Super Smash Bros. Wii U and 3DS Discussion

Ridley is an absurd choice. You can claim the whole "he was small in the NES game!" crap, and I could go on and on about the limitations of the console and all the other typical arguments used, but the fact that he's been a boss battle throughout at least two Smash games (I forget if he's in Melee), and then he's also in Smash 4 already, as a boss hazard, makes his theoretical appearance ridiculous.

Hell, I'd take SA-X before Ridley.

Oh pomegranate wait, are you actually using the size argument seriously. Uh, I didn't realise people actually thought that could be a problem in smash bros, a game which repeatedly rescales characters time and again. Especially not for a character who changes size between games. The only reason anyone ever mentioned the NES sprite ridley was because someone used Bowsers NES sprite as his justification for not being the behemoth he is in all the recent mario games.

In particular, the pokemon scaling relative to each other is pretty jarring. Pikachu, for example, should be less than a quarter of charizards height is, in smash, a little more than half his size. Either charizard got made smaller or Pikachu got much bigger, either waysize scaling for appropriateness is clearly a non-issue.

and then he's also in Smash 4 already, as a boss hazard, makes his theoretical appearance ridiculous.

If you're going to call things ridiculous for already appearing, maybe your first suggestion shouldn't be someone who is already an assist trophy?

A character skin takes a hell of a lot less development time and money than a full blown character that needs to be balanced in comparison to the rest of a 50 character cast, across several game modes. I think it's silly you'd even compare a smash character to a mario kart skin.

What? A skin? No-one gives a pomegranate about the mario kart characters, if that's what you mean. You got 16 new tracks for £11, which is half the games content.

You want to measure it by development time rather than relative content? Alrighty then, let's make an estimate.

Say sakurai started on smash 4 immediately after finishing Kid Icarus uprising at the end of march 2012. That means the game took just under 30 months to make, if he worked from then until the JP 3DS launch. That means each newcomer took on average about 30/17 =1.7 months per newcomer.

Realistically, that would be a significant amount less because there would have been an awful lot of other things to do, plus essentially making the same game for two different systems.

Nintendo EAD studio 1s previous game, MK7 released at the start of December 2011. MK8 launched in May 2014, also making it a 30 month gap. The base game had 32 tracks, so each one took roughly 1.07 months to implement. The first DLC pack released in november, 7 months later, with 8 new tracks, suggesting that around 1.1 months per track is about right.

So, if you want to go by development time vs mario kart, smash characters should cost about 1.7/1.1 = 1.55 times as much in ratio of a track dev time to a character dev time, for a code for both versions (since we counted the dev time as for both smash games up above).

That would put 16 Smash characters at £11*1.55= £17. Or £17/16= £1.06 per character. For a code for both smash versions. Less than £1/4 of what we're being asked to pay for that.

Or about half what I said above. Huh.

So, to quote myself

They overpriced the characters anyway. Maybe MK/NSLU were too good value, but after getting the equivilant of a 50%/100% content increase for £11/£18 respectively, I hardly feel like £4.50 for a single character (price is for a download to both versions) is anything but a bum deal.