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Saturday, January 10, 2015

A Somewhat Real Manual on a Physical Copy?

The one thing that really surprised me yesterday when I received my copy of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is that it comes with a game manual. As you may know, game companies nowadays save money - while still charging you that ridiculous $59.99 or higher standard price on their games - on physical game distribution by eliminating the inclusion of instruction manuals. Why they just don't go full digital distribution is beyond me because Valve is just rolling in the dough with the Steam digital distribution platform. And we are not just talking about an instruction manual with only a few pages and this is definitely not one of those health warning inserts. What is included with the physcial copy of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is a full-fledged colorful instruction manual. Somewhat that is. The manual is thick but that is because it included the several language translations. If they just stuck with English there, well, it would have been rather thin. At least it's something right? I am sure that physical copy nuts are really happy about this. Just don't expect it to happen very often however or you will be very, very disappointed. And what about the game itself? Well, I actually got bored not even half hour into the game. There's no adventure mode and the amiibo integration was lackluster. I will definitely play the game more in the coming days but it looks like this is another case of Mario Kart 8 where the game contains too little and fails to innovate. I have to investigate closer but I believe the game even uses the exact same graphical assets from Super Smash Bros. Brawl on the Nintendo Wii. Instead of polishing up the stages from the previous game, they pretty much just transferred everything directly, warts and all so some parts of the game look really bad. I thought Nintendo abandoned the original Wii because they wanted to embrace new technology. What a lie that turned out to be. Oh Nintendo, what are we going to do with you?


Instruction Manual Shock: 5 out of 5
First Impression of Game: 2 out of 5

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whaaaaat? Some of the assets are just recycled/upscaled?

Loner Gamer said...

From what I have seen from that first run, some of the stages seem to be the exact same ones found on the Wii. They didn't seem to be bothered making them pretty for HD or add effects since the Wii U was supposed to be a better hardware. I have to boot up Brawl soon to double check but based on some of those really bad textures... It is apparent that Nintendo didn't want to spend too much on the development of this game.