Project M

The most extensive mod for a console game ever.

Project M is a mod of Super Smash Bros Brawl[1], inspired by Super Smash Bros Melee and designed to add rich, technical gameplay to a balanced cast of characters while additionally enhancing the speed of play.

So far, public reception has been extremely positive, landing Project M front-page coverage and wiki support from the major gaming news website IGN.

Demo Version 2.1, which boasts updated system mechanics, twenty-nine playable characters, and forty-one stages, is available for download now.

Not to be confused with Metroid: Other M.

Tropes used in Project M include:
  • Artificial Stupidity: Since it's largely Brawl AI, the CPUs are incapable of fully utilizing the advanced techniques technical potential of the game (e.g. chaingrabbing and DACUS[2]). As of Demo v2.1, there have been slight tweaks to the character's AI, including all CPU-controlled characters being able to wavedash, recover more efficiently, and four characters are capable of L-cancelling[3].
  • Attack Reflector: Everyone can achieve this if they perfect shield, though it's much harder than using a relevant special move to do so.
  • Combos: Although comboing is a mainstay of the Fighting Game genre, this is the first time in Smash that combos of such complexity are intentional and integral to the gameplay.
  • Competitive Balance: Naturally, since this mod is intended to be very balanced, and is expected to catch on with Tournament Play.
  • Doing It for the Art: So far, the team has independantly spent two and a half years working on this project, all for the love of Smash. That's longer than the development times of Smash 64 and Melee!
  • Easter Egg: As a nod to the noob quality/ general incompetence of the Wii remote, selecting a character with said controller makes the narrator's "Failure" sound effect play through the Wii remote speaker.
  • Fan Remake: Of Melee's and Smash 64's characters, stages, animations, and physics.
  • Fan Sequel: To Melee, since Smash as a series has general installments rather than direct sequels (in terms of gameplay)[4]; since Brawl heavily deviated from the gameplay of both Smash 64 and Melee, Project M is made to be the true sequel to Melee.
  • Game Mod
  • House Rules: Somewhat averted in that, as opposed to Brawl's settings, the conventional competitive set is now default, which saves players the trouble of ever needing to set the rules manually. 4 stock, 8 minutes, and team attack on. Also, the "buffer" setting, introduced in Brawl+, is present, though it isn't considered tourney-legal.
  • I Shall Taunt You: Smash 64's Taunt Canceling was brought back.[5]
  • Meteor Move: Footstool jump is one of the few techniques retained from Brawl. Essentially, it gives every character a meteor smash, albeit a bad one. Unlike in Brawl, where it's executed by pressing a jump button while on an opponent, it's done with a separate input from the regular jump, so it can be mapped to a different button on the controller (up on the d-pad by default), and it can't be done accidentally.
  • Won't Work On Me: Characters that tether recoverer in Brawl suffered from extremely easy ledge-hogging; when a character was occupying the ledge, the tether couldn't detect the ledge, so the user wouldn't be able to recover. In PM, tethers are no longer dependent on ledge occupation, so the tethers can work without being blocked off. Therefore, multiple characters could grapple to the same ledge at once, with an additional character occupying the ledge. When a tethering character pulls up while the ledge is occupied, he/she ledge-jumps instead.
  • Scenery Porn: The new Skyloft stage.
  • Shout-Out: Many; see the character sheet.
  • Shown Their Work: It's clear that most members of the Project M team know a lot about the games of the characters in Smash. Many characters were given both functional and aesthetic changes that reflect their incarnations in their previous games.
  • Obvious Beta: Not really a beta, but the first demo fits this trope. Compared to the more recent developers' builds and the second demo, the first demo is very outdated, and it inversely shows how much "Melee-ifying" the team has accomplished in months.
  • One-Letter Title: Though some playtesters prefer to call it "Project Melee".
  • Stylistic Callback:
    • Charizard's beta demonstration video has an intro with Professor Oak and sprites straight from Pokémon Red and Blue.
    • Bowser's demonstration video has a montage of him being beaten up in previous games by Mario.
  • Region Coding: For now, this mod requires an NTSC Brawl copy and a Wii that could play it. (A Wii with a disabled region lock works.)
  1. ↑ and a spin off of Brawl+, which was the same team's previous attempt to make Brawl more competitively-oriented
  2. ↑ a Dash Attack Cancelled Up Smash. It involves performing a dash attack, and then very quickly pressing Up and the throw button simultaneously
  3. ↑ the Space Animals (Fox, Falco, and Wolf), and Captain Falcon
  4. ↑ This is due to Sakurai's insistence on making every additional game drastically different from the last, since he isn't much of a "sequel" person in general.
  5. ↑ Melee and Brawl have forms of taunt canceling, but to very minimal extents. See ssbwiki.com for details.
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