Let's find out whether PSASBR is a rip-off or not.

[Kantor]

Chandler said:

Kantor said:

A rip-off? No. It just so happens that Brawl's genre has been largely ignored by other companies because they don't have enough mascot characters (Ubisoft or EA might be able to manage it as well).

-They went to great pains to completely change the scoring system
-There are multiple levels of finisher
-I don't believe it has any of the minigames (could be wrong here)

It's certainly inspired and heavily influenced by Smash Bros. But it's no more a Smash Bros clone than Dawn of War is a Starcraft clone or Call of Duty is a Wolfenstein 3D clone.

To those calling it a clone: what could they have done, within the genre, to make it any more different from Smash Bros?

I completely disagree.  But first of all to the other posters: I love how the defenders get all snarky instead of actually trying to discredit the rip-off statements.

The part where people say that if PSABR is a rip-off off smash than every shooter is a rip-off of wolfenstein is insane. Plain insane. Pointing at things and shooting them is a staple of the FPS genre. It's like I would say that Smash is a rip-off of Street Fighter because you punch and kick things. That's totally asinine. PSABR and Smash share way way more similarities than just the basic characteristics of a genre. This is at least Uncharted <--> Adventurer territory.

 

I also disagree with the statement that they completely changed the scoring system because they really didn't and funnily enough, keeping point based scoring goes against the very name the game carries. The basic idea of Battle Royale from ancient Rome is having more than 2 Gladiators fight each other until all but one are dead. So why are there respawns? Give everyone a healthbar and let them fight it out Last Man Standing style. If you go by the interpretion of the WWE, Smash Brothers is actually closer to a Battle Royale than PSABR itself because you score points by getting your enemies out of the ring. Like I said they didn't not completely change the scoring system, you are still accumulating points over a fixed time frame, just the means to obtain these points was slightly altered.

 

It's not my job to come up for a fresh idea for this kind of game but it was clearly also not the developers job to do so. It's a rip-off alright.

A subgenre rather than a genre. Perhaps a better example is Battlefield 3 not being a ripoff of Modern Warfare 2. Both modern era FPS. Both involve fighting similar enemies. Both rely heavily on their online component. And yet they are different.

The system you are describing would be a copy of Smash Bros, because Brawl at least is Last Man Standing. The score is kept, but doesn't mean anything. Perhaps there are other game modes that I haven't played. In PSASBR, the focus is on getting special attacks, where those are just an added bonus in Smash Bros.

There is demand for a game similar to Smash Bros amongst the PlayStation fanbase, and Sony would be foolish not to capitalise on that. There is only so much you can actually change a mascot brawler, and I think they've done a pretty good job of it.