The Official Super Smash Bros. Brawl Thread - See you in March!!

[A Black Falcon]

http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/ssbb/vol2_page1.jsp

The other two parts of this great interview are up.

The lesson: Sakurai's ideas of how to do online gaming are Nintendo-standard stupidity. They talk about how Sakurai's original plan for SSBB online was pretty much exactly the same one that they made in the end, and fit in perfectly with the Wii's online "gaming" system... which is so, so awful... :bummed:

Iwata
Therefore, we tried to think of ways to avoid this form of online gaming and ways to fashion an environment in which parents would feel safe letting their children play games online, debating at length on topics like how to create an online environment free of harassment. As a result, our concept of the WFC slowly began to take shape with two separate modes of play; players could play with friends or play with people they don’t know. It would be more about the fun of sharing rather than simply competing. Amazingly, these were the proposals I found in the first document you gave me.

Sakurai
That’s right. When people think of playing Smash Bros. online, they think about battling opponents to see what happens based on their record of wins or losses, or about holding tournaments online. But I felt that this would make it a service from which only a select group of players could derive enjoyment. For Smash Bros., there are small communities here and there where there’s fun in winning and losing, even when there are more skilled players than others. But if you make an environment where everyone is trying to climb their way to the top of a single tall mountain, it’s clear that the people having fun would be limited to a small number of individuals.
Iwata
Those in the top five might feel pretty good about themselves, but what happens if you’re number 15,398 in the rankings? People considered formidable in their own particular community wouldn’t be the least bit pleased.

Sakurai
Furthermore, since Smash Bros. is likely to have a broad gaming base, those that enjoy playing it within their own community might still end up number 100,000 in the rankings.

Iwata
We were in nearly complete agreement on these things without ever having talked about it. Maybe it was because of our long experience of working together...or possibly our shared roots. (laughs)

This is exactly how NOT to make an online gaming network.

No, that's not enough... this is exactly how to make an irrelevant "online" gaming network. "People will be unhappy about being ranked low and won't like getting put down by people online so we'll BAN ALL THOSE FEATURES"??? I still have no idea how anyone in Nintendo actually thinks that these are good features to mandatorially impose on everyone. Make them OPTIONS! Options!

Sakurai
Simply stated, the Stage Builder enables players to build their own stages. Just like the name says, right? (laughs) (See document) By combining several different components, like platforms, the width of the stage, and traps, players are free, to a certain extent, to create their own stages. They can upload these stages to Nintendo’s server, where it is then sent to other players. In other words, once everyday, a new stage made by someone, somewhere can be sent to your Wii.

Iwata
And the stages sent in this way then disappear.

Sakurai
Right. We figured making these stages available for just one day would make it more interesting.

Iwata
Treasuring every encounter, right?

Sakurai
Right. We wanted players to look forward to these encounters.

Iwata
And, if the stages piled up, it would be difficult to choose from such an endless supply. I think it’s the right decision considering that players have a limited amount of time to play games.

Or more like "The Wii's memory is way too small to save many and we don't want to bother with a listing system that will let you sort them by type, or quality, or anything else like that, so we're going to take the really, really lazy (and cruel and annoying) method and not let you save downloaded maps! Bwahaha!"