Poll of the Day > The character models in the first Super Smash Bros. are hilariously bad

(+) Yeah! (+)

Of course N64 models look bad now, but I mean, even by N64 standards they are bad. How do Mario and Link look worse than in earlier N64 games? Luigi, Yoshi and DK look a lot better in Mario Party, which came first (though barely) and is fucking MARIO PARTY. Then there's all the items which are just 2D sprites.

I assume the reason the models suck so bad is that they thought the game wasn't going to catch on. It makes for a funny contrast with the rest of the series, which is ridiculously comprehensive and detailed.

Well it makes sense that characters like Link and Mario wouldn't look as good as in their dedicated games since they are just members of a roster and not primary protagonists that is directly in front of the player through the entire game

You're also seeing the characters from further away than in most games, and you have to keep in mind with the first smash game they didn't know if it would be a hit. Nintendo tries a lot of different things and not everything finds an audience, you can't blame them for not investing the same time and money into an unknown compared to an established franchise
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That is the most un-Mead post I've read in a long time

I'm curious also what their relationship with HAL was at that point. I know they've always been closely associated with Nintendo but weren't they not fully owned by them at one point? You'd think they would use the character assets from existing games, but it obviously looks like they built them from the ground up, so I wonder if Nintendo didn't provide them. The only other explanation I can think of is that they had a hard time getting the animations to look right with the existing models

i don't believe bri wrote that
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He must have forgotten he wasn't logged in to his Zeus account

Rockies posted...

That is the most un-Mead post I've read in a long time

helIy posted...

i don't believe bri wrote that

no u
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Kirby has an awesome character model lol. He was like an awkward wad of chewing gum
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The game could lag like crap though so I think they compromised the models in order to reduce that lag.
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LeetCheet posted...

The game could lag like crap though so I think they compromised the models in order to reduce that lag.

My guess would be rendering.
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60 fps
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RoboXgp89 posted...

60 fps

I had to just look this up. I had never noticed SSB64 was 60 fps. That's very impressive.
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NMB topic
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Rockies posted...

Of course N64 models look bad now,

N64 games have always looked bad.
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donkey kong 64
perfect dark
and even turok 2 were not bad looking games
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RoboXgp89 posted...

donkey kong 64
perfect dark
and even turok 2 were not bad looking games

If you say so, they looked bad to me, thus,

AllstarSniper32 posted...

N64 games have always looked bad.

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Rockies posted...

I assume the reason the models suck so bad is that they thought the game wasn't going to catch on.

Mostly, yeah. It wasn't a tremendously high-budget game, courtesy of being a pretty new idea. Toss in that they needed a larger variety of animations and hitbox interactions than other games featuring the characters and that the camera's usually zoomed out too far to see the models in detail anyway, and it's pretty understandable that they didn't put that much into making good-looking models.
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How often did we see multiple detailed as Mario/Link enemies in their 64 games?
Smash Bros had four characters on screen and had crazy powerups going on, so they had to cut down on the polygon models in order to make it run in 60 fps.
Mario/Zelda 64 were also running at 30 fps, with framedrops, which gave the developers more power to render Mario/Link with more polygons.
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Because it was probably a tech demo at first
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FellWolf posted...

Because it was probably a tech demo at first

That's the opposite of how it usually goes when something starts as a tech demo. That way, you tend to get a game that looks really pretty, but has pretty limited gameplay. SSB struck me more as being a proof of concept, which would explain having half-assed visuals.
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adjl posted...

FellWolf posted...

Because it was probably a tech demo at first

That's the opposite of how it usually goes when something starts as a tech demo. That way, you tend to get a game that looks really pretty, but has pretty limited gameplay. SSB struck me more as being a proof of concept, which would explain having half-assed visuals.

Tomato tomato
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