“Things are starting to heat up!”
It’s been making the rounds, but this year’s The Big House is cancelled. The Super Smash Bros. tournament, planned for December 4th-6th, got a cease and desist order from Nintendo. Why?
Because of their planned usage of Slippi.
What’s Slippi? Well, from their site:
What is Slippi?
Super Smash Bros Melee was released in 2001 and is an absolute masterpiece of a game. Long-term players know that the game has nearly infinite possibilities as a competitive game. Being an old game, it lacks many of the features you expect to find in more recent esport titles.
The goal of Slippi is to bring Melee into the future and invigorate the sport surrounding the game. So far this has come in the form of enabling:
-Portable replay files
-Complex gameplay stats
-Improved streaming video quality
-Improved online netcode
-Online matchmaking
-And more
Normally I’m mostly indifferent to the plight of the Melee player. This is a bit different. Pretty much everyone agrees that this year’s been a mess, and the internet is pretty much the only way to hold these sorts of tourneys given the whole COVID-19 thing still going on. And for a nearly 20-year-old game that had no internet play to begin with, it’s kind of hard to do that.
The working theory on why Nintendo would do this is that, frankly, Slippi sort of puts their current online play for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate to shame. Which isn’t even that hard to do, as the Switch doesn’t even have a built-in ethernet port. Add in rollback netcode and all the other stuff Slippi does and it’s not hard to see why they sent that C&D.
This probably isn’t exactly helped by the fact that said utility is named after a Star Fox character, complete with frog emblem. There’s tweaking a giant’s nose, and then there’s wearing a glowing target saying “please destroy me Mr. Giant!”
That said, given this year, this probably isn’t going to have a desirable effect for Nintendo’s PR. I currently pity whoever’s behind the wheel on that Twitter account.
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