs the view of the players) don't work, either, since the computer doesn't have to process anything visually to know what the state of the board is at any time. These games are still balanced for humans playing against humans more than humans playing against machines.
That said, because games are made by humans who program things, the same weaknesses that can be used to exploit AIs into patterns that will make them defeatable can also be used to make systems do things that are not intended. So that a game that tries to avoid infinite combo chains can be made to do them, with the appropriate abuse of glitches and unintended effects from the interactions of those systems. (And that is how the Stop Having Fun Guys managed to get into this game and turn it onto its own meme starting with the installment after this one. They had tier rankings and wanted to make sure there was as little opportunity as possible for anything other than "skill" to determine victory. Those same people also tended to adopt the "scrub/n00b" versus "gamer" dichotomy.)
The third thing that distinguished Smash Brothers from other games of its type was the copious amount of items available to the players, drawn from all kinds of Nintendo properties. Unlike other games that essentially meant a sequence of one on one battles with only the abilities of the characters available, Smash Brothers could hold up to four players all on screen together and gave them an arsenal of things to help heal their damage, grant temporarily invulnerability, or provide explosive impetus for sending people off the screen asking with a healthy dose of damage. It's exactly the kind of randomness and having to think tactically that the Stop Having Fun Guys detest and that makes Smash Brothers fun and balanced. (There's customization options so that you can select what kind of items you want to appear and how often, which allows for tailoring the experience for maximum fun.) It's great fun when you're losing, but then get to grab the big smashing hammer and even up the odds by sending everyone flying. And sometimes you're the one who gets hammered, but games are usually short and you can go back at it again in the next round with the hope that things will tilt your way.
Because of these three things, Smash is a much more accessible entry to fighting games of its type, which meant that when it came to my dorm room, I felt like I could play along and do okay. (It probably helped that I had a knack for the placement and timing of certain extra powerful moves that came with high risk for missing them.) I am a way better Smash player when there are items on the field than when there aren't, which I think is a testament that my play style is better suited to those kinds of games, rather than that I have lesser skill because I will always lose in no-item games. (This was also the time where I found out I could sleep through gaming sessions like this when needed, and probably should have been checked for sleep apnea at that point, but I didn't even know that the things I was doing around sleep were warning signs of it until a lot later on in life.) Dorm room Smash (and some other games, too) was one of the ways of getting along with the neighbors and getting to know my roommates and bond with them for the time I was there, and gaming helped introduce me to other groups on campus as well to make friends (along with other things that I did in my university experience. There are other things that come from this, but we're not to that part of the story yet.)
All in all, the N64 is a well loved and fondly remembered console for many, including me. The graphics were rough, but that was because everyone was still getting the hang of this polygons and 3D thing, and the controllers were not the greatest, but the software was often designed well, with good gameplay and understanding of what the system was capable of. And there were definitely enough people around who had it or who were familiar with it that it was a way to get to know each other. Bonding, over games.