Alfred breaks down Super Smash Brothers Ultimate (The 3:59, Ep. 500)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. It's finally here, the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate review is live. Alfred, you're all over it. What's the verdict? It's a hot one. It's a pretty good game. I spent a lot of time playing it on the GameCube Controller on the Joy-Con on the Switch itself. Played on my subway ride here this morning. Played it on a two hour train ride to Queens last week. Played it at dance practices with some friends using just the joycons. Yeah, it runs really smoothly. You can tell that this is actually going to be a really competitive game and not really watered down to make it easier for beginners. So I'm a big fan of that. That is criticism that some people have though where, Super Smash Brothers with Ultimate is just diving deeper into itself as opposed to making it friendlier for newcomers. It's really for pros at this point. Yeah, which I 100% appreciate, because I don't want to have to keep playing with beginners anymore But yeah, it has this trouble of balancing itself as a party a game and as a hardcore competitive game. You don't see people playing Mario Cart competitively because it's supposed to be a fun party game kind of thing. Super Smash Brothers was originally always supposed to be this. Fun party game, like hey, I threw a green shell at you and you died, ha ha ha, isn't that funny? But people turned the items off. They played on stages that didn't have any hazards or anything like that. And they developed it into its own scene. For a while Nintendo was trying to stay away from that but now they realized the potential in the competitive scene. Yeah. And this one is very much catered towards that. Well not only that but like the physics are a little bit different and it's a different game, right? Yeah. You're describing that in your review that this isn't just A port. A small evolution Yeah. Or a port from a previous generation. Yeah, it's definitely not a port. A lot of people have been thinking that it might be that. But yeah, they changed the physics of it a bit so like the gravity is a little bit higher so you fall to the ground faster which Leads to a lot more air combos and things like that. There's more hit stuns. So, if I hit you, you can't just get out of it, immediately, and I can follow up with more attacks. So, bottom line, the experience, how does it differ from the previous two big versions? It definitely rewards more aggressive play than the previous one, and, at the same time, also, it meets this kind of middle ground that For the GameCube version was really aggressive and I would argue that one is even harder for beginners to pick up. Okay. And for the WeU version that made defensive play more rewarding, so I would say this is a middle ground between the two. Okay. So next up, the EKG feature on the Apple Watch series 4 will be made available later today with a watch OS 5.1.2 software upgrade. Our own Vanessa Hand Orellana has an in-depth look at how this may play a bigger role in [INAUDIBLE] health. Is this enough for you to buy an Apple Watch [UNKNOWN] for? [CROSSTALK] I'm not a watch person, so no. But I think For folks they care about this type of information yeah or like maybe even your doctor would wanna like tell you to buy something like this then yeah this could expand the opportunities for people start doing Buying this. I could see this being something you would want to get for your parents that want to constantly check on their health condition. I am 19 and I will live forever so I don't need this right now. True, yeah, I mean, it's interesting to note Vanessa testing this out actually found an abnormal heartbeat for here. I mean doctors said it would be fine but they still need to look at the fact it actually found it was Probably the perfect illustration why you'd want something like this. Yeah, also another Vanessa story, she went up to Corning and found out how they're working on an ultra thin bendable glass for foldable phones we're expecting to come out next year. This glass is about 0.1 millimeters thin and can bend almost in half like a piece of paper. So pretty interesting to see the [UNKNOWN] is definitely to get in In front of the foldable phone craze that hasn't quite yet happened yet. How does that work? Cuz right now, Samsung's showing off this foldable phone. But that's plastic right? That's not glass that's folding. I mean, how does Corning thing fit into this? According to Corning the argument is that the glass is better because is Stronger? Yes is much more scratcher in as isn't in plastic and it also doesn't yellow as it ages the same the prastic would. So If they are able to convince a lot of phone makers that, hey, this is better than plastic than maybe we'll see a lot more foldable phones with glass. Can you imagine how expensive that would be to replace if your screen cracked. My god, don't even, just buy a new phone. Well, I mean if you can afford a foldable phone you can probably afford to fix it. For our full coverage, check us out on CNET. I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Ben Fox Rubin. I'm Alfred Ng. Thanks for listening. [MUSIC]