It’s here. It’s finally here. Remember back in October 2003 we announced something called The Sonic Smash Cards? Well, you’ve all been waiting for it to pop up, and here you are! The first initial build of the Sonic Smash Cards is here for your delight and amusement!
What ARE the Sonic Smash Cards? Well, these are collectable cards that are automatically saved and logged to your TSS Account. You find cards by collecting rings on the site (more on this later) and buying card packs. Originally, the first series was just going to be collectors cards, with ‘Online Battle’ functions delayed for a possible new series of cards.
Not the case. After thinking long and hard about a decent battle system that would work (and, you could say, bringing back ideas from the classic ‘Sonic Battle Stadium’ of yore – those who have been on the ezBoard will only know what I’m talking about here), each card now has a set of moves at their disposal, to be played online. This is expanded upon in a bit.
Each member will get themselves FIVE FREE SMASH CARDS for their account, to play against others. As this is a progressive system (meaning we’re adding new bits one step at a time), Card Listings for members and Rings will be re-instated tomorrow – with a new way of handing out rings to members so that hilarious ring counts don’t happen. In a few hours time, you will be able to purchase new cards to your account too, depending on a new factor – BATTLE POINTS. For winning battles, you earn points which you can also use for cards. Again, online Card Shop will be launched in just a few hours. 🙂
If you’re logged into your TSS Account, you can head to your own Battle Page right now, by clicking here: http://www.sonicstadium.org/ssc/
Your card list will be displayed for brief stat looks and other things. To start a Battle:
- Select a member from the drop-down menu box to battle with
- Select your chosen Battle Card. Out of all your Smash Cards, you can only choose one to battle with, so check out each card (they are also displayed below) for their attacks, defences and ‘Specials’ so you can use to your advantage.
- Select whether to play for keeps (meaning losers lose their cards and winners steal them).
- Then select a “Strategy”. Your chosen card has numbers on it – 1 for it’s attack, 2 for its Defence, and 3 for its Special. You can only use your Special move once per battle, and you have five ‘Stages’ to use moves in. Select your strategy, and hit the ‘Battle’ button – a battle request will be sent to your potential opponent.
- Your opponent will see your invite to battle, including whether you want to play for keeps. If they accept, they accept all grounds and rules of the battle, so cannot whine if they lose their cards.
- Each Stage is played out by the Sonic Smash Cards Battle System (created by B, nice one, he’s really outdone himself ^_^), and reported back to each battler – how much HP your character has taken damage, any stat changes (such as ‘SLEEP’ or ‘SLOWDOWN’, which occur at a chosen point by the System).
- Before each stage after, players have a chance to ALTER their strategy by going back to the Strategy page.
- When all five Stages have passed, the character with the most HP lost loses the game (there are no set HP levels for the cards, as of yet).
Here is a list of the cards you get for free, free for each and every TSS member (they will also automatically show up on your Battle Page). There will be 20 cards to collect over the weekend, with a total of 10 (including the free 5) being available in the new Card Shop opening in a few hours time.
To Do List:
- Card List and Rings return tomorrow.
- Card Shop opening at 8pm GMT to purchase new cards
ENJOY YOURSELVES PEOPLE! 🙂
Sonic Smash Card Examples
UPDATE: The truth is now out. See details below.
April Fool: The Beginning
The Sonic Smash Cards is an idea Dreadknux has had since December 2002, and announced October 2003 – it was to be the launch of an interactive card collecting system, using SSMB Member’s accounts to buy cards with ‘rings’. To date, the Sonic Smash Cards is still being worked upon, after having to restart the code from scratch and change the coder to make it… However, Dreadknux had been planning to have an elaborate joke, saying that “TSS Interactive project has finished, but lead members to a crappy-made page, with crayon-like designs and poor presentation.
Upon chatting to lead TSS Coder and Assistant Administrator B’man on March 31st, the two decided that something better was necessary. The plan was changed to Sonic Smash Cards being finished ahead of schedule, making an authentic page yet making it useless to the member. The basic plan was created at 6:20pm GMT, and work started ten minutes later. B’man made authentic broken coding, and Dreadknux designed and wrote the entire information on the page, while making five dummy cards for authenticity. The project was complete at 10:20pm GMT.
The result can be found below, with a direct link to the page:
http://www.sonicstadium.org/ssc/
April Fool: The Prank
Head to the link above. There is an extra bar, with links to ‘Forums’, ‘Sonic Smash Cards’ and ‘Private Messages’. This part of the page is static, and the joke is therefore in the assumption that members will be logged into their TSS Accounts when approaching this page anyway. So it will look authentic to them. But just view that page while logged out; the same information and links appear.
The original idea for Sonic Smash Cards was a mere collectors feature. No ‘Battle’ features were planned, because that would have included too much working out during development. For the prank to work however, Dreadknux decided that he should knock up a convincing battle system placed on the dummy cards and on the page. It was the only way to get people to visit the page and attempt to actively hit that button at the bottom of the page to ‘Battle’.
The Cards themselves are giveaways of a ‘wrongdoing’ – check the card numbers of them all, located on the top right corner. ‘Complex’ features such as ‘Defence’, ‘Stat Changing’ (such as ‘SLOWDOWN’) were either blamed as being randomly calculated by the system or were simply avoided. Other focus features that were announced for the Sonic Smash Cards – a personal ‘Card List’ for each member, Card Shop to buy more cards and a trading system – were slated for a weekend release instead. However, it was said that the choosing of your card to play in battle was a “smaller version of your personal card list”. In actual fact, since “every member was given 5 FREE cards” to begin with, and no more cards were handed out (the Card Shop was delayed, remember), it was simply a case of displaying the same five cards on the page and have people believing it was their own personal interactive list.
B’man worked the phoney coding; when you try it out now, there’s an “April Fool” error on “Line 1337” whatever you do, but when the “system” was launched at 4pm GMT April 1st, there were many ‘authentic’ errors made up by B’man that would change as each hour passed, to give the effect that staffers were working on ‘fixing’ the code, only to have another different code appear.
Alongside the Stageshow that B’man and Dreadknux setup for the entire SSMB Community, Dreadknux promised that Card Lists and Card Shops would be launched at 8pm GMT – the very end of the plan. At this point, whenever a user completed the form, the error would change to the “April Fool” error. By this time, if members hadn’t cottoned onto the joke by then, well they don’t have much hope do they? ;D Thankfully, they all noticed at 8pm and shook their fists towards The Sonic Stadium, while we basked in the wonder of fulfilling another dastardly plan!
Click this link to watch the drama unfold in the SSMB Forums (guests can read this topic), the poor victims of the prank: http://www.sonicstadium.org/board/index.php?showtopic=6636
April Fool: The Reaction
After slapping the last part of the plan to effect, Dreadknux went into his IM Messenger to speak with those who had just fallen for TSS’ latest April Fool ploy. We also checked out the TSS IRC Chatroom – the log of the IRC chatroom begins well before the 8pm deadline, and many times people get close to sussing it completely. But Dreadknux kept them on track. Below you can read and view many people’s responses and the logs from IRC. SSMB Member Nazoshadow even made a wallpaper for the Sonic Smash Cards, even though the launch was false!
- Nazoshadow’s SSC Wallpaper – Makes us feel guilty we did it now =( …mwahaha.
- TSS Chatroom Log – The logs starts somewhere in the middle of the prank – we kept members waiting for nearly 4 hours to fix a page just to have them realise it was all a prank! Some clever members almost cottoned on… but not quite, thanks to the blagging skills of Dreadknux.
- DRED-B convo – During the time of the madness, Dreadknux and B’man were cheekily plotting their dastardly scheme behind everyone’s backs. Check out the whole conversation, including random chat and a few mentions of SSMB members.
- Member Reactions – You all fell for it, now read the people’s reactions to our prank. We try to mask people’s SN’s as much as possible for privacy, but meh.