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Video Game Development Concept of Nintendo
Nintendo is a Japanese multinational consumer electronics and video game company headquartered in Kyoto. Nintendo is one of the world’s largest video game companies by market capitalization, creating some of the best-known and top selling video game franchises of all-time, such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Pokemon.
It has supplemented since the 1980s by its major divisions Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Europe, it ultimately became one of the most influential in the industry and one of Japan’s most-valuable companies with a market value of over $37 billion in 2018.
Nintendo has proved itself by being awarded for many excellent works. The latest award winning by Nintendo is Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. It has won many awards in both 2018 and 2019. It has been nominated for 13 times. Nintendo achieved awards for Best Fighting Game in Game Critics Awards, Best Console Game in Gamescom Awards, Raging Bull Award for Best Fighting Game, Fighting Game of the Year in 22nd Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, Excellence in Gameplay in SXSW Gaming Awards, and Game of the Year and Excellence Prize in Famitsu Awards. Moreover, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate by Nintendo got Grand Prize, Best Sales Award, Global Award of Japanese Product, Excellence Award and Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry Award in the famous Japan Game Awards.
This award winning game, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, as with other games in the Super Smash Bros. series, features a crossover cast of fighters from several different Nintendo franchises, as well as fighters from series by third-party developers such as Konami, Sega, Capcom, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Square Enix, Platinum games, Atlus, Microsoft and SNK. The base game features 74 playable fighters, consisting of all 65 previous fighters from past entries and 11 new ones. When starting the game, players only have access to the eight starter characters of the original 1999 Super Smash Bros. game and must unlock the rest by completing the Classic mode of the game, playing through the single player mode, or fighting a certain amount of battles.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was the best pre-selling game of the series to date before its launch date, 7th December, 2019. It surpassed 5 million sales during its first week on shelves. That figure includes both physical and digital sales, and would make sense give the game has already sold over 4.2 million units in the United States and Japan combined. And it was sold over 12 million after 2 months. In a few months, it has become the best-selling game in the world.
It is not easy to produce an award winning game globally as well as world’s best-selling game. Firstly, the developers have to make game development usually starting with a game concept. The game concept is a very important document. That concept outlines the features of the game, the goals, and the overall game play. The concept ensures all parties involved with the game start on the same page. This includes development team, marketing, licensor, etc. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is completely excellent at all those works.
Nintendo has made Super Smash Bros. complete and successful especially with fascinating mechanics, three dimentional view, a great number of different characters and game worlds to explore as well as enjoyable soundtracks and battle sounds. The game makes the gamers feel completely different to play it rather than the other games.
Gamespot’s review Edmond Tran’s review-in-progress gave Smash Bros. Ultimate a 9/10. “Situational downers don’t stop Super Smash Bros. Ultimate shining as a flexible multiplayer game that can be as freewheeling or as firm as you want it to be,” he wrote. “Its entertaining single-player content helps keep the game rich with interesting things to do, as well as bolstering its spirit of loving homage to the games that have graced Nintendo consoles. Ultimate’s diverse content is compelling, its strong mechanics are refined, and the encompassing collection is simply superb.”
Resident Smash Bros. expert Alfred Ng got an early copy of the game, and found it has what both casual and hardcore fans want. “For now, SSBU (Super Smash Bros. Ultimate) plays like a well-balanced game with new elements to keep it fresh and interesting for a long time,” he said. “The meta game could develop to a point where one character is broken and overpowered, but until then, SSBU has a great shot at bringing Smash players from across the fandom together.”
The game features every single Smash Bros. character yet and new additions such as Castlevania’s Simon Belmont and a Piranha Plant. It has more than 100 stages and more than 800 music tracks and countless other additions to the long-running franchise.
All of the playable characters in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate i.e. every single fighter who has been in a Super Smash Bros. game will be featured in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Every old character is also getting major or minor tweaks to their move sets, attributes or play styles.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is a massive monument to itself. The greatest thing about the Super Smash Bros. series is its dedication to impact. Every time a punch, kick, slash, or blast stands, it has a high likelihood of sending the victim flying – like a good superhero movie, or an anime. Every strike resonates with invisible power; smoke plumes follow these cartoon characters as they careen around their environments, almost ready to explode.
For the casual player, Super Smash Bros. has always excelled as a balance of satisfaction and chaos: the joy of Nintendo’s best and most interesting characters pummeling each other, fighting against the disorder of items and bodies being constantly flung from one side of the screen to the other. It is like ballet, only with your little brother’s action figures, and instead of dancing they are being thrown at your television set. It may not be like ballet at all. But it is in tis best moments, graceful.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the fifth iteration of the same basic idea. What happens when you put Nintendo’s most popular mascots together in a 2D fighting game emphasizing big, dramatic, goofy play? Series director Masahiro Sakurai wanted to find out, and in 1999, the original Super Smash Bros. was born. What Ultimate adds to that basic premise for the casual player is scale. Ultimate is a sprawling, moving monument – to Nintendo, to videogames at large, to itself.
Seventy-four playable characters, dozens of stages, spanning nearly every large franchise in video game history, whether closely coupled with Nintendo or not. Mega Man; Metal Gear; Final Fantasy: hell, even Sega icon and Mario archrival Sonic the Hedgehog is here. Surrounding them are hundreds of remixed music tracks, quiet Easter Eggs, and collectible “Spirits” based on characters from every one of these franchises. In being inclusive of gaming history, Ultimate is also inclusive of Smash history: Every character from every version of the game is here, along with every stage and every song. It is an art history exhibit painted as a series of brawls.
It is also in the same vein a bit of a slog. Ultimate introduces itself as a guided tour through its encyclopedic history; at the beginning, only eight playable characters are unlocked, and they are the first eight available in the original 1999 game. From there, characters have to be unlocked through extended paly. At regular intervals, you will be forced to duel with a new character, unlocking them if you succeed and waiting for a rematch (accessible buried in a menu) if you do not. There are ways to speed up this process, and for a canny, determined player it can take a couple of hours or so. For a player who is not so savvy or so patient, it can take a lot longer.
The problem gets at the frustration I’m feeling with Super Smash Bros. Ultimate – a game I have, by design, only scratched the surface of, and will likely only ever scratch the surface of. In so many ways, it is impeccable and like its predecessors, is one of the purest engines of joy in the videogame world. The combat is polished to a fine sheen, and while there are nuances of its design to be picked apart by hardcore players, for the average player engaging with friends it is familiar, responsive and exciting. Battles pop and soar and crackle, and the wide roster offers an amazing level of choice. In short, if is funny.
But it also feels barely able to contain itself, torn between its urges as an object of play and its urges as a curatorial project. Its single-player game modes are entirely in the thrall of Ultimate as a museum piece, and that makes them sluggish, overly meticulous, long dizzying stretches of content that provide recollection without substantial payoff. The primary single-player mode, World of Light, is packed with more collectible Spirits than I can reasonably count, and while each one serves as a nice nod to some game in Smash’s repertoire, their sheer number and variety cause the mode to balloon out in all directions, dragging down the pace and process.
And slow just doesn’t really suit Super Smash Bros. At times, Ultimate feels like a guided tour through a playground – all the fun rides surrounded by red velvet tape. You can get to them, certainly, but only if you take the approved path. The wild joy of scenery is dampened by the controls placed around it, by the game’s slavish devotion to history as both a driver of player progression and an expressive goal for the game to achieve.
This dual interest does, perhaps, make Super Smash Bros. Ultimate impressive. And it absolutely does not stop the play from being compelling. But it also creates a dissonance that doesn’t entirely work for the series. Videogame history is great – truly, it is.
As a concept, Super Smash Bros. has stayed the same since it was first released in 1999. Nintendo characters battle in the platform fighter game, trying to knock each other off the stage. But small changes to the physics with each new game have made it more or less competitive.The original on the Nintendo 64 was limited in its options, but allowed for dddp development within ghose restrictions. Melee, for the GameCube, was fast0paced and combo driven but could be too difficult for newcomers. Brawl on the Wii was easier to pick up but not as competitive. And the last version, on the Wii U was easier to pick up but not as competitive. And the latest version, on the Wii U, focused more on strategy and mental fortitude but was not as aggressive.
Nintendo has returned to rewarding aggressive play in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. You will do better if you chase after your enemies and fight them, and it is more difficult to run away. Characters could dodge in the air as much as they wanted in the Wii U version, making combos difficult unless you could predict when your opponent would do it or bait them into a mistake. This was a shift from Melee, where you could only do one air dodge then you would be immobile until you landed again.
SSBU takes a middle ground: Air dodges now have a long cooldown time, so you can’t keep spamming them to stay safe. This forces you to be more precise with dodges, making for more fighting than running. It is subtle adjustments like this that make SSBU more competitive than previous games while keeping it fair for novice players.That middle fround means leaving out wavedashing, a technique for sliding and moving quickly in Melee, while bringing back dash dancing, another movement tactic that is simpler to pull off.Another example is reducing Rage’s effect. Rage was introduced in the Wii U version. It made you stronger the more damage you took. This was fine when playing with friends because it allows for comebacks, but competitive players often saw Rage as the game rewarding you for losing – kind of like how you only get the best items in Mario Kart if you are in the last place.
There are many more minor changes. A few of notable ones include Perfect Shielding, which allows for counter attacks if the game player block a hit with precise timing, and higher gravity for more fast-paced air combos.Playing SSBU feels like rediscovering a competitive game. It is exciting to think about how strategies will develop in the months after its release. There were many times I found myself watching replays frame by frame to see the most optimal aerial move with the least landing lag, and noticing what moves kill at certain percentages. Each version of Super Smash Bros. has its own loyal fans and top players, but SSBU is Nintendo’s best chance at getting them all together under one title – the same way they brought every single character back in one game.
Obviously, SSBU is all about multiplayer. You can play online (if you have the service) or with friends in person, whether it's with the Switch's small JoyCon controllers, the classic Gamecube controller with adapters, or against someone else with a Switch.We talked more about the competitive aspects of SSBU from playing with a professional Smash player in a previous article. While the most fun ways to play Smash is with friends, I spent the majority of my time with the game alone, and I couldn't play online. With past Super Smash Bros. there was always a limited single-player mode, other than Brawl's Subspace Emissary. There were challenges such as Home-Run Contest, Break the Targets and All-Star mode, but they didn't have much replay value.
SSBU tries to address that with World of Light, its new adventure mode structured like a board game. It plays a lot like an RPG: You walk around a map collecting spirits that have their own power-ups to help you in future battles.Some spirits you'll absolutely need to continue the story -- like finding a pilot spirit so you can use a spaceship on the map. The World of Light board is massive -- after a week of playing, I am still finding areas that I have not been to yet.And some fights are too difficult unless you have the proper power-ups, like a fight where the floor is lava unless you have a spirit that grants you immunity to it. The story itself is not great, and at times can feel a little bit corny -- but I do not think anyone is playing Smash Bros. for its narrative.
When you first get the game, you'll spend plenty of time unlocking all the characters. Compared to previous Smash games, it is a real mountain to climb with 66 fighters to unlock -- not counting the original eight you start with.The AI has gotten a lot smarter since the last Super Smash Bros. too -- along with the changes making SSBU more competitive, the computers have changed to fit that play style too. Computers will now chase you off the stage to kill you and are much less predictable than previous games.Most importantly, they are much better for training solo players. In previous versions, training on computers at the highest difficulty didn't translate well to playing in tournaments, because the computers had perfect reaction times and dodges.
If you trained against those computers, you were playing with an unrealistic standard, and would be unprepared to play against a human who makes mistakes and picks up patterns in real time. The new AI is much smarter, often using techniques that I have only seen humans using in the past. At one point, I played against a computer-controlled Young Link that held onto a bomb to blast itself in the air to get back onto the stage. That's a strategy that players in Melee developed, but I'd never seen it played by a computer.For now, SSBU plays like a well-balanced game with new elements to keep it fresh and interesting for a long time.The meta game could develop to a point where one character is broken and overpowered, but until then, SSBU has a great shot at bringing Smash players from across the fandom together.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate won’t change your mind about the series. If Nintendo’s particular brand of chaotic fighting doesn’t appeal to you, Ultimate doesn’t offer much new, unless you happen to be a die-hard Ridley fan. Instead, it takes what people already love about it, and offers more. More characters to explore, more ways to play, and even more story to dig into. It is a greatest hits collection, one that makes me wonder just what director Masahiro Sakurai could possibly do to top this for the inevitable next Smash game.