Smash Bros. Brawl Tutorial Videos

Updated on Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 11:39AM by Sirlin

Updated on Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 8:02PM by Sirlin

Updated on Thursday, December 4, 2008 at 8:53PM by Sirlin

Updated on Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 11:22AM by Sirlin

I made this series of ten short tutorial videos for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They appear on the official Nintendo Channel accessible through your Wii, on Nintendo's website, and below from YouTube. Nintendo asked me to explain the game to new players in a way that shows them there is more going on than they might think. Remember, these videos are for new players, not for tournament champions and they're intended to help the Smash scene grow.

Smash Bros. sells well in the US and in Japan, but struggles more in Europe. It sells more in both the US and Japan, while the perception in Eurpose is that it's "that kids game with the Mario Kart characters." A strange and ironic statement considering that the "Mario Kart characters" aren't even originally from Mario Kart, but that game sells well in Europe so it's a point of reference for many. Maybe my videos and the reputation of my name will help increase the scene in Europe. (Note to anrgy commenters: this information is from Nintendo, not from me. The idea that my name as an expert on competitive games might help in this situation is from Nintendo, not from me, and that's why they contacted me.)

Special thanks to David "Scamp" Cantrell and Cedric "Ceirnian" Qualls for gameplay advice, Rich "FMJaguar" DeLauder for editing and secretly keeping sirlin.net working, and Mike "Bocci" Boccieri for his technical wizardry with video capture.

As more of the videos become available on youtube, I'll post them all below. If you're interested in these videos, you might try that new "share article" link below, for digg or one of those new-fangled link-swapping sites.

--Sirlin

Part 1: The Two Games

Click to read more ...

Sirlin.net: HD Remix

Sirlin.net is all-new. Let's go over the changes.

More than Game Design

First, a change in theme. Game design is great and all, but it's not enough of a topic. There's more to say in life, and even if we stuck to game design, it necessarily branches out into other topics anyway. Games are for people, and so designing them requires some understanding of human psychology. Making games requires problem-solving and some knowledge of how other fields solve very complicated problems would help. Games are part of pop-culture and have the power to make statements--whether the creators intend those statements or not. Because of this power, we should be conscious of what our games are really about. I don't mean surface of a game--whether it's set it medieval times or World War 2--I mean the emergent properties of the rules. For an example, try this game about surviving in Hatai and notice how the experience created by the rules communicates a statement.

Because all my effort has gone into creating this new site, you'll have to wait for some articles that actually cover these topics, but they'll come.

New Content

I wrote about 13,000 words in a set of 4 new articles about balancing games: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4. That's about 25% the length of my book, Playing to Win, so I could definitely extend those articles into an entire book about game balancing. Unfortunately, the market for such a book is way too small, so I guess I won't. (Writing books is a lot of effort!)

I slightly revised my Yomi Layer 3 article, moderately revised my Rock, Paper, Scissors article, and completely rewrote my Slippery Slope article. I didn't transfer all my old articles over yet, but the best ones, the ones about multiplayer games, are here and polished up a little. I also didn't transfer over all my old blog posts, but the ones I felt are most important to look back on here, and many of them have several formatting fixes and broken links fixed.

The sidebar now has a section for games that I worked on. In it, you'll find an article on Kongai that previously appeared on gamasutra and a few pages about my Yomi card game, including an article on its design, now that the game is no longer secret. Incidentally, I'm still working on Yomi, and the art is the major thing holding it up, but artists are working on that right now. My article on balancing Puzzle Fighter is still pretty popular, so you'll find that in the sidebar, too. Finally, in the near future you'll find about 20 articles about Street Fighter HD Remix in the sidebar, in a handy collapsible menu. These will be similar to the articles you might have read on Capcom's website, but revised so that they are all written from the same point of view (after development is done) and also completely in my own words. Stay tuned for that.

99.98% Uptime

My last webhost (wingsix.com) was awful. Good riddance! They took my site down 3 times in one week without any notice, all for bogus reasons that were their fault. My site is now hosted on a sytem with grid architecture that can handle huge spikes of hits and not go down. My old site went down every single day twice a day, for 20 minutes at a time due to poor handling by the webhost. This should be a dramatic improvement in reliability with uptime % somewhere between 99.98% and 100%. If you are serious about getting that kind of uptime for your own site, as well as an awesome visual interface to build the site and a tons of features already built-in for you, sign up for squarespace.

Reader Comments

All the comments from my old site are gone. This half on purpose and I think it's a freeing move that lets us start anew. I really think I should only allow comments in the form of trackbacks or comments from registered users who donate to my site or something. I don't say that at all as an attempt to make money, but just as a barrier to keep out the various haters and clueless people who stop by. I think it would really increase the quality of discussions. Several people told me not to do that though, so all you miscreants are in luck.

Also, you can finally preview your comments before posting them and edit your comments for 15 minutes after you post them.

Recommended Books

I've been doing a lot of reading, so my recommended books page now has 13 new books. All these recent additions to the list are in the psychology section. There's almost 50 books on the list in total now, so you have some work to do. Or you could wait a few years and I'll write a book that summarizes many of the points from those psychology books for you.

Playing to Win Book

My own book is still free online, and now it should be a lot easier to find, with a link right there in the top navigation bar. You an also buy a physical copy from Lulu (recommended), Amazon, or Amazon Kindle, in addition to reading it for free.

RSS

I have a new RSS feed now, and it should be generally better than the old one. It's formatted better, and now incorporates better stat tracking on my end. Fyi, the RSS feed includes both my posts and articles together, and does not include comments. Also, you can subscribe via e-mail now if you type your e-mail address into the form in the sidebar. Google runs the service that takes your e-mail and sends my new posts, so you'll be safe from spam. It's a nice alternative if you're not into new-fangled technology like RSS.

TipJoy

There's a TipJoy link at the top right of my site. If you want to leave a tip, all you do is leave your e-mail address in the TipJoy field. The advantage is that it's literally one click, whereas PayPal takes more clicks and requires you have PayPal setup in the first place. TipJoy is an interesting company in that it might help spread the concept of paying for content that you appreciate on the web by making the process much easier for readers. Right now, if you appreciate my content, you could leave a PayPal donation (great!) or you could click on ads, but that's kind of strange for advertisers if you have no intent to buy their stuff (but hey, I'm not stopping you).

So what TipJoy does is automatically create an account for you if you leave your e-mail address as a tip somewhere. You can tip all day, as much as you want, on whatever sites you want. I'll receive no money, and you'll pay no money until you later decide to put actual cash into your account, presumably when you've tipped enough around the web that you feel a little guilty for not actually paying your tab. There's no point in putting a fake e-mail address because all that means is I get nothing and you typed a fake e-mail address for no reason. The huge downside to all this though, that content creators can't cash out with cash right now, only A bucks. If they catch on, that will change.

Sorry to go on and on about this tip thing, I'm mostly explaining it as possible interesting shift on the web in general. Also, it's funded by Y-Combinator, which is a VC firm that knows wtf they are doing.

Chat

There's a chat room in the sidebar now, and underneath it is a link to a bigger version of it so you have more room to chat (they are linked together). This will surely be a complete disaster of a feature that I'll have to remove, so get it while you can. You guys like to argue about everything, so I thought I'd try to integrate even more ways for you to go at it.

Draw My Thing

This Draw My Thing game is awesome. It's a shared whiteboard where players take turn trying to draw the given word or phrase. One player draws while the rest guess, and whoever types the exact correct text gets a point, then it's the next person's turn to draw. Casual and fun! I put it on my site for the hell of it.

Enjoy the new site. I plan to update it much more frequently now.

Magic: The Gathering Makes a Card for Me

Ken Nagle from Wizards of the Coast explains here how he designed a Magic: The Gathering card inspired by me. It's in the Shards of Alara set.

The first of many Sirlin-inspired Magic cards.

Hadouken!

David Sirlin is a world-class Street Fighter player and game designer. Whenever he talks about "the most balanced" games with "the best design," he inevitably sticks Magic: The Gathering at the top of his list. He obviously has great respect for the game design work we at Wizards of the Coast do on Magic.

A simple question arose in my mind: if David Sirlin were to design a Magic card, what would it be? I reached for the lowest-hanging fruit...

In Naya design, this card was upgraded to hit players, ending many a stalemate between Spearbreaker Behemoths and Feral Hydras. This card was cycled across Naya into Soul's Might, Soul's Fire, Soul's Grace, and embraced by the creative team as a chance to show Ajani on cards other than Ajani Vengeant. Development and templating dropped the "tap your guy as an additional cost" to remove text and combo better with attacking (via exalted and unearth).

Here's my Hadouken.

Thanks Ken, that's awesome that you made a hadouken card as a tribute to me. Though if I designed a card, it would have been something that captured the essense of the Shoryuken. The Shoryuken says, "I know what you were going to do, and I was ready for it." I would have looked for some way to make a counterspell that you play ahead of time, proving you know what's coming, rather than as a reaction. Meddling Mage comes to mind, the card that Chris Pikula got to design for winning the Sydney tournament in the year 2000.

This card requires knowing the opponent's deck.

To really get that "bam!" moment though, it would be better if you could bait the opponent into playing just the card you expected, then show right then that you expected it. It's pretty hard to capture that in Magic though, because there isn't really a clean way of naming a card, yet keeping it secret which card you named. If there were a way though, it's easy to imagine the cycle across the colors. The red version would deal damage when you Shoryuken them; blue would let you draw cards; green would put a token creature into play under your control; black would make them sacrifice permanents; white would do something boring.

Punch Out!!

I totally love Punch Out. That's awesome that they are making a new one.

Punch-Out!! Wii 'Debut' trailer

While I was at MIT, my roommate and I played Super Punch Out (SNES) a lot. We had quite a rivalry over it. The game has a scoreboard for how fast you beat each boxer and my roommate and I each tried to have the fastest time against every fighter. Often we weren't even home at the same times, so I'd come home to find him with a new time 0.3 seconds faster than mine or something. But even sweeter is that a lot of times he'd come home to find my time 10 seconds or even 30 seconds faster than his!

You see, there are tricks to beating lots of those characters quickly, so by discovering some different method, you can radically reduce your time. Often, I would find this much different method, then my roommate would see me do it (or I'd tell him how I did it), then he'd perfect the new method and shave off a fraction of a second or something.

We went back and forth on this for weeks, or maybe even months. Eventually, it was not enough to merely be #1 on a character's time-attck scoreboard. We'd each try to get TEN scores agaist a given boxer that were all faster than the other guy. That way the entire top 10 scoreboard would be my name, knocking him off entirely. Now you're getting the idea how into this game we were.

I love the look of the new Wii version in the video above. Really captures that old-school feel with modern graphics. Too bad I kind of don't have any friends anymore, so I don't foresee reliving the fun of that old rivalry. Oh well.

--Sirlin

Evolution 2008 Results and Stories

The world finals in Las Vegas have come and gone. I spent a lot of time at the event on monitoring the gameplay of the two games I designed: Street Fighter HD Remix and Yomi card game. Both of them are shaping up well, but there was also a Street Fighter tournament to worry about in the middle of it all.

I actually planned to win this year, and it felt within my reach. Winning would have allowed me to write a really great essay, too, explaining my view that more practice does not equal more ability. In fact, I don't really recall playing any matches of ST (Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo) the entire year between Evolution 2007 and 2008 except about 20 minutes before the 2008 event started. You might say that my practice playing SF HD Remix is a good substitute, which is somewhat true, but it's also "anti-practice" because it's a different game with different properties and different matchups. I had to remember not to be thrown off by that.

So if I had zero real practice, why would I think I was more able to win than ever? Because I had a trick up my sleeve. Not winning the whole thing makes for a pretty lame story, but that's what we're stuck with. The trick: perceiving that time has slowed down.

I have always relied on this ability. How is it that my low strongs in SF Alpha 2 seem to beat other people's low strongs? How is it that my dragon punches seemed to hit other dragon punches (doing them 1 or 2 frames later means you can hit theirs...).

I read Josh Waitzkin's book, The Art of Learning, this year. Josh is a US Chess champion (and subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer). Josh gave up competitive Chess and took up Tai Chi for relaxation. He then stumbled into Tai Chi Push Hands competitions and has won over a dozen titles in that sport, including world champion titles.

Josh explained that one of the skills needed in Tai Chi Push Hands is to see "more frames" than your opponent. To see time go by in greater detail than your opponent. He mentioned how in a Chess tournament once, there was an earthquake that sent everyone into a panic. This heightened state actually gave him MORE focus though, and helped him win his match. How could he achieve that state without an earthquake though? Later in his life, he broke his arm and the fight-or-flight response gave him an edge to win a Tai Chi match, when most people would have considered him out of the fight. The accident allowed him to see time flow more slowly than usual, and was the edge he needed. But how could he enter this state without breaking his arm?

I have noticed the same things Josh noticed. As a child, I was in a bicycle accident and as I flew forward over the handlebars of my bike, I could see every moment in sharp detail, in slow motion. I have been able to perceive slowed time in fighting game tournmanet matches before, on a smaller scale. This year though, my plan was to focus on achieving this state of mind as much as possible.

Another concept Josh mentions a lot is the ability of the mind to deeply focus, and mental strain it takes to do so. He recounds several tales where he carefully managed his focus, expending it at the right times and pushing himself to have more "focus reserves" than his opponents.

I have said for a long time that fighting games mostly involve double-blind decision making. That means that the moment you decide to jump, you often do not know if your opponent has already thrown a fireball or not. You only know if he threw a fireball a few frames earlier because you cannot instantly perceive the state of the opponent--it takes a moment for the perception to register. The idea I have focused on more lately is that not only is it a double-blind experience, but that the opponent can be more or less blind than you at various points in the match. If he is thrown off, moments of the match can rush by for him without him able to see the details. If you enter deep focus and can perceive time passing more slowly, then you are less blind than usual and can use those nuances to your advantage. But as Josh explains, the kind of deep mental focus required for this is draining. If you push yourself to the limit with it, you might have nothing left for a later match in the tournament. Use it, conversve it, and waste the focus reserves of your opponent, if possible.

The tournament started Saturday. I cared less than ever about which characters I'd play. I wish I could have played HD Remix's T.Hawk or Fei Long or Cammy or Akuma or something, but they aren't quite the same in ST, ha. Anyway, it's more about playing the opponent than the character matchup in this world of slow-time. I was even willing to trade in my usual sloppy style of play for an even sloppier one if it meant I could use my time-ability.

The early rounds of the tournament were a good warmup. I don't really know exactly why they help me, but they do. By the time I was to face Mike Watson (former US champion in ST), I felt ready. Mike will tell you that he simply had trouble dragon punching on console sticks (probably true) but in any case, I was able to use my time-power. During a few critical moments, time passed very slowly, and I was even able to notice a couple times when I simulated what might happen if I did X, decided that I didn't like the simulation's answer, then did something else and was successful.

I have never played Ryu as a counter to Honda in an ST tournament, but this year I did and won that match handily. Then there was ST pro NKI and his Chun Li. NKI is a challenging opponent because he now knows more nuances of ST than I do, so it's difficult to beat him with a knowledge-advantage, as I do for many other opponents. Vega seemed like the obvious choice against him, but Bison just felt right. Also, earlier that day NKI said he would prefer to fight my Bison than my Vega, which he meant as a kind of insult to my Bison. I told him maybe he'd get the chance and as luck would have it, he did get the chance. I chose Bison.

I was winning the first round when the evil-NKI paused the game and quit, because his button configuration was not right. I know he did not do this on purpose, but it felt dirty anyway and I wished him bad luck. The tournament director later told me that I should have been awarded a round win for this because pausing the game to change your buttons is expressly covered in the tournament rules and it is supposed to result in a round-loss. Final note on this: NKI is only evil in the contect of this one round, not generally. He is a nice and helpful guy.

I was able to use my power again vs NKI. It wasn't superior match knowlege, but slow-time that I used at a couple key points. Obvservers might not have noticed those key points because most of the match had me flopping around sloppily, looking for openings. The most interesting part of this match was the very long time (30 seconds???) where I did nothing. NKI was doing Chun Li's lightning legs a few pixels away from me and I have no move at that distance that can beat it. My only real choices are jump in, jump away, or do nothing. I did nothing and NKI kept doing lightning legs. It was an interesting "conversation" in that we each made it clear that we would keep doing our own thing. I chose to do nothing here because he is the one on edge in this situation, not me. Doing nothing is easy and it doesn't even require me to be afraid of a suddenly different move from him (there is ample time to react). Meanwhile he must keep pressing the buttons to do lightning legs (that part isn't that hard, but it's something) and more importantly, he must be on edge about whether I will jump in. If I do, he must stop doing lightning legs immedialy, then do up kicks. It's very draining to be on edge for so long, adrenaline pumping to help you react quickly if needed. When that moment is prolonged too long (say, for 30 seconds), it drains your focus reserves.

Anyway, one of us finally did something and the (fake) stalemate ended. He won that round, but I won the match. Next, I was to play Nuki, former Evolution ST champion. Nuki also plays Chun Li. I was completely ready. I was in the zone, activating slow time every match now, and Nuki was next. I saw that bracket had progressed to our match and I stepped up to play. The tournament director then informed me that my match against Nuki would be the next day, on stage as part of the top 8. Nooooo.

I'm supposed to be happy to make the top 8 and excited play on stage (yeah, both of those are true), but I was READY right that moment to face Nuki. 24 hours later might as well be 24 years. Whatever state of body chemistry I had would be gone, and who knows if I could get it back.

The next day, I did play Nuki on stage. I was not worried at all, and believed that I would beat him for sure. Playing in front of a huge audience does not rattle me, so that would not be a factor. I thought Vega was a more logical choice, but I felt Bison was a better choice for some reason I couldn't explain. Character choice wouldn't matter much anyway, it would be a battle of timing and who could see through the fog of double-blind. So I played Nuki...but...at normal speed. I don't know, I just couldn't get it going. No slow-time, no super power from me. Our rounds were close, but Nuki defeated me pretty handily. [Note to people who don't get it: I use "super power" as joke-phrase. I think everyone has access to this phenomenon.]

A few matches later, I was to play Tokido on stage. Tokido won last year's Evolution ST tournament, and it was quite a travesty that I did not defeat him last year. Last year I quickly took him to match point and just one more hit would have beaten him, but he came back to win the game and the set with repeated Vega wall-dives that I could not block. I should have beaten him then and I was sure as hell going to beat him now. His 1-dimensional style of play should be easy to defeat, and I had no doubt that I would beat him.

My plan, probably to everyone's surprise, was to play Blanka. This elicited the following reactions from various people in the crowd: 1) "but you don't even play Blanka," 2) "Blanka is bottom tier," and 3) "Blanka isn't even a counter match for Vega, what are you doing?" Well, I do play Blanka, just not many people know. And I do think Blanka is a counter-match. All I have to do is trade my roll with his pokes. Each trade does about 5x the damage to him than me. That means I can roll randomly and get hit back for it a few times, and still be ok. Throw in some bites and crossup shorts, and it should be easy. Oh and by the way, he can't go off the wall because my up-ball beats it 100%.

I traded my roll with his poke a total of zero times. He knew exactly what to do, never went off the wall, mostly sat there doing nothing, and occasionally poked. The game was close, but he won. When an opponent shows a little too much competence in a matchup, I usually like to switch characters. I asked the crowd if I should play Bison or Honda. They said Honda. Choi (legend of ST) was standing just off stage and he advised Honda as well. I said that I was feeling something with Bison. Choi shrugged as if to say "if you say so..." I should have beaten Tokido last year with Bison, so let's make it happen now.

Unfortunately, I had to play him at normal speed. No slow-time powers. Close rounds, but Tokido won handily. That means that the ability I bet everything on never showed up in the top 8 matches on Sunday, and I was only able to summon it on Saturday. Why is that? I don't really know.

Evolution 2008 ST Results
1st - John Choi (O.Sagat, Ryu, N.Ken)
2nd - Nuki (Chun Li)
3rd - Alex Valle (N.Ken)
4th - Tokido (Vega)
5th - Sirlin (Vega, Bison, Ryu, Blanka and almost Honda)
5th - Kusumondo (Honda)
7th - Justin Wong (O. Sagat)
7th - Shirts (Dhalsim (he usually plays O.Dhalsim but switched to N.Dhalsim)

After the tournament, Tokido told me he expected me to play Vega against him. I said, "Play a mirror match against your Vega, your only character? I don't think so. Blanka is a counter." He then told me that in a recent Japanese tournament, he was defeated by Komodo Blanka and that he was very upset. He practiced relentlessly against Blanka so he would not lose that match again. I frowned, wishing I had known that. Then Tokido said, "but why switch to Bison? It is Vega's advantage." I told him that I have played that match in tournaments for over 10 years. I have only ever lost it to 2 people in all that time, and Tokido is one of them. I am not afraid of the match." Tokido seemed to think I should be though. Maybe he is right.

There's an untold story about Tokido here that you'll have to hear another time. But let's just say that after seeing change in the entire game in SF HD Remix, Tokido approved all-around and agreed with every one of them.

So there you have my story of getting 5th place (aka not winning). For a more important story of Choi winning, read this. Choi's story speaks for itself and there's little I can add to it, but I will say one thing. I saw him playing CvS2 on stage against Ricky and Ricky won the first game. A few moments into game 2, I said to the people next to me that Choi would win this first round (meaning defeat Ricky's first character and come out ahead). He did. As he did, I saw that he was in full force. I am an "expert" at watching Choi play in tournaments. There's something about his choices in gameplay that have always excited me. So I recongized the pattern that was about to come. He was going to beat Ricky. He was going to beat everone. He was going to win CvS2. The people around me said no way in hell is he winning CvS2.

At this point, I left the main hall and went to eat. I had to care about staying on schedule physically and I would rather eat on time than fight the 1,000 spectators in food lines once CvS2 ended (my match with Nuki was coming up later). Besides, it's CvS2, a generally boring game of short, short, into super. So I left. I later found out that Choi won and that everone considered it exciting because it was so surprising. Well I was not surprised at all. From just a few moments of one round, I saw that no one would be able to touch him that day. (Though I didn't expect him to win ST also...). What I didn't know was why, but now we do.

--Sirlin