Year: 2015

Is this going to be forever?

Let’s talk about me.

Super Smash Bros. Melee wasn’t released at a very good time for me. I was in college, away from home and most of my gaming friends. Also, it was released for the Nintendo GameCube, which history has shown us wasn’t a terribly successful console. In fact, I don’t think any of my closest friends back then owned a GameCube.

But because I know people who know people, there was a handful of opportunities to play Melee over the next few years.

I’d be at people’s houses and find mostly-young, mostly-male groups gathered around the TV trading smash attacks between signature Nintendo characters in the most wonderfully whimsical cartoon fighting game imaginable. Mortal Kombat this is not. Up to four players at a time would spend a few minutes at a time battling Links, Marios, Kirbys, Pikachus1 (and many others) in levels pulled from familiar Nintendo games. They’d be talking trash and throwing flowers and bombs and baseball bats at each other… much as my closest friends and I had spent literally hundreds of hours doing a few years earlier in the Nintendo 64 Super Smash Bros., the original game in the series.

smash-bros-melee2001’s Melee, however, was a very different beast from ‘64,’ and is still held in high regard by many, and still a tournament-favorite—despite new installments of the series being released in 2008 and 2014.

Gosh, I’ve always hated Melee.

Even today it’s still the fastest-paced and most brutal game of the series—the speed each game runs at is a design decision made by the developers—but Melee felt especially amped-up coming from the downright glacially-paced 64, even today still the slowest-paced game in the series. That alone made it tough to get into Melee—imagine picking up the controller and being mercilessly pounded by up to three other players (who probably play this all damn day), while you struggle to figure out how to not accidentally fall off the edge of the level.

“Seriously you guys, when you’re ready to play a real game, I’ll kick your ass with Link in 64!” is a thing I probably said every time I played Melee.

Speed was one problem for me in Melee, but my other one was the GameCube controller. Yeah, I know: the design is still held up as one of the best controllers ever, believed by many to represent Nintendo at their peak, right before their Wii-era folly of appealing to the dreaded “casual” market with the waggle-motion-centric Wiimote. The classic GameCube controller is still supported in newer Smash titles, and is still the choice among the hardcore Smash crowd… despite the half-dozen other controller options that are also supported at this point. How could I possibly not see what an amazing gift Nintendo had bestowed upon us with the GameCube controller?

gamecube-controller-smash-brosYeah, so I never really “got” the GameCube controller. I never learned how to effectively use the soft analog ‘shoulder’ buttons, never became comfy with the layout of the right-side ‘fire’ buttons (X, Y, A, B)—the real meat of any controller. Coming from 64, I knew what the C-stick was for, but it just wasn’t the same as the four yellow buttons of old. And I’m sorry, but the Z button is just wrong—it goes on the bottom, you jerks.

With a decade-plus of hindsight, it’s clear now that my problems with Super Smash Bros. Melee, and with the GameCube controller in general, were mostly due to a lack of familiarity. I didn’t have the chance to spend time alone learning Melee at my own pace… or barring that, having hours upon hours to spend competing with close friends to sharpen my skills, like I did in high school. And I’ve always felt a little handicapped when it comes to picking up steam at new games that favor players with, you know, reflexes. I didn’t really grow up with games at home when I was young—I definitely missed a lot of the formative stuff that other 1980s babies grew up on.

Anyway, although I essentially sat out the entire GameCube era, busy with college and other life stuff, my interest in gaming was reinvigorated with the release of the Nintendo DS and later the Wii. (Yes seriously, the Wii.2) When the Wii-era Smash game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, came out a couple of years later, there was no stopping me from picking it up.

I enjoyed Brawl and played a lot of it. Having my own copy at home put me in a good position to get fairly good at it. It was very different from 64—way more characters and way more everything—and as a lot of the hardcore complain, way, way different than Melee. “It’s so slow!” “It’s for noobs!” Whatever; the slower pace and the not-GameCube controls are probably what I liked most about Brawl. Thank goodness they corrected their Melee misstep, I thought.

My newfound enthusiasm for console gaming died down a few years later. I haven’t really been keeping up with the new Nintendo Wii U or 3DS stuff at all. But my original Wii remains below the TV, and I turn it on every couple of months, usually to play an old-timey 8- or 16-bit classic.3

Something happened last week. An Ars Technica article about competitive Smash, and the enduring tournament legacy of Melee, showed up in my RSS. Before I had even finished the article, I’d already been to Amazon and ‘Prime’d myself a GameCube controller and memory card… and an overpriced used copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee.

My girlfriend was going to be out of town for the rest of the week. The time was right to dive in headfirst.

What happened to me?

Look, I developed this attitude as I grew closer to 30 a few years back. It goes a little like this:

So… is that it? Is this really how it’s gonna be for the rest of your life?

As I read the Ars article through these attitude-tinted lenses, I decided that my hating Melee was based on shaky reasoning at best. The way I felt about it after my few tries may have been a genuine and reasonable reaction to getting pummeled while flailing uselessly with this weird-ass controller, but let’s be honest: I never gave the game a fair shot.

That, paired with the fact that Melee‘s still so widely held in such high regard almost 14 years later—it’s definitely not just mindless fanboys trumpeting the new hot thing—made me think hey-why-not? I essentially have a GameCube just sitting there—it’s actually built into the hardware of the original Wii.

A couple of days later, my little care package from the past arrived. Predictably, I still fucking suck.

But I think it’s going to be fun this time.

  1. By the way—just sayin’—f Pikachu.[↩]
  2. The console was cheap enough, the motion controls seemed interesting enough, and the potential for amazing first-party Nintendo games (Mario, Zelda, etc.) made me take the plunge. I camped out on release night in 2006. Also, I had a job, some money, etc. And despite the tons of shovelware, there were more than enough good Wii games.[↩]
  3. There’s a good chance it’s Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball. Gotta stay sharp.[↩]

Compromise and Nexus 5: a review

I know a thing or two about compromise—I bought a Nexus 5 a few months ago. It’s not the phone I want, but it’ll do. For now.

It’s been years since I bought something that wasn’t the latest and greatest Nexus model, but this time I think it was the right call. Like other Android fans, I awaited the announcement of the Nexus 6 with every bit as much excitement as the entire world does when it’s new-iPhone-time. (Yes, this is a thing people actually do for Nexus devices.)

I found myself utterly underwhelmed by Nexus 6. Price, size, boring, etc. But I knew I needed a new phone, so I immediately ordered the fan-favorite Nexus 5.

It’s fast. My Galaxy Nexus—a phone from 2011—didn’t seem that slow, even towards the end, but I’m blown away at how fluidly this thing runs just about everything. (That’s probably the extra RAM talking.) Another RAM-based plus is that it’s awesome to switch between apps—and even browser tabs—without my seeing persistent background processes dying and restarting. I could have avoided this frustration by simply doing less with my device, but why would I?

Having 32 GB of storage shouldn’t be such a big deal in 2015, but after dealing with two phones that maxed out at 16-ridiculous-gigabytes, it feels amazing to not have to think about space, at least for now. Of course it’s still only 32 GB, so I’m not significantly changing the way I use the device to make use of the extra space.

Ick: I find it a little hard to believe that I own a phone with a not-user-swappable battery.1 After all, I thought that I object to these on principle. In the end, sigh, the Nexus pluses won out over the other devices I considered. But I feel as if the device comes with a built-in expiration date.

Speaking of power, I didn’t expect to pick up a wireless Qi charger for this phone, but I did. (Um, two, actually—cheap ones.) I love it. Wireless charging is not only the future of mobile devices, but for those on the Android side of the proverbial aisle, it’s the present.

Well, no shit there’s no physical keyboard. I immediately missed having one when I got my first candybar-style device in 2010. You’re getting on well with tapping, swiping, voice, autocorrect, whatever? That’s wonderful and I’m so happy for you. I miss having a real keyboard no less today than I did four years ago.

Months after its general availability, I’m still continuing to hold off on applying the Nexus 5 Lollipop upgrade. The same UI flash that got Apple-enamored design bloggers salivating actually saddens me. Exactly why is probably worth a dedicated post, but after months of using Lollipop on secondary devices, I still can’t see myself putting it on my primary phone (read: the only device that matters to me).

Nexus 5 feels like more of a stopgap than anything else… at least it was pretty inexpensive. It’s clear that the world isn’t turning back to the good stuff from the past (top want: badass Sidekick-style slider) but there is hope for the future — Nexus 5 just needs to last me until Project Ara is a thing I can actually use.

Someone will make an Ara keyboard module. I can feel it in my hands now.

  1. I know. There are disassembly guides that show you how to crack open the phone and replace the battery. But that is not the same as having a truly removable battery. For one thing, I can’t just casually carry a second battery to pop in for an instant top-up. And also, I imagine this complicating factor limits the market demand for replacement batteries, which I fear will limit the battery supply when, down the road, the day comes that I finally need a replacement. Sealed phones are a shitty, disrespectful design decision by which this dude cannot abide.[↩]