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Smash Bros. Melee diehard Felipe ‘Nyx’ Monteiro spends his time trying to make Super Smash Bros. Ultimate better. We speak with him about how his Project NX mod is going to achieve that aim.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl is widely considered to be a competitive mess. Project M, a fan-made mod, exists to clean that mess up and make it much more viable for competition. What started as a gameplay modification to make Brawl feel a lot more like Melee in 2011, soon became its own beast. In 2013, Project M saw a rapid rise in popularity and was a familiar sight at many Smash tournaments. At one point, it even surpassed the popularity of Brawl. While Project M’s development has now come to an end, one modder is aiming to take that same spirit and apply it to Nintendo’s latest Smash game with his own mod, Project NX.
“Brawl was released in an era when Nintendo was vocally against competitive Smash Bros. Brawl was a spit in the face of the Melee community,” Felipe ‘Nyx’ Monteiro explains. Nyx is a tinkerer, a composer and a Melee diehard from Chile. He is also the developer of Project NX.
Like Project M before it, this mod seeks to remake Ultimate in Melee’s image. The question on many people’s lips, however, is why? Unlike Brawl, Ultimate has been well-received by just about everyone including the competitive community. At Genesis 6, nearly all of the Gods of Melee competed in Ultimate. So why did Nyx feel Ultimate needed Project NX? Simple. He didn’t.
“This is not necessary,” according to the tinkerer himself. “I am not developing this to replace Ultimate. This started as a purely personal project. I like to press buttons and move fast, and Ultimate didn't let me do any of that, so I decided to fix that for myself.”
Take a look at Project NX in the video below:
Nyx’s roots grow deep. He’s been playing Smash for nearly 15 years. He spent his formative years taking stocks in Smash 64 online on the Latin Kaillera netplay server, and his love of 64 eventually led him to the inviting doors of an internet cafe. Inside he found an indigo treasure chest, and while the boxy chest didn’t contain jewels or gold coins, it instead held a game that he came to cherish for the rest of his life: Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Ideas abound for Nyx on how to bring out the full potential of Ultimate. Melee might be one of his favourite games in the series, but he's also drawing inspiration from his Smash 64 roots, and borrowing aspects from Smash 4 – and even Brawl.
“This, in terms of Ultimate's gameplay, means adding more hitstun and removing hitstun cancelling – a mechanic that enables players to cancel their hitstun frames roughly two thirds of a second after being hit. It acts as an upper limit for the amount of time players can’t move after being hit – to increase combo potential, making dash dance closer to Melee or Project M, increasing the DI (directional influence) strength (from 9 degrees to 18 degrees), removing Launch Speed Influence (a mechanic that increases/decreases knockback when hit), increasing Smash DI and removing untechables.”
“Aside from that, we're tuning some mechanics like wavedashing and wavelanding, which are in Ultimate but are too laggy to be really useful. All of this together will make Ultimate still play like Ultimate, but with more emphasis on combos and mobility,” Nyx explains.
Gazing into the gears of Ultimate to see what makes it tick is not only an exercise in bettering a game he likes, but the endeavour is an educational one, too. Because he has no current plans to release it and due to the educational nature of his tinkering, he’s not worried about Nintendo stamping out his work with a cease and desist order.
Still, the thought of a release is, at the very least, in the back of Nyx’s mind. Right now he’s considering bringing builds to tournaments so that people can test it and enjoy the game with him. He’s also not at all concerned about a potential future release splintering the community.
“The Smash community is already fragmented. If anything, the closest the community has ever been was in the Project M era, where we had top Brawl players like DEHF (Larry Lurr) and Elliot ‘Ally’ Carroza-Oyarce competing side by side with Melee players like Adam ‘Armada’ Lindgren and Jason ‘Mew2King’ Zimmerman. People who think a mod can fragment a community are ignorant or just can't remember the past. “
We asked Nyx if his time was well spent working on Project NX so far; he tells us, “For sure. I have had such a blast playing the current build. This was 100 percent worth it. I will always have this to myself to play with.
“Ultimate is just a different kind of game to Melee, Project M, Rivals of Aether or Slap City. There's nothing wrong with it. People who like Ultimate should still play Ultimate. If people want to play this mod, they also have the right to do so.”
