Replay

An image from the Replay menu, with a replay of Falco on Target Smash! 2 highlighted.

Replay is a feature in Super Smash Bros. Brawl that allows players to review previous gameplay moments. Once a match ends, players can press the Z button on the results screen to save the replay on to the SD Card or the Wii itself. Replays can only be save if the match lasted less than 3 minutes, Sudden Death included. Hacks, such as Balanced Brawl, can remove this limit.

When saved, replays will be named rp_YYMMDD_HHMM.bin, where YY, MM, DD, HH and MM indicate the year, month, day, hours and minutes, respectively, in which the replay was saved. If saved onto an SD card, they'll be stored inside app\RSBP\rp.

Smash Service

Prior to June 30, 2009, players could send their replays to be used for the Smash Service; after June 30, no more replays, custom stages, or screenshots would be accepted. One month later, on August 1, replay data was no longer being sent. Replays used for Smash Service are all from Stadium mode, due to their typically shorter length and file size.

Data

Contrary to what some believe, a replay is not saved as a video recording of the match. Instead, the input data from the match, the match's random number seed and the general rules are saved, so when a replay is watched, the game in fact re-generates the match from the data. This makes replays much smaller in file size than a video file, and it also allows pausing and camera movement during the replay.

Replays don't save the players' names, but this can be changed with a cheat code. For online battles, the game saves each player's server number and client number. When a player battles online, the player is seen as player 1 on his screen (client), but that may not be true for the server. In saved replays, each player's color and the numbers above the characters' heads indicate the client numbers (the ones that were seen on the screen of the one who saved the replay), whereas the order in which the character portraits appear on the bottom indicate the server numbers.

It is worth noting that while playing online in the "With Anyone" mode, the characters' scores will not appear on the screen above the characters' icons. However, when battles are saved as replays, the replays will show the score numbers above the characters' icons as if the players were playing a Group Brawl with "Score Display" turned on in the brawl settings.

If a character or other element is loaded during a match faster than expected (such as because of pausing or online lag), then the replay of that match has to "freeze" and finish loading the element before it can continue.

Issues

At times, a replay may "desync" over time; the effects vary, though among the most common are actions occuring that did not previously occur, excessive lag followed by significantly increased playback speed, and the replay ending abruptly. For unknown reasons, replays of Wi-Fi matches are more likely to desync than local matches, though the risk still exists for the latter. The cause of "desyncs" is unknown.

A very rare bug causes saved replays to have idiosyncratic values in its timestamp, such as 781/88/2008 280:-480.

External links

Synchronization glitches

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmpZ933K6rA
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLv9d2tRUuo
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDWGi3PmrsA
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO7RsByZtYY