The Plane Is A Tiger |
Jun 11, 2014 07:54 PM |
I went to Nintendo's Smash Bros. demo at Best Buy today, and thought I'd give a few hands-on impressions. They had four people play Smash Run against CPUs on 3DS first, and then you moved on to play two rounds on the Wii U.
I tried out Greninja on 3DS, and it was a little awkward getting used to his movement during the Smash Run segment. Most of his attacks don't hit the hardest, so it was tough beating any big enemies. Smash Run itself is really cool though, and includes enemies from every game. I ran into giant peahats, Kid Icarus enemies, metroids, cannons from Kirby, etc. The challenge room I found was an easy-level target challenge from the original Smash Bros; just a flat platform with 10 targets flying around. You can die during the run by getting hit hard enough after taking a lot of damage, and it restarts you at a random spot.
Greninja played much better in the actual battle at the end of it. His down attacks are incredibly powerful, and his shadow teleport is a lot of fun. Greninja players also tended to win the Wii U battles from what I saw.
I played as Mega Man on the first round on Wii U, which were 2 minute timed matches. The biggest challenge was that my brain kept trying to use Mega Man controls of A for jump and B to shoot, which does not work. His wide variety of attacks will make him a great character to play, and his attack shooting Airman's weapon upwards can hit pretty hard.
The second round I managed to win using Villager. The tree just vanished instead of falling after I chopped it, but the gyroid rocket is fantastic. As long as you're above or on level with the stage you could ride it back as a recovery move from any distance, but you're frozen after jumping off the same way you are after up+B moves. The bugnet and umbrella hits make him a solid close-up fighter too.
As for other general things, the game seems VERY generous about catching the ledge. I grabbed it a couple times with Mega Man when I didn't seem to be close enough, so I assume they're probably going to tweak that before release. The controls on both 3DS and the Wii U Pro controller are almost direct translations from the Gamecube controller. It feels kind of weird having both X and Y as jump when the buttons are all the same size/shape, and the right stick on Wii U was labeled as something to do with smash attacks, but I didn't mess with that. Jumping by pressing up on the 3DS analog stick still worked, but not as well as before so it was better to stick to buttons. X-Bombs are crazy. Rosalina appeared to be a very heavy hitter while holding Luma, as in Bowser heavy. It'll be interesting to see what they do with the items picked up during Smash Run, which was something they hinted at during the tournament last night. I picked up a Reflector and some kind of grenade which just showed up as green sparkles on the loot screen in addition to a Greninja trophy.
I was also amused that Best Buy made Nintendo not give out the gold coins today like they'd planned. Instead of the first 70 people getting coins today Best Buy will give them out on pick-up to anyone who has a receipt saying they preordered at the correct store during the times when the Smash event was going on. There are going to be a lot of very confused cashiers. It also meant you could now get two coins if you preordered both versions, but I only put money down on the 3DS game.
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