I have a very large, almost encyclopedic level of knowledge on every smash title. From funny bugs like Wario's Wectoring in Smash 3DS to Melee Falcon's gentleman being negative edged for some reason. Things like ZSS' moves involving her whip such as nair not staling for some reason to more out there things like using Wario chomp on Snake's up B to trade with the cypher and destroy his recovery. I have put in a lot of effort to understand smash titles, I do with almost any game. A lot of people say I'm like, good at labbing games or something. Or come from a fighting game mindset. To tell the truth, I really don't think so. I think I am in fact, awful at fighting games.

The most obvious thing is my mind set. It absolutely isn't one of a winners, and it's likely never going to be. If I lose for almost any reason, I just get upset. Really, that's my own fault. I think almost everything I contribute, even if it's so meaningless as video game meta tech, is not really good or just not worth celebrating in any capacity. It feels like I'm intentionally just being miserable even when I do the things I like to do It's not like I don't enjoy these games-- I do. Why am I on this detour though? Well, I think Smash Ultimate is the climax of the series to me, and not because of the hoops they went through to get this game out. Not because it has everyone in it, or that it has Sora in it. Smash is just a very exhausting game to try to play at any serious level if you aren't completely composed mentally at all times.

It's not an issue exclusive to this one. By the very nature of Smash titles, they kind of effectively gaslight you into thinking that the game is played a certain way. To be clear, most things in Smash aren't intentionally designed. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Things like wave dashing, slide offs, amsah techs, crouch cancelling, ADT power shields, etc are all emergent game design. It's design the game explicitly allows for, but not due to developer intent. They keep these games intentionally open ended, having an ostensible restraint on moves having wholly unique properties, just so each tool in the sandbox has a kind of through line to them. You may not necessarily understand why something is the way it is, but you can will it into being something else. Thats how you get things like shine being essentially it's own cultural signifier.

This feels liberating but everytime they added more limits, it exposed the games to me as feeling kind of pointless. There's an easy romance to even the most modest of 64, Melee, or Brawl play. But you look at Smash 4 or Ultimate and almost nothing feels cool or interesting. It's like infinitely generated. What I meant earlier when I brought up gaslighting is that people make their own pocket metas with Smash more than they do almost any game. Because there isn't a clear, default ruleset people would agree on. It's perfectly reasonable actually, to think that some items should be legal. It's also fine to think that they're all off because complex bans are difficult to police. The Smash community starting with 4 just did what Nintendo did with the online matchmaking rules. That's why Smash 4 was mostly 2 stock 5 minutes even though almost every player understood why this ruleset sucked. My main point here is the fact that even before a match begins people are all playing different games.

We may even be using the same ruleset, but there's so many factors in Smash at work that it sometimes feels entirely random how something will go down. I'm not referring to preconditioned 50/50s, or like, the very basic universal mixup of fast fall timings. Smash has very arcane hitbox interactions. Like, one characters jab just fails to work on one character because of their collision pushing you out of the way. Or moves going into the Z Axis on specific frames and are irreconcilable essentially. What about sword disjoints that have the same frame data as characters with stubby normals except they can only be challenged if they jump closer than they ever really have to. It's like, first you think this is all consistent jank, so you can just control for it. But no, it isn't. A new thing happens almost every match. I end up feel betrayed and irritated. It's like the game was rewriting its own rules. It's not like I'm totally adverse to learning things. I feel like this because the only way to get anywhere in learning something, is having the confidence to say something 'is such', which no matter how small gives you a vantage point from which to observe and move. While it's the nature of Smash for this very thing to always be challenged, which seems like it makes for a very dynamic, eventful game, it's just annoying! It was fine in older Smash titles because at least the game feel was just fun. Now you don't even have momentum when jumping. Plus there actually was more to the neutral in those games.

Smash 64's neutral is very like a traditional fighting game. If your defense is pretty good it's not really a super heavy 0tD game like you might think it is. Simply positioning well in that game can be as powerful as it is in any other Smash title. There's just less avenues a particular hit can go down; which of course means the times you die in one hit end up sticking out more. In each Smash game the most heavily reified game states end up having more forgiving checks in place. To me it's, Neutral, Advantage//Disadvantage, and then Offstage//Ledgeguarding. Most recoveries in 64 and Melee aren't strictly terrible, but just bad enough to where almost any hit is certain death when intercepted. Starting with Brawl unless you're like Meta Knight or something you're generally well off just trapping them at the ledge. And it's basically stayed this way ever since. Except in Ultimate they massively overturned certain things disproportionately. G&W has a frame 2 reversal with I frames that can serve as its own edge guarding tool, combo bridge, and insane out of shield option. Rob's gyro sends wherever Rob was facing when he threw it. Which sounds cool, there's like a design cue you can follow here, but then it's compounded with stuff like: The hitbox is super active when idle so it's very difficult to pick up on the ground. He has a -3, disjointed sword like nair that's a combo starter thats also safe on parry, that combos into the Gyro when tossed-- and then leads into a DI Mixup where you can actually just die even at 0 percent because his Side B is a multi hit that travels relatively far offstage and ends with a strong hit. You can play around these things but Rob has a frame 4 dtilt that trips and combos into itself essentially infinitely. He can box at any range, and if you get hit by either the Gyro, his held item or his giant nair you're forced into this really bad situation. It feels like a punish akin to Smash 64, except in Smash 64 you don't have a combo starter that works literally anywhere on the screen or the stage. Thats not just a property of the Gyro, hitboxes in Ultimate are generally designed to only ever send at one angle.

Older Smash titles can feel kind of clumsy because moves don't necessarily just work out the box. Things are minus on hit at low percents, or a move that hits multiple times tend to whiff certain hits or anything past the first hit anyway. You're generally meant to control for this on your own, which adds to greater expression. My favorite combos are ones that involve drifting forward and hitting with the front of your back airs hitbox. This ends up sending them forward, but because it was a move designed to hit the area behind you, you end up hitting the sour spot or deep into the move. Adding a new consideration for your combo game. Such a thing just doesn't happen in Smash Ultimate because if you try that it'll just send backwards and it'll be the strong hit too. These aren't necessarily bad things in a vacuum but they bubble up in a way where it feels flavorless. Now all the jank is unfun, subtractive game design that reduces a situation to just waiting. There really isn't a way to immediately stop Steve from mining behind a wall, or Cloud from just mashing back air and side b'ing on reaction when you jump in. You can just counterpick to the few characters who don't care about that-- or very very passively pressure them and then get two hard reads in a row to not even get a clean hit on them.

What ends up happening is, on its face it seems balanced because almost every character has insane win conditions you can't exactly prevent from happening-- So everyone is cheap. But this obviously benefits certain characters way better than others. Steve was a poorly thought out gimmick character who ended up having the best almost everything. And the one thing designed to limit him hardly works because there isn't a system level interface for this kind of thing. Generally I don't like the trend modern fighting games have towards relying on the system rather than character idiosyncrasies, but a lot of characters in this game end up playing kind of samey anyway. There's no traction anymore. Everyone except Kazuya has a 3 frame prejump, almost every character has lagless aerials with at least one being -4 or -6 or at least killing at 60%. Almost every character in the game does something in the form of up throw up air or down throw forward air. Etc etc. It's actually kind of bizarre how the game feel of each character is so annoyingly similar.

This game is why I end up getting so upset at almost every fighting game I play. It sounds so goofy to say but, I spent so much time on this game. It's like I got trauma from being burned by this game so much. Now it feels like everything I do in any other game is fake or 'Not Good.' Because this game is so ridiculous it made me stop actually believing that I could do anything on my own. That I could figure out things. That I even mattered really.

Crash Bandicoot returns, fresh off the massive success of the N. Sane trilogy remaster with a brand new, from the ground up built platformer with more ambition and more challenge than ever before. The results are mostly pretty great.

The sixty five teams that have credits before you get the to the main menu every time you boot up the game have smartly come to the realization that only those intimately familiar with the Crash franchise are those who are going to tangle with a brand new entry in the modern age - Crash Bandicoot 4 is an intense challenge from the get go, with bonus levels that you must solve like rubiks cubes, hidden gems in places even the best sleuth will struggle to track down, and platforming challenges that demand more precision than ever before to allow you to progress. Going for a 100% completion run would drive anyone but the most faithful to madness, with each level having not only its own set of collectibles, but also a counterpart inverse world that pushes you to play each level in essentially a wireframe format that reverses each level like mirror mode in Mario Kart. If that isn't enough, each level has a death counter to track your failures, with a collectible offered for coming in under 3 deaths for each level, and a series of brutally precise time trial medals offered for each of the levels as well. If that isn't enough, there are tapes scattered across the main game that unlock even more bonus levels, and alternate side character perspectives on several levels that allow you reimagine the already explored areas using new move sets - the new characters offer weapons like a vacuum pack or a grappling hook, or even a frustratingly limited laser weapon to plow through these levels with.

There is an absolute Scrooge McDuck bank vault level of game here to machete chop though. It's wonderful for those who wish to push themselves to the absolute edge.

For the rest of us, we'll appreciate the added checkpoints to each of the tastefully designed boss battles, the circle that is placed underneath the player character indicating where Crash is going to land whenever he takes to the air. We'll also appreciate the consistently fresh level design that uses different masks to augment the gameplay; one slows down time, one turns Crash into a spinning top, etc....and the way the game starts layering these masks into sequences on top of each other to force us out of our comfort zone and learn how they work intimately to succeed.

I don't think every single new idea Crash 4 brings to the table works completely; adding the masks in, which each have their own distinct button sets, adds too many buttons to the already demanding basic moveset. In levels where they demand you constantly switch through masks in sequence, you're pressing the Y button to activate one mask, a trigger for the next, and then a different button for the next one; it shifts the complexity of the controls in a direction that becomes overly confusing when mixed with the inventive level design. And the new characters add very little to the game; whenever you play as them you just wish that you were playing with the moveset and flexibility of Crash proper, which makes an entire chunk of the game a chore.

Crash Bandicoot 4 is a genuinely great follow up that should have revitalized its franchise for a bright future. Four years later, its ideas are mostly still fresh and well executed; the people who built this game should absolutely be allowed to build a follow up or a successor that refines on the excellent ideas laid out here. Good times all around.