When Evo announced that it would no longer host a Melee tournament in favor of just Smash Ultimate, to glance at Melee Twitter or Evo’s replies was as if the world was ending. The organizers refused, Nintendo says, so the company lawyers broke out a cease and desist letter, forcing the overall cancellation of the event - meaning the Melee issue took down the perfectly serviceable Smash Ultimate tournament also.įor someone like me, primarily a Street Fighter fan with a passing interest in competitive Smash Bros, the following outcry was predictable.
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In a statement issued to Kotaku, Nintendo explained that it contacted the organizers of The Big House and asked them to cancel the Melee tournament due to its use of the Slippi mod framework, which requires an emulator and thus a ripped copy of Melee to use. So the organizers of The Big House decided to put together an online pandemic-safe Melee tournament using the mod. Anybody into fighters knows that rollback is the gold standard for online, and in truth the mod, Slippi, was really built with Super Smash Bros. There’s an excellent fan-created mod for the GameCube emulator Dolphin allowing Melee to be played online with silky smooth rollback netcode. community has always been split between the new games and the old - and so something had to be done about Melee. The game has online functionality, and while it is classic Nintendo-level online - that is to say, lacking features in places - it’s serviceable enough to run an online tournament with a bit of organizational jiggery-pokery. In the midst of a global pandemic the tournament organisers did what many have done with games like Street Fighter, Killer Instinct and their kin - they took the tournament online.įor Super Smash Bros. ‘The Big House’ has been a mainstay of the Smash tournament scene for many years. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Attempting to get going with the MLG, fighting over which Smash games are selected for Evo, even dealing with abuse within the community - the Smash scene always seems to be going to war over something. Melee community and Nintendo are at loggerheads again.įor those who follow the wider competitive fighting game eSports scene, that’s a semi-regular occurrence. Reset the clock, because the Super Smash Bros.