Smash Bros. Brawl Tutorial Videos
Sunday, November 9, 2008 at 12:08PM I made this series of ten short tutorial videos for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They appear on the official Nintendo Channel accessible through your Wii, on Nintendo's website, and below from YouTube. Nintendo asked me to explain the game to new players in a way that shows them there is more going on than they might think. Remember, these videos are for new players, not for tournament champions and they're intended to help the Smash scene grow.
Smash Bros. sells well in the US and in Japan, but struggles more in Europe. It sells more in both the US and Japan, while the perception in Eurpose is that it's "that kids game with the Mario Kart characters." A strange and ironic statement considering that the "Mario Kart characters" aren't even originally from Mario Kart, but that game sells well in Europe so it's a point of reference for many. Maybe my videos and the reputation of my name will help increase the scene in Europe. (Note to anrgy commenters: this information is from Nintendo, not from me. The idea that my name as an expert on competitive games might help in this situation is from Nintendo, not from me, and that's why they contacted me.)
Special thanks to David "Scamp" Cantrell and Cedric "Ceirnian" Qualls for gameplay advice, Rich "FMJaguar" DeLauder for editing and secretly keeping sirlin.net working, and Mike "Bocci" Boccieri for his technical wizardry with video capture.
As more of the videos become available on youtube, I'll post them all below. If you're interested in these videos, you might try that new "share article" link below, for digg or one of those new-fangled link-swapping sites.
--Sirlin
Part 1: The Two Games
Part 2: Attack Types
Part 3: Evasion and Throws
Part 4: Movement
Part 5: KOs
Part 6: The Edge
Part 7: Controlling Space
Part 8: Super Armor and Auto-Cancels
Part 9: Items
Part 10: Tournament Finals Match
Sirlin
Part 5 is now up!
Sirlin
Part 6 is now up!
Sirlin
Part 7 is up!
Sirlin
Parts 8 and 9 now available.
Reader Comments (174)
Good stuff Sirlin.
fyi, Wario's forward smash has super armor too :P
I think there's some more but I don't remember off the top of my head.
FFA is awesome for competitive battles. When I'm seeded with two of my fellow crew members
one of us wins every time.
I thought this would be a great series of videos to learn how to play Smash Bros, but I stopped after video 3 when you used the YouTube annotation to describe a throw loop as "gay." That's a nice and mature way to deal with something you don't like. Using the word "gay" to describe anything you don't like is just moronic. For a guy who went to MIT, you should know better. Perhaps you could have used better words to describe your distaste for the throw.
Edited by Sirlin: What are you talking about!?!?!? I did not post those videos on Youtube. Those are not my comments. Figure it out.
olimar's down special has super armor on the begining too
I gotta say I love the vids you did there. I'm a european myself (from Poland to be exact) and Brawl sales are very low in my country. Actually all Wii games sell badly wich makes me very sad. Anyway I knew most of these things cause even though there is no real competition where I live I like playing that way. Items are fun on a party but training and playing your best is even more fun. To bad that I wont see any competetive comunity in Poland.
On other note, wich may sound silly, I would love you to balance the next Smash game :). After reading your SF HD remix articles I think you would do great job at balancing the game and removing the really weird chaotic matchups from it.
GJ on the vids :D.
I'm curious. Why did you choose the finals of Evo 2k8, knowing full well that neither player is at the top of Brawl's game? Ken had been in survivor for several months, so he really didn't have much time to even PLAY the game, and has since not done much in Brawl's metagame anyway. CPU hasn't had a factor in the metagame at all, either. Why choose a tournament that the smash community essentially disowned?
Torgo: I'm guessing two reasons:
First, it's a tournament Sirlin himself is involved in.
Second, it's run by people (specifically: the rules are set up by people) who are not whiny babies about items, etc. As i understand it, the smash community disowned it because of their own purism. They were free to join and compete if they wanted. They chose not to. On that day, of the people who decided to take part, CPU and Ken were the victors.
Winter is an awesome smash bros. He's done a lot for the metagame and he's made topics that make item-haters like mew2kinglook concise and stupid. He's also a master at rolling good numbers on dice, and is really in touch with the wants and needs of 99% of competitive smash bros players. He's also been able to outrun a Sonic on Hyrule Temple.As Jigglypuff.
Or maybe he's an egotist who honestly believes that everyone who plays smash is an idiot and that the likes of Keits honestly know anything about the game. Protip: You're not Mew2King, you've done nothing for the metagame, the smash scene has done more extensive research on items than anyone on SRK has ever done, SRK is the one changing the game from the accepted standard.
Oh, and All-Brawl is shit.
Winter, Smashboards isn't full of "whiny babies" about items.
For one thing, items are totally broken in Smash. They don't add anything except for randomness. Final Smashes even are completely broken and unbalanced.
The only reason why CPU was able to beat Ken (in the entire set) is because of items. Ken was clearly the better player, but CPU got luckier with the Smash Balls and beat the hell out of Ken.
Items aren't ideal in the competitive scene, but this is an introduction to Smash Bros, and not competitive gaming; though, I'm positive that new players can take some of this information and use it effectively at tournaments. Even when you are playing with items on, you need to know how to fight against them. Whether they're turned on or off, characters like Peach can pull some of them up from the ground anyways, so it's good to know how to deal with them from a defensive position.
Nice videos.
I'm a "smash vet" and now play Super Smash Brothers Brawl competitively, but I went ahead and watched these videos anyways :P.
And I must say, these are excellent! They offer a logical, thorough, and easy to follow introduction to the game, as well as to many aspects of it that the average player would probably miss. Thanks for these!
(I mean really, something like this is needed, as the game has no tutorial mode outside of the easily missable and amazingly basic "how to play" video <___>)
Well, i hope this has encouraged a few people to give the smash bros. series a go, if only to help them discover the vastly superior, non-broken, non-boring competitive game that is melee.
Seriously, if you like brawl, fair enough but you'll be amazed at melee when you get into it
also, ssb64 has the best combo system of any game ever. Just like to throw that out there :P
Although these videos are for newbies, I actually learned a few new things from them:
- That backward rolls have invincibility on start-up, but forward rolls don't. Very useful to know!
- That by holding up after a tilt attack, I can do a up-tilt without accidentally jumping (though I turn Tap Jump off, so I can't really use this)
Thank you for your contribution to the SSB scene. Getting this kind of information out to players who can benefit from it is something I applaud. Hopefully we can see something like this for Smash Bros (Wii-U).