Happy New Year, everybody!

I'm not really good at doing the whole ball-drop timing thing.  But happy new years to the people who still read this thing (:

Also, I was thinking about maybe doing vlog stuff in addition to this so you can all laugh at my silly face while I say things.  And I can emphasize my points and posts with meaningless hand gestures.  We could do Q&A type stuff, I could just rant, and I would save this writing section for more analytical stuff.

Anyhow, to reiterate:

Happy New Year!

Two thoughts in a row!

Cons of living in Dallas, TX:

Only two people to smash with on a regular basis.

Pros:

Those two players are DoH and Darkrain.

So I spent the evening practicing with Darkrain, and I've come to a few conclusions.  The first is that I'm not very good with Sheik.

The second is that the moment I start wanting to really win, I start playing awfully.  And unfortunately, my strategy of trying to convince myself that "I'm going to lose, I will make mistakes, it's inevitable" and using that to keep my nerves down, doesn't work.  I still get way too upset over my errors and my mistakes.

I think I was in a much better place years ago when my focus was exclusively on maintaining the right attitude while I play.  I had a string of matches tonight where I was completely in the zone, and except for the occasional chuckle or "wtf was that" when something weird happened, I pretty much felt... blank.  It was kind of nice.  There was a moment where I thought, "I'm not really angry or happy," even though during those matches I was actually playing unbelievably well.  I just KNEW the right thing to do in--it seemed like--90% of the situations.  After about four or five games of this, I started thinking, "wow I've got it I'm doing really good heck yeah" and then it promptly faded and I went back to air-dodging off the level like normal.

I guess I'm going to try and stop thinking about anything except being calm and empty.  Before I even play, work myself into a state of as little emotion as possible, and focus on staying in that place.

I had a thought

People have a tendency to make mistakes when they are nervous.  You know, people like me.

I also know that I play much better when I'm relaxed, and sometimes when I'm simultaneously relaxed AND into my match, I go into a very focused state of destruction.

So, it finally occurred to me to ask myself, what is it that makes me nervous?  I typically make smart decisions, but when I start getting antsy, I also begin to just go for blind attacks.  And I often screw them up technically.  Nothing goes right.  What is it that makes me so nervous and tense, even in friendlies?

For some people, it's not wanting to lose.  I know that I hate losing, but it happens a lot so I'm kind of used to it.  I'm also pretty used to the crowd booing against me, but it gets to me the most when I feel like they shouldn't be.

Recently, I went into work thinking "today is going to suck."  But it wasn't exactly a pessimistic "everything is going to go wrong today," kind of thought.  It had a more matter-of-fact spin to it.  I was kind of tired, I had to work a lunch rush in the most hectic position, and I was scheduled with several people I didn't like working with.  It seemed very likely that my day would not be a good one.  That was my logical assessment.

For some reason, that day I didn't get angry about anything.  The normal stuff that bothered me I just kind of took in stride, thinking "yeah, that's pretty much what I expected."  When my workload lightened slightly, I thought "hey, this isn't so bad," and became energized, and actually did my job BETTER than normal.

Most people have told me that I need to have more confidence when I play.  I think... this is kind of true, and kind of not.  I DO need to stop beating myself up about random things that go wrong.  But what I really need to do when I play, if I want to play better and win more, is stop thinking about winning.  I've found that the closer I get to winning, the more nervous I get.  The more I expect myself to win, the more my mistakes bother me, which snowballs into causing more mistakes.

I'm not really that scared of losing, especially not if I think it's likely.  I remember going into my matches against Mango at APEX thinking that I was 99.9% likely to lose; I'd just watched him play Vanity Angel and pull out some pretty ridiculous combos with Falcon, even while hungover, so I was pretty sure that the real Mango was hiding in there somewhere, ready to jump out and yell "ahh, rape."

I went into that match with ZERO confidence and what's weird is that, not only did I win, I did it with almost NO technical errors.  I made a few, sure, and I made judgment mistakes and in the end I only one-stocked his Mario with infinites legal, but then he brought out his Falcon (which had murdered me last time we played) and I three stocked it.  Again, he was hung-over, so that obviously had a lot to do with it.  But at the same time, the things I was doing were coming out right.  No flubbed wavedashes, no botched short-hops.

My match against Silent Wolf was remarkably similar.  I was sure that he was going to slaughter me because I'm just not that great against people who play really fast.  And I was so certain that I would lose that I wasn't really that nervous to play.  And I wound up winning pretty soundly.

I guess in a weird, counterintuitive way, I'm more nervous about winning than I am about losing.  The more I remove victory from my mind, the more I focus on the moment.  And I've been finding lately that--at least while practicing--my skill goes up when I tell myself "you're going to make mistakes."  I stop worrying about them, stop thinking "I have to get this right," because I've already accepted the error in advance.  And I DO screw up still... but now it doesn't bother me.  I just think, "oh right, I was just hitting L too early because my fast fall didn't come out," and the error suddenly goes away.

Will this work in real matches?  Time will tell.  It'd be pretty cool if it did, huh?

PS:  a big thanks to Unintentionally for reminding me of something I actually wrote awhile ago, about accepting the possibility of your loss beforehand while you simultaneously play as hard as you can to win.  It seems I have outsmarted myself, lol.

Frustration

Okay.  I've been here before, in many respects.

Over the years I've improved slowly and painfully, then plateaued, wanted to quit, and forced myself through it.  I broke through those walls and became better, even if it was only a tiny margin at a time.

I want to believe that I can still improve, and that I can finally break down this one barrier that's been eating me alive for so long, which is my technical inconsistency.

I can't seem to communicate to people just HOW BAD this problem is.  I don't really get frustrated when I lose, I get frustrated when I play poorly.  Particularly when I make lots of stupid technical errors that I shouldn't be making after playing for 6 years.

Things like trying to wavedash, and failing, then attempting to fast fall to avoid eating the aerial that I'm now in range of, and double jumping with my joystick.  Or trying to waveland onto the stage, but just standing up; then when I try to wavedash back onto the edge so I can try again--and see if my controller doesn't need resetting or something--then I roll by mistake.  Then I decide "whatever," and try to short hop and get the edge, only to full jump.

Somebody said that I make lots of bad decisions, and it's hard to explain to people that your decisions aren't really your own when your hands don't cooperate.  I'm constantly at odds with my own body to actually communicate my desires to the game.  Some games more than half of my attemped inputs come out as errors.

This is not an exaggeration.  WD d-smash becomes WD f-smash because of a c-stick flub, followed by an attempted roll that turns into a spot dodge or jump because I spaz on the joystick.  My next JC'ed grab is a full jumped f-air to which I then miss the fast fall (and subsequent L-cancel).  Upon landing, I airdodge horizontally, failing to wavedash again.  My next short hop n-air is a dash attack because I miss my jump button.  And so on.

Again, not exaggerations; these are specific examples taken from recent smashfests and friendlies I've played. And when I tell people that I'm frustrated because these mistakes are getting me raped, they say things like "everybody has bad games."  I am trying to explain that this goes beyond most people's definition of a bad game, and it happens with a consistency that people think I'm embellishing.

This would not be as big of an issue if I had some safe baseline to fall back on, some technical elements that I NEVER mess up so I can play safe while I calm down... except I don't.  I cannot handle the controller without some risk of missing buttons or slamming the joystick in some random direction.  Most people find themselves overreaching their tech-skill sometimes and saying "okay okay we'll tone it down."  I cannot tone it down to an error-free level.

Sometimes this is clearly tied to my mental state; when I'm frustrated or agitated I often play worse, and when I'm calm and focused I typically play better.  Durr, obvious I know, but yeah.  However, even when I'm practicing solo in a relatively calm state I will still make these silly mistakes.  When I'm nervous, in high-pressure tourney situations... well, most of you have seen what happens.

I have accepted that I don't really have a talent for this game beyond my obsessive nature.  But this is at an extreme that I don't know how to cope with anymore; the amount of practice I invest does not seem to correlate at ALL to my technical proficiency, and I'm starting to lose hope.  I come up with new systems and ideas to try and rectify it, but nothing's working.  My past month-plus of dedicated practice, of going back to basics and hammering them in with constant repetition, has yielded absolutely nothing.  I still screw up these fundamentals at a rate far beyond what is acceptable for any player trying to legitimately call themselves good at this game.

The worst part is that I can't just give up and call it quits because there's something inside me, a small petulant voice made of spite and ambition and idealism, that refuses to let me.  I'm not going to keep playing if I honestly believe I can't get any better, and apart from this voice, that's what I'm coming to believe the more and more I practice.

tl;dr: bah.  If somebody has any advice on how to fix this nonsense, please send it to me.

Smash Workout

Warning: long post ahead.  It's also rambly.  Beware of "magical philosophizing."

So one of my recent hobbies--being pretty isolated in Texas, with me, Darkrain and DoH all being on completely different work schedules--is working out.  Mostly I do a lot of bodyweight stuff, working my way towards one-armed pullups and pushups, hanging V-raises, one-legged squats, stuff like that.  And, massive nerd that I am, I've thought about it and want to see what I can apply to Smash.

My most recent tournament, TO6, was pretty depressing for me for a couple reasons.  One, I'd just taken 5th at APEX and had 3 1st place finishes in tournaments before that, all of them with pretty stiff competition.  I had high expectations for myself, I took 4 days off work to go, and I wasn't playing as well as I liked.  That and having the entire crowd against me put me in a bad mood.  I lost to Raku, a Sheik player--who was surprisingly good, truthfully, he deserved his win 100%--and thanks to my high expectations that put me in an even worse mood.  I went to loser's and started off by getting stomped by RockCrock, and ended up quitting.  You can call it a rage-quit I guess, but it was a quit meant to pre-empt rage.  I promised myself awhile ago that if I started getting too frustrated during matches I would just forfeit before reaching a point of no-return on my anger.

So after a lot of thought I decided that my main weakness is--and has always been--my technical skill.  I don't make perfect guesses and decisions 100% of the time, but often I still screw up when I do, which is a big part of why I rely on simple chaingrabs and such; I'm incredibly inconsistent across the board, and the grab-game is the easiest for me to execute, so naturally I gravitate to it.  But I've been using it as a crutch for far too long, and I decided that if technical inconsistency is my biggest weakness, I will just have to train my ass off to turn it into my biggest strength.  If I can couple that with my generally smart play, then I'll be a much stronger player as a result.

But how to train?  How can one develop technical skill?  What is it?

For starters, I think technical skill--the kind that really matters--boils down to consistency.  It's not the ability to sprint, but to run a marathon.  To keep a consistent pace the entire match long so that even if you can't take advantage of every tiny opening with blinding flashy speed, you can give nothing away through mistakes.  And, once you can run the marathon, to improve your time.  Or, if we're going to compare it to a weight workout, we're looking at low weight with high reps first.  Master the basics, ingrain them utterly, and then slowly scale up.

When I first started playing competitively, I practiced a lot with Fox and he became my tournament main.  I learned how to do most of his stuff via something I call the "high-score" method, which is pretty simple.  Pick a technique, be it short hopping, wavedashing, whatever, and do it over and over and over again.  Keep track of how many times you can do it in a row before you make a mistake.  That's your high score.

Now, try to beat your high-score.  Keep going, keep beating your high-score.  Get to a really high number, because remember, you're going to be doing these things a LOT in any match.  Can you short hop 100 times in a row with Fox?  You'd better be able to if you're a serious Fox main, because you will be doing THOUSANDS of them in one day at a given tournament, and you can't afford to have an 80% success rate.

High-score method is how I managed to actually learn my tech skill originally, and I improved at it pretty rapidly.  Why did I stop?  Beats me.  But I'm starting again.  But what do you practice?

Here's another thing for weightlifters to consider when they work out: compound lifts versus isolation.  A compound lift is any lift that targets numerous muscle groups and forces them to coordinate to complete the lift.  A squat, for instance, doesn't only use your thighs and glutes, but you have to use your shins and calves to balance, as well as flex your back to lower yourself, then stand.  A squat works a lot of muscles.  In general, compound lifts are more effective for training your coordination, for giving balance in your muscular development, and even for saving you time in your workout.  Unless you're a bodybuilder specifically focusing on sculpting a single muscle group, it's almost always more beneficial to use compound lifts.

But what's interesting is that a "compound exercise" might not be the best idea for Smash practice.  It trains multiple skills at once, but sometimes it can give you the wrong kind of muscle memory.  This is because tech skill in Smash is also very heavily mental!

What do I mean?  Let's talk about inhibition reflexes.  (told you this is long and rambly)

Normal reflexes kick in when, let's say, your computer says "click when the screen turns green" and then hey, it turns green, so you click.  Inhibition reflexes involve making judgments and sometimes NOT taking certain actions.  If your computer says "hit enter when a letter appears, but DON'T hit anything if it's an X," then that tests your inhibition reflexes.  You have to check for a value, then decide on a response, sometimes inhibiting your decision to press Enter.

Smash matches do not follow a script.  The longer and more involved a technique is, the less likely it will be strictly applicable to every scenario.  Practicing short-hop turn-shine waveland fast-fall off the platform into b-air is fun and flashy, but sometimes you don't want to do that.  The more you practice it though, the more ingrained that entire action becomes.  The more of a habit it is to do that, the more you will have to actively prevent yourself from taking that action during a match.

But what if doing that is a great idea?  What if you know you can bait them into jumping out of their shield and you'll clip them with a b-air while they DI badly?  You want to be able to perform the maneuver.  So maybe you can just practice turn shines in one instance (that's kind of isolated), then practice waveland b-air in another (also pretty isolated), and every now and then put them together to make sure you can do it.

Now for another fun psychological experience: attentional blink.  Attentional blink refers to when you shift focus from one piece of information to another; as you can imagine, in Smash you have to do this A LOT.  You have to mentally move to the next step in the match, and sometimes it happens at blinding speed.  Somebody jumps up above you and wavelands on a platform, then falls off with b-air and hits your shield.  It's not enough for you to think, "okay he's going to waveland and b-air me," but then you have to quickly move forward into, "now I think he'll dash-dance away then come at me with a tipped n-air."

One of the things about attentional blink is that it WILL compete with your inhibition reflex for space in your mind.  You cannot consciously process two pieces of information simultaneously.  You can shift rapidly between them, but you can't actually think about them both.  If you have to put attention on on stopping yourself from turn-shine waveland b-airing, you will find it difficult to actually make a new decision.  Because you can't come up with a good decision, you may find your hands flubbing for a response.  And even if you CAN settle on a response, your hands won't be prepared to execute it well.

How does this relate to your smash workout?  Well, here's my theory: if you want to have good tech-skill, and you also want to be able to make good decisions even under pressure, you must have strong isolated skills and quick attentional blinking speed.  You have to separate situations into the smallest pieces possible, and be skilled at executing all of them.

SO, with all that long-winded shit in mind, here's how I'm trying to "work out" with Smash.

Wavedashes:  200 in a "set."  I cannot afford to screw these up because ICs rely on them heavily every game.  I find that by around 200 in a short time, my index finger is too cramped to keep pressing the trigger, so this is where I stop.  If I mess up, I start over.

Short hops: I short hop for a lot of reasons, but it's important not to do the same thing out of your short-hop every time.  Empty short hops, dashing short-hops, dashing into a backwards short-hop, short-hopping all your aerials, short-hopping with and without fastfalls, these all come into play for mix-ups and good decision making.  I start with empty ones, shooting for fifty in a row, then I start short-hopping random aerials (with the most emphasis on my b-air and u-air, because they're the ICs most applicable aerials and the easiest to mess up).

Dash-dances: Joystick control is imperative.  It's very important that ALL players are good at keeping track of the direction they're actually pressing it, for the sake of your air-control, DI, and sweet-spotting.  I pick a spot on a given stage (like the center of the Pokeball in Pokemon Stadium) and dash-dance within that strict distance for as long as I can.  Twenty seconds of rapid dash dancing without a flub is pretty good, and I've found it's already given me much better control with my left thumb.  Can't hurt to shoot for higher though!

L-cancels: These are tricky to train because their timing changes so much depending on your given situation.  If you hit two shields, a light-shield, a taller character, if you're fastfalling out of a short hop, or fastfalling out of an aerial from a different height... these all change the timing.  This is where quick attentional blinking really makes a difference; recognizing how the timing changes, being ready to land your L-cancel based on new information and then quickly move on to the next step of the match.

Well, that's all I've got for now.  Believe it or not, there's going to be a follow up to this!

Hope you didn't think that was too weird or stupid.  Peace.

It's about time you started losing.

"I've missed over 9,000 shots in my career.  I've lost almost 300 games.  Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed.  I've failed over and over again in my life.  And that is why I succeed." -- Michael Jordan

I don't like making mistakes.  Anybody who plays with me on a regular basis will tell you that.  I miss a short hop or an L-cancel, I have to go into mental damage control mode.

I'm a perfectionist.  I hate screwing up.  I hate losing.  I hate the thought that people watching me will think I'm anything but a great player.  This applies in friendlies, money-matches, and tournament.  I've mellowed out a lot over time, but this is still very much true of me, regardless of what I'm doing, regardless of whether I've even done it before.

Have you ever worked a dish-washing shift in a restaurant?  I hadn't, until about a week ago, when they stuck me in front of a sink during lunch rush and said "go get 'em tiger."  I panicked.  I could spray shit with water, but that was about it.  I didn't know where things went, or which detergents to use on which type of dishes.  What I can just rinse off, and what has to go in the industrial torrential bacteria annihilator we call a dishwasher.  And every time I got something wrong or fell behind or put something in the wrong place or someone corrected me, I got irritated.  Over something I had NO REASON to expect myself to do well at.  Ridiculous?  Yeah, I'd say so.

You can tell where I'm going with this.  Losing a friendly kind of sucks, but who cares?  What matters is that you learn from it.  The example I give to people is this: you and a friend play 100 matches.  98 of them are friendlies, and you lose all of them.  You spend them trying new stuff, practicing new techniques, figuring out what works, what doesn't, and your friend just plays the same the entire time.  The other two are tournament matches, and you 2-0 him.  That's 1 in 50 wins, but you advance in the bracket.  Which matches matter more?  Which matches do people care about?

"Oh, but I beat him in friendlies."  People say it all the time, friendlies don't matter.  Or rather, they do matter, but only because of what they teach you.  People remember the tournament results.  They remember who took first.

Here's an interesting flip side; people get mad about other people camping in friendlies, even though it's a strategy that you should learn to deal with if you want to be a top player.  Friendlies are the optimal environment for testing new strategies and counter-strategies, but people don't want to practice against camping.  Why?  It's boring.  You shouldn't try so hard to win in friendlies, etc.

Yet the very reason that those people are pissed off about camping is because they are losing to it!  "You shouldn't try so hard to win in friendlies!  Let ME win instead!"

Here's the point: friendlies are for practicing and trying new things, not for keeping score.  You try to win them, but not because winning the friendly matters.  It's because honing a skill properly so that it becomes a winning technique matters.  And if you have to lose a lot so that you can actually win when it counts, so be it.

One Thing

"I'll post more," he said.  Takes him two weeks to post something, and it's not even smash related.  What a noob.

Anyhow, I felt like posting something I was thinking about that applies everywhere.  It's about self-improvement, learning, and achievement.  It goes according to a rather significant quote:

"Today I will do what others won't, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can't."  -- Jerry Rice

I'm a fan of the "one thing" methodology, which is pick a single isolated skill, technique, or habit, and ingrain it within yourself until it becomes your instinct.  Then pick something else, and repeat until you're done.  Don't try everything at once.

So here's your homework, readers.  Pick something today.  It can be in Smash or school or work or whatever, doesn't matter what.  Pick one thing, just ONE, that you don't normally do, or you think "I really ought to," and do it.  No excuses, no johns, it's just one thing.  You can manage it.  It's that one thing you CAN do, but don't.  Go do it.

And if you have to, be ready to do it again.  That's it.  You're identical to your old self except for this one thing, which you do a bit better.  Now, overall, YOU are a bit better.

Now do it again.

Peace.

Brief downtime and gratitude.

Even though the blog was only down for a short time, I heard from a surprising number of people (surprisingly quickly) that I needed to hurry up and bring it back.  I didn't realize people actually enjoyed reading this thing!

So I'm going to try and update more frequently, even if it's with smaller stuff, just so you folks who check here regularly can have something new to read every time you stop by.

Thanks for sticking with me so far, everybody.

What do you want?

This blog is not entirely about Smash, but more about life.  It's about something I'm thinking about right now, and I want to encourage other people to think about.  I'm writing it as much in an effort to share my thoughts as I am writing it to try and understand my own.  It was inspired by this video, specifically around 1:21: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvOUVil7W5s

What do you want?

Why do you want to be good at Smash?  Why do you spend your hours playing this game rather than at your job, studying math, picking up girls, working out, learning guitar, writing your novel?  What is your goal?  Why is this important to you?

I've asked people what their targets are when they play, I've received lots of different answers.  Some people just want to make it out of pools, some people just want to avoid going 0-2, some people want to be the best with X character, some people say "I want to be a top player."  One answer I liked was "you know how when people play you they're like, 'oh shit I have to play Wobbles.'  I want people to say that when they play me."  Nice one.

Though I didn't ask him directly, my favorite answer came from Soft when I went to Alabama.  I told him, "I'm traveling a lot because I want to get as much practice as I can, since I want to win APEX."  You know what his response was?

"So do I."

I guarantee you that Soft will improve faster and rise to higher levels than most other players.  He didn't manage to make it out of 2nd round pools, but doesn't that make his goal more impressive?  People say, "I want to make it out of my pool," "I just don't want to get last."  Soft wanted to take home the whole damn thing.

Remember this.  Whenever you stop to pursue a goal, in that time you exclude everything else.  When you sit down to play Smash, if you have some goal like "I want to have an amazing Falco," and you don't work towards that goal, then you are failing yourself.  You only have so much time in your life.  You absolutely MUST spend it pursuing whatever goal is most important to you, and if you're going to spend that time, do not spend it carelessly because you are spending it at the expense of the other things you could be doing.

I wanted--I don't know if I still do--to be the best player in the world.  I did not care how many Mangos and Armadas and HBoxes and M2Ks and other top players I would have to surpass to do it; it was my goal.  It was stupidly ambitious and audacious to believe it was possible for me, a player who demonstrated no recognizable talent when he started.  But it was my target.

And to be honest, I did not have the dedication such a lofty goal deserved.  I screwed around, I trained poorly.  I've made johns and cop-outs and settled for less than my best.  I not only picked a goal that I didn't work my hardest for, I did it at the expense of other things in my life, so I wasted time on multiple fronts.  By some weird combination of luck and bursts of obssessive motivation, I've become one of the top players in the country.  But I'm damn sure it's no stellar example of how to play and pursue your Smash career, or any other goal in life for that matter.

Don't mess around.  Don't give maybes and don't lie to yourself about how you're trying your hardest but other stuff comes up.  If something matters to you and you're going to spend your time on it, then don't waste that time.  Every moment wasted is irreparable damage to the potential output your life could be creating.  If there's something that gets in the way of your goals, then sit down and figure out how to make that obstacle fuck off.  No johns, no "it's too hard," if you want it, then go for it, and crush anything in your path.

Peace folks.

Here, Fishy Fishy.

Let's talk for a moment about the only man to ever beat Chuck Norris in a race: Captain Falcon.

Now, *aside* from his overwhelming manliness, how does Captain Falcon ever manage to make it back to the stage?  Somebody saw fit to give the other characters some pretense of a chance at beating the Cap'n, so all he's really got is up+b.  And with up+b, he can pretty much aim for the stage, or aim for the edge.  He can also try and ledge-tech but once people found out you can edgehog that it became less handy.  So he can go onto the level, or onto the edge.  That's it.  Regardless, paragon of the XY that he is, Falcon finds a way back anyhow.

The reason that Falcon can make his way back despite overwhelming evidence that he should *not* (besides being goddamn Captain Falcon of course), comes down to two things.

First is the fact that we, as players, are fish.  We have a tendency to bite down on the juiciest piece of bait that lands in front of us.  When we see something that makes us think, "hey I can punish this," we rarely stop ourselves from leaping in mouth-first.  Impulse control is one of those useful skills that you don't talk about much.

The second is air control.  There's a lot of hidden effort involved in using that one move to make it back to the stage.  Let's say that you're Falcon and your opponent is a smart dude.  You up+b, and right now the other guy is thinking "ah, he's going to the edge, but he wants to trick me."  As you start moving forward the guy is watching you, looking for the trick, and then he sees it.  You start pulling back, and so he quickly steals the edge.  One stock down, three to go.

He's wrong though.  You hit back on the joystick for just a fraction of a second, and when he saw you slow down he thought you were completely changing direction.  Turns out you quickly hit forward again and moved into towards the middle of the level, out of range of a ledge-hop punishment.

One of the many differences between good players and great players is how they use air control.  Much like how Starcraft players can always find something productive to do in just one second of dead time, great players add more dimensions to their game in places that good players don't think to look.

Most Falco players, once they fire their laser don't realize that they can still control their horizontal momentum to adjust their spacing, nor do they consciously implement this to make their approaches and zoning games more precise and safe.  Watch a video of Mango's Falco and really watch his character model.  Look at the tiny adjustments he makes in the air.  Besides giving himself better spacing control, this has the effect of giving the other guy false information about his intentions.  The slightest bit of DI in can convince somebody you'll be in shield-grab range, even though you immediately begin to DI out and they whiff the grab.

Or consider Jigglypuff.  Most Puff players use a very predictable in and out rhythm of air movement.  While this helps them space their moves, it also gives the opponent a handy metronome for anticipating the Puff's move placement.  Once again, watch Mango if you want inspiration.  Sometimes he abruptly stops in mid-air for not even a quarter of a second, giving you the impression that he's about to retreat and it's save to jump out; of course, that's when he has a n-air waiting for you.  And then when you're busy watching for it, he'll spend some of the match moving in at full speed and being in range before you even realize it, clipping you before you have a chance to notice that he's up in your grill.  And then sometimes he really does just completely pull back and you whiff an attempted counter-attack, letting him punish as he pleases.  Once he's in your head like that, Mango can attack pretty much whenever he wants and you'll be too flustered to avoid it.

Back to the two main points: air control, and fish.  As players those subtle cues in air control tell us where the opponent plans to go and what he plans to do.  Why do you think that people still keep falling for Ganondorf's double-jump bait against shield?  He jumps in on you with your shield up, fast falls and then jumps.  The key?  The fast fall.

Experience works against us here.  Fast falling is a sign that you're using an aerial and you want to cancel lag on the ground as quickly as possible.  It's the cue that many players use to tell if somebody is about to land, and having seen it you assume the other guy is about to land.  Afterwards you think "of course Ganon was tricking me so he could double jump and stomp me in the face," but at the time throwing out that grab seemed completely reasonable, didn't it?  Yes.  If you're a fish.

As fish, we often react to the first piece of pertinent information we see, and use that as an excuse to go for the bait.  Somebody dashes towards you, that's the cue to roll towards them and get behind them because they are OBVIOUSLY tech-chasing you away.  And that open space behind them looks so damn inviting, doesn't it?  Wait, why is Fox wavedashing backwards?  I hope you remembered to DI his up-smash properly, little fish.

The bait can become a little more complicated.  I love dashing up to a prone target with ICs and bringing up my shield, then wavedashing out to follow their roll.  Because once I've shield-grabbed somebody's get-up attack eight times in five minutes, they start catching on.  In fact, they lie there prone just to encourage me to run up and shield again so they can roll away, safe.  Wait, why is Wobbles suddenly wavedashing backwards?  Fishy fishy fishy fishy.

These situations happen a lot and they're pretty easy to understand and learn from, because the options here are very concrete and defined.  Roll in, roll away, get-up attack, stand-up... not that complicated.  But few realize just how easily and how often subtle air-control will bait something like a jump into an "obvious" move.  HBox's air movement is full of alterations in timing and speed adjustments that make even really good and smart space-animals jump straight into his b-air.

So don't get lazy.  You aren't on a fixed trajectory once you've jumped where the only difference is in the timing of your stupidly telegraphed aerial.  Every character can do a little to screw with the other guy's sense of his location, and once you do, then you'll really be fishing.

Let's Talk About Being Good: A Rant

What is skill?  How do you define being "good" at a game?

I've got a pretty simple definition of what it means to be good at something.  How good you are is determined by how often and to what degree you succeed at it.  That's it.  I think it's a nice, universally applicable definition that can apply to pretty much any game.

Let's say you've got some guy, a professional bowler.  This guy can bowl a perfect game every time he goes into an alley.  You'd agree with me that this guy is pretty good at bowling, yeah?

Let's get peculiar.  Let's say this guy bowls by throwing the ball over his head with both arms at the pins.  He just chucks the ball as hard as he can down the lane.  Every game he scores a 300, perfect consistency.  His methods are unorthodox, yes, but wouldn't you agree that he's still technically bowling well?  In fact, no bowler in the world--that I know of, which isn't saying much--can get those scores so consistently, so he'd arguably be the best in the world.

Now let's say that it's illegal in the sport of bowling to throw the ball that way (maybe it already is?  I don't know).  You have to use an underhanded roll, and any other kind is against the rules.  This guy is no longer good at bowling, because what he does is not technically bowling anymore.  He's good at throwing a giant sphere of plastic polymer with deadly accuracy, but he's not good at bowling.  This is important, because games are defined by their rules, and if he isn't playing the game anymore, how can we say he's good at it?

Or let's take a look at the movie Happy Gilmore.  Wouldn't you agree that the eponymous main character is good at golf?  Sure, he swings the club like a maniac and has a hockey-stick-shaped putter, but at the end, his score is better than everybody else's.  He also--during the movie--becomes consistent enough to beat a bunch of golf pros who are significantly more orthodox than he is.  So he's consistent and he wins.  By my definition (which I don't think is very terrible) he's a good golfer.

I bring this up because there's a mentality in the Smash community--and a lot of other gaming communities that I've experienced--that there's a "right" way to play.  There exists some weird kind of skill, called "real skill."  Some players win, but they don't have "real skill."  Doesn't this seem silly to you?  Somebody plays by all the rules of the game, has access to the same tools, beats other people, but somehow he's actually worse.  He doesn't have "real skill."

In Smash, what is this mythical "real skill?"  Is it the ability to hit all your L-cancels?  I don't think so.  There's a stigma attached to being a technical player who doesn't adapt well; we say things like, "they're technical but they still aren't good."  Is it the ability to read people?  Well, not really.  You can't really say that's "real skill" if you can't back it up.  You can't prove you knew what the other guy was going to do if you walk into it on accident anyhow, can you?

So "real skill" probably exists, but it's really tough to define.  We know it when we see it.  Certain players have it, some don't.  Hungrybox, for instance, does not have "real skill."  I'm not sure what he has, but that's not it.  He wins tournaments, takes top 3 at just about every national, beats almost every character with his Jigglypuff, but let's be clear, he does not have "real skill."

Why not?  Well, he doesn't SHFFL.  He clearly doesn't have any mindgames.  He just spams one move and waits to rest you.  Admittedly, the many other Jigglypuffs that can't SHFFL, have no mindgames and tried to spam b-air and rest haven't had nearly the same level of success as HBox, but that's not the point.  He's not ACTUALLY good.  No "real skill," remember?

I'm not sure how he beats people who have more "real skill" than him, actually.  I guess he has a lot of fake skill?  So much of it that it overwhelms all the "real skill."  Which, as we've established, [i][b]Hungrybox does not have[/i][/b].  Someday we'll find the real secret behind why he wins so much, and we'll be happy because it will give us something to add to the list of what real skill is not.  (I think this is something that separates SSBM from crappy games like golf.  We have "real skill.")

Let's talk about skill!  Being good means having skill.  So what is it?  (Not "real skill," we can't really define that.  But we know it when we see it!)

Well, there are lots of different kinds of skills, so I like to think that your overall skill is determined by combining the individual skills you possess.

Some skills work together synergistically.  They are good skills to practice together because they complement each other.  I could practice shield-grabbing and SHFFL'ing b-air, or I could practice shield-grabbing and then chaingrabbing.  I think that overall I would get more milage out the second combination than the other, because better shield-grabs would help me land chaingrabs, and better chaingrabs would make my shield-grabs worth more.

I also have no qualms in saying some skills are worth more than others.  Some people will practice things like pivoted jab and moonwalk b-air with Fox, then be awful at sweetspotting.  Usually, these kinds of people do not win a whole lot.  They spend their time on skills that lack solid value and it costs them in tournament.  SHDL is great, but finding ways not to get gimped four stocks per match is better.  Being good at gimping them for all four stocks before they can gimp you is pretty good too.

Speaking of gimps, I just remembered something about HBox.  He plays "gay," which trumps "real skill."   I forgot.  Silly me.

Back to skill.  You can agree that some skills are worth more than others.  You may also agree that your overall skill as a player is the combination of the things you have chosen to master.  I think it is then logically sound to say that picking different things to master will lead to different levels of overall skill.  Now, if you factor in that some skills are good against others, and it actually becomes rather difficult to tell who is "better" than somebody else.  Even if somebody wins one particular matchup, they might not be more solid all-around and lose a larger number of matches than the other guy.  (It probably doesn't matter much to you if you're the guy who gets eliminated, though.  Then again, if you don't want the internet to make fun of you, you have to make sure everybody knows the other guy isn't actually as good you, so make sure to post about it a LOT).

But being good at certain things is worth more than being good at others, particularly if your skill choices synergize.  That leads to you being better, which helps you win, which is good.

Unless, of course, you play gay.  What's interesting is that even though--for instance--HBox plays gay, he doesn't camp (apparently you can be offensively gay, which isn't the same as finding gayness offensive).  It's the fact that he only uses a few moves and somehow beats all these other people.  

Let's get serious.  There's a reason I am coming back to HBox so much.  It's because people have an idea that there is a right way to play this game, and a wrong way.  For whatever reason, certain players rarely receive the credit they deserve.  HBox is my case study because no other player has had so much success met with so much communal ambivalence.  There are other players like him though, who don't get credit because they don't play the "right way."  They don't have "real skill."

Pardon me for being so emphatically vulgar, but what the **** does that mean?  They aren't winning?  Clearly they are, or we wouldn't even bring them up.  They aren't playing the game that you want them to?  Who the **** cares?  In fact, if doing things you don't expect and want them to do helps them win, who's going to blame them for doing it?  You?  Of course you would, you lost.  They're not entertaining?  If we wanted the winner to be more entertaining, we would play bonus mode.  They used the same move too many times?  Put the abacus down, pointdexter, because you don't lose stocks for getting Stale Moves.

We do not have rules regarding entertainment.  We do not have rules regarding proportionality in your moveset.  You have 4 stocks and 8 minutes to put more hurt on the other guy than he can put on you and that's most of it.  Nobody says you have to find every playstyle fun.  I thought HBox's combo video was boring as hell.  But the moment you start talking about "real skill," I start questioning your sanity.  This applies to every last player in every last community.  It's up to each person to master skills they believe will win, and when they DON'T win, to figure out what they lacked and then adapt.  HBox can b-air like a champ, rest like a champ, avoids dying four times in a majority of his games, he rests more than most other Puffs and he gimps better than most other Puffs.  Those are his skills and they help him win.  Unless you're Mango, it probably means he wins more than you.

Here's my take on it.  You pick the skills you want to master.  You try and get them to synergize and you try and get them to give you the largest probability of winning against the largest number of people possible.  After that, it's just execution (which is a skill of its own).  If the skills work out and you win, fantastic.  If they don't, get back to training mode and learn from your mistakes.

And don't ****ing john about it.

Selective Attention and The Empty Short Hop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Go there and watch that video before you read.

Anyhow, the video is a meant to be a test/demonstration of selective attention.  That is, in a given situation, our minds often ignore and completely blot out things that they do not expect to see, especially when our attention is focused elsewhere.  About 50% of people do not actually see the gorilla in the video.  It doesn't have anything to do with profession, peripheral vision, or anything like that; people just sometimes don't see it.

I brought that up because this basic thing happens all the time in Smash, particularly in doubles.  Things that you do not expect to see will completely blindside you, to the point that you might not even realize they happened at all until it's too late to deal with them.  Ever lose your jump and fall all the way to the bottom of the level before you realize it?  You hit jump, nothing happens, and instead of anything else registering in your brain, you just watch yourself fall?  Or maybe you thought you would grab on to the edge of the stage, so you just watched the edge.  Somebody else got it first though, and you just stared while you plummeted off-screen.  Technically, you were looking right at your character, but you never even saw it happen.

A fun example from playing with one of my friends: the very first time I used a Captain Jack grab with Mario (you know, canceling a dash attack with grab so that you hear the "Wa-hah!") he literally stopped playing.  He was grabbed.  But his brain was trying to tell him, from the sound cue, that he had been dash-attacked.  He did not realize that he was being held, and just kept trying to see where the dash-attack was.  (Afterwards, he thought this was so funny that all I had to do to beat him with Mario was send him into laughing fits by CJ grabbing)

Selective Attention--and more specifically, any inherent expectation you have regarding the match--is a liability.  Like any liability in a multiplayer game, you can use it as a weapon.  The most commonly used form of it that I know is the empty jump.

Tournament players learn to SHFFL aerials.  It's just a thing that you learn unless you're playing one of like, three characters that don't really utilize it.  Peach, Samus, and... Yoshi.  I don't know.

Point is, you learn SHFFLing.  You come to believe that anytime somebody is in the air, especially if they're against your shield, that they're going to do an aerial.  So you watch for it, so you can shieldgrab, or roll away, or up+b out of shield, or whatever.  And you watch.  And after awhile, you become so conditioned to seeing the aerial that you won't realize it if the other guy doesn't do an aerial at all.  You'll just keep waiting.  By this point, he's landed and grabbed you.  At this point, you might finally notice, but odds are you won't even DI the throw.  Or, in the ICs case, mash out before I infinite you.

Another example: using the ICs d-throw d-air on Fox is kind of risky, because he can smash DI and then buffer a roll to get away.  It's escapable, and can be a waste of a grab if the other guy knows how to get out.

But what if you know they're going to roll?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGq7X37ypEA#t=1m05s

In this case, Forward SDI's away and down, then rolls like you're supposed to, and I take a big risk in just dashing towards his landing spot.  I d-smash him, and he DIs with it.  Note the percent; grab at 30 percent, dead at 61% because he can't recover.

Forward's a good player with pretty decent reaction time.  What makes somebody like that DI badly?  I'm willing to bet that, because after a d-throw d-air, Popo is *supposed* to go for a grab, he didn't even realize that I hadn't done it until it was too late.      He may not have even really seen me dashing towards him, or at any rate he didn't process it.  The only way you can get a very good player to make errors like that is by doing things you shouldn't, and being where you aren't supposed to be.  Wavelands are very useful for this for the same reason an empty jump works; you're supposed to do something in the air, and you're certainly not supposed to slide all over the place.

When does this sort of thing not work?  If the other guy has a plan of action that counters your trick *as well as* the thing he expects, he might just go ahead and do it anyhow, and have it work out.  An empty short hop doesn't work against somebody who uses up+b out of shield anytime you get close, because... well, he'll just up+b.

Kind of a short post, but it was something I thought of today when I read about that video and test.

Peace, folks.

What It's Like To Play the Best Player in the World

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile.  I've been hunting for a job by day and playing League of Legends by night, and on top of that haven't had much to talk about.

Recently though (especially with Nice Shot Hugo coming up, which I'd like to attend if possible) I was thinking a bit about Smash and something I'd like to talk about.

Not too long ago, I went to a Cali tournament and actually took second.  I beat Lucky for the first time in two years, beat Zhu in tournament for the first time, and made it to Grand Finals against Mango where I even managed to win a round.  Hats off to the TOs for letting me infinite, because I'm pretty sure it didn't hurt.

In fact, having it legal helped in more than one way.  Obviously, I got to KO all my opponents off grabs, and that was certainly useful.  More importantly though, it put massive pressure on my opponents not to mess up and not to give me grabs.  This meant they were playing very safe, cautious, and kind of campy (which isn't an indictment, I support camping wholeheartedly provided it actually wins you the match).

I like playing against cautious players.  First, I have relatively poor reflexes, so I don't handle rushdown very well.  Second, because they take their time attacking me, I can take my time to figure them out, and come up with plans and tricks.  When very technical Foxes and Falcos and Falcons rush in on me and don't give me room, I tend to panic and make dumb mistakes, both technical and mental.

The fear aura generated by the infinite gives me a big boost.  It kept Lucky and Zhu from shield pressuring me into the ground.  It gave me breathing space, and like most people, I enjoy breathing.

But not Mango.  Mango has a few characteristics that are integral to making him the best player.  The first one is that he's very aggressive, but he's not stupid about it.  The poker term would probably be "tight aggressive."  If he has an advantage, he pushes it.  If he doesn't, he waits until he does.  What distinguishes him, however, is that he pushes almost EVERY advantage he gets, regardless of how subtle or intangible it is.

Second, Mango is utterly confident in his play.  He doesn't get shaken up.  He rushes me down knowing he's not going to miss an L-cancel or space badly, and so he can continue to attack without giving in to the fear aura of an infinite.

Third, Mango is efficient.  If there's a way to KO you, he does it.  Right there.  No messing around, no middle-man, pure destruction factory direct to you.  At least, most of the time since fourth, he has a sense of humor and likes trying weird stuff, which is part of what makes him innovative and hard to read.

Fifth, he's hard to read.  Sixth, he reads most players like a book.  This is what interested me the most; Mango can combine technical rushdown with mind-games to a level no other Smasher can.  Ken was not particularly technical in his time, and while M2K was incredibly technical, fast, and precise, most players agree that he tended to follow plans and formulas over adaptations.  PC Chris was the most Mango-like of the three, in my opinion.

My strong suit, as a player, is my ability to read people.  I tend to guess right a lot more than I guess wrong, and I play a character where a good guess can yield a stock, so that kind of covers the efficiency aspect too.  What's better is not many IC tricks require a lot of tech skill (contrary to popular belief).  Which isn't to say I don't mess up; my tech skill is terribly inconsistent even doing the most basic stuff.

Mango is really, really, really, really hard to read.  Based on the people I've played, Mango is in the toppest of top tiers, mentally speaking.  In the arena of reading people and being hard to predict, the only player I would place close to Mango is Chu Dat (right now, I know a lot of people would clamor for Armada, but this is based on who I have played.  I would totally believe it though).

Anyhow, playing against somebody that smart, fast, and efficient is... very unusual.  I think against Mango I played some of my best Smash ever, because at times (very few times mind you) I felt like I was keeping up.  I was linking as directly as I could into the mind of my opponent trying to see his intentions and his patterns, and most of the time I came up blank.  Nothing.  I didn't even have the faintest idea of what he wanted to do, or when he planned to do it.  Every now and then though, something clicked, and it landed me a grab.

Not much else to say, really.  I could have had a second game from him, but I botched a ledge CG that would have linked to an infinite and earned the last stock.  After that though, it was more or less over.  I really hope I get the opportunity to play him against at NSH this month, assuming I go.

VVVVVV, speedruns, and being the best (bonus section included)

(This article includes a special bonus section at the bottom!)

Recently released was the beta for a flash-based game called VVVVVV.  That's 6 V's.  You can learn a bit more about it at distractionware.com/blog.  Its designer is a gentleman by the name of Terry Cavanagh.

The final version will be released January 10th and if it stays like the beta, then I can assure you this game is unbelievably terrific in many, many ways.

Two related factors; one, it's very hard, and the music is terrific.  Why are these related?  Because you're going to die a lot and, consequently, you'll be listening to the same tracks looping over and over again, so the music HAS to be good.  And it is.

The gameplay is simple.  You can move left or right, and you can flip gravity.  Hit V, and you flip up to the ceiling.  Hit it again, and you start falling back down.  You can't flip until you've hit a surface, so you can't just mash V and hover in place.  You travel around a large world going from room to room, collecting shiny trinkets and rescuing your shipmates.  It's old-school in presentation, style, and--of course--difficulty.  This includes going into rooms that kill you unless you already know what is in them.  I typically find this to be a design flaw, but you repeatedly run into little respawn checkpoints so you almost never lose any substantial progress from dying, and the game demands precise platforming skills so even when you know where things are you tend to die anyhow.  It's just damn hard.  I liked this game way more than I think I should have.  I liked it so much, in fact, that I'm doing a speedrun for it, even though it isn't technically finished yet.

This is where the game's magnificent design becomes apparent to me.  Almost every room seems capable of being cleared at full speed, provided you have frame perfect timing, you understand the physics engine, and you know where everything is.  Some rooms you clear at ALMOST full speed by knowing just where to slow down and how to enter each room.  The game is basically a giant puzzle waiting to be solved.  It's a lot of fun, I recommend you check it out if you've got the $15 dollars to do so once it's released.

So this brings us to the second point; how you go about creating a speedrun.  This game is rather easy on you as far as designing the speedrun goes.  You never get any powers and you can't skip over levels because--in order to do a full 100 percent speedrun, collecting the trinkets scattered throughout--you simply have to go through the stages as normal.  In a Megaman game, for instance, you have to pick a path for beating all the robot masters so that you can use the powers to defeat the masters and zip yourself through stages as quickly as possible.  The order you do things in matters.

Not so in VVVVVV.  You don't get any abilities, and rescuing one crewmate won't really affect how you rescue the others (with one tiny exception that will save you one or two seconds overall).  So figuring out your path isn't that difficult.

Figuring out each room is where the real fun is.  I went through the first dangerous room somewhat slowly.  Over one enemy, under another, and then wait for the last one to drop so I could go over it.  After a bit of experimenting, I found you can--with perfect timing--jump UNDER the last enemy on its way up.  So this speeds up the room by about 1/2 a second.

Not much, really.  But with hundreds of rooms in the game, those halves would add up.  And if I didn't do each level as fast as I knew how to do, somebody might imitate my run EXCEPT for this one room, and beat me by a second and take my record.  If you want to have the best speedrun, you have to think like that.  Somebody just might care a tiny bit more than you, and practice a little bit harder, and get that half-second.

For instance, I remember reading on a board dedicated to Melee HRC and BTT a thread somebody made saying he had the new world record for the Game and Watch HRC.  He had topped the other record by something miniscule, like .2 feet.  All he did--I'm guessing--is inch the bag forward slightly while doing his bat-drop combos, and otherwise mimic the world record exactly.  But you know what?  He had the new record.  .01 seconds can mean the difference between a gold and silver in the Olympics.  I'm pretty damn sure an Olympic level athlete would NOT say "one hundredth of a second?  Eh, whatever, I didn't want the gold that badly.  What's the difference, really?"

The difference between winning and losing a close Smash match can be one more hit than the other guy.  It can be hitting each other at the same time, but you were a little closer to the blast zone than he was.  It can happen in the finals of a tournament.  Does it matter?  Yes.  Absolutely.  It will not be a trivial difference when it's the difference between having a record--or victory--and not having that record or victory.  So yes, mastering this stupidly hard jump to save 1/2 a second really does matter.

Then I learned that you can go through this first room with the right timing so you reach the third enemy fast enough to go over him without waiting at all, and you don't have to jump under him either.  I didn't know you could do that.  It's actually *easier*, and saves another 1/4 of a second.  That's a bit of a relief.

Next room leads you to your first trinket.  There's a checkpoint in here, so when you trigger it, if you die you will return to that checkpoint.  Trigger the checkpoint, drop into the room with the trinket, and then... there's another checkpoint and a lot of spikes.  Reach the trinket, leave the room.  Right?

Wrong.  If you do the room just right, you skip the checkpoint.  Get the trinket, kill yourself, warp one room back, save a second or two.  And so on.

Just about EVERY room in this game has a trick like this.  If you time a jump right, enter the room at the right angle, go as FAST as possible, you can blitz through this game.  And kill yourself a lot in the process because the timing is NOT forgiving.  Hell, the game's bad enough to do normally, let alone charging through at full speed.

But if you want to speedrun, there are a few basic tenets.  One is that it doesn't matter if something is hard.  If it's faster, you must attempt it, because somebody else will.  Second is that there is, very often, a faster way than what you have, and it's waiting for you to discover it.  You have to be willing to question what you believe is possible.  "I can't make this jump."  Actually, maybe you can, and you're just not doing it right.  And almost all the time, your movements can be just a little sharper, you can cut each corner just a little more closely or jump just a little earlier, and save yourself that tiny bit of time.  And through an entire game, it all adds up.

However... bear in mind that in a single segment run--a run where you start the game and beat it in one sitting with no saves--you are probably going to mess up, especially on very difficult games, and especially towards the end.  My record for beating this game is currently clocked at 19:14 by the game's timer.  The first five minutes or so, I won't tolerate anything but superficial errors.  By the end, however, I will begin to accept mistakes, because otherwise I'm wasting the run and the opportunity to practice other parts of the game.

As the run goes on, I will tolerate bigger and bigger errors because the third tenet is accepting your human limits.  I am GOING to make an error in the time it takes to complete this game, especially when I attempt frame perfect jumps after a long period of nonstop focus.  And if I'm recording, it may still be the best speedrun I've done, even with a few dumb mistakes in it.  It may be the best anybody's done, and I'm not going to sneeze at that.

And nobody says I can't replace my own run!  So I can choose to do an "inferior" run this time, skipping over a few of the harder tricks in favor of safer, more consistent methods, particularly towards the end when I don't want to waste an otherwise good run.  I can keep that as my current record, then I'll have something good to beat.  And if nobody else does it in the meantime, I hold the record.

If you've played Mario Kart and done the time attacks (or saw the Speed Racer movie :P), you know that when you try to do a time-trial on a given level, the game races you against the "ghost" of that previous record.  When speedrunning, I feel like I'm racing against the ghost of a person who does my run just a little better than me.  I make a mistake, and I imagine that some invisible competitor has, until that moment, done everything exactly like me... except without that mistake.  So I'm losing, and I have to step my game up.

Because this is not a blog about Speed Racer, Mario Kart, or VVVVVV, and it is a Smash blog, I should be talking about how this relates to Smash.  But I think the parallels should be obvious.  If you don't dedicate yourself to mastery, somebody with a little more dedication will do what you do, but better, and you will lose.  You can decide NOT to practice your Fox ditto chaingrabs, but then you will play somebody who goes pretty even with you, except for those chaingrabs, which he does better.  And that could be what clinches the match.  Little things add up.  Somebody who is just a little sharper, or faster, or a little more consistent will beat you out.

Then again, nobody is saying you have to be the best at anything.  That's a personal goal that you set for yourself.  But if you want to be better, you can't ignore things and say "it's too hard" or "it's not worth it."  Obviously you want to pick things that give you the biggest improvement margins.  I can spend my time practicing a frame perfect jump that saves me 1/2 a second in my speedrun, or I can use that time to find a path that saves me a full minute over the course of the game.  If I can add a fourth speedrunning tenet, it's that solid overall play trumps highly specialized tricks.  Practicing the toughest tricks that only save a tiny bit of time should be secondary to the ones that save you lots of time.  In VVVVVV, there's a trick that saves a good eight seconds if you do it right, but can cost you twenty seconds if you mess it up--if you do, you might as well start the run over.  When choosing between learning that trick, and one that's stupidly hard and saves me only one second, guess which one I pick.  If I had to draw a Melee comparison, it would be the difference between learning to wavedash consistently and learning how to shine b-air people with Fox.

As time goes on though, if you want to continue to have the best record, you have to make your record *better*, because other people will try to improve on it.  So you'll need to optimize and improve in places you didn't know were actually possible, and constantly reinvent your own speedrun.  You may need to take tactics from other people, which is totally legitimate.  It's not about inventing tricks, it's about having the fastest run.  Developing a new method for playing the game can *help* you get the best time, but if you adopt somebody's technique and do it better, more power to you.  I don't care if my speedrun looks just like everybody else's, provided it's the fastest.

*

Bonus section!  So, I also promised on the IC boards to write something special just for IC players.  Here it is!  Some of it's going to be a little obvious, some of it less so.


Your Guide to Not Letting Nana Get You Killed

Nana is great.  She's your best friend, the source of half your damage and probably more than half your KOs.  There's a problem though.

Nana's dumb.  Very, very dumb.  And like somebody who is dumb, she does dumb things.  I've become very acquainted with just how dumb she can be.  So any time you're going to try and interact with her, remember: she is stupid and will try to get you killed.  So here's a list of things that you should keep in mind while trying NOT to let her kill you.

1) You cannot save Nana while she is tumbling.  If Nana has lost her double jump and goes into a tumble, she's gone.  Forget about her.  Killing me won't bring her back.

Okay, that was stupid.  Point is, you can't save her from a tumble, so don't try.  One important If she gets shined by Fox however, that breaks her out of her tumble, meaning you can belay and teleport her to you.  The problem is that there's a Fox right near the edge and belaying leaves you open, but then again, going SoPo against Fox is eighty kinds of annoying, so the risk might be worth it.

Nana cannot break herself out of tumbles except with her double jump.  She double jumps the moment her character model becomes level with the main surface of the stage (except on Yoshi's Story, where she will jump towards either the platforms or cloud, depending).  If you practice in training mode against another ICs and just hit them off the level, you will soon learn the exact timing for when she jumps.  The moment she uses her double jump, you can belay or forward+b, so keep that in mind.

2) When Nana is in hit stun, she will not belay or forward+b with you.  Even if she is not sent into a tumble, she won't come to your aid.  If you were to up+b at the exact frame she gets hit by the weakspot of Luigi's up+b, she would not teleport to you.  Don't rely on her to belay and save you if she's about to get hit.  That said, if you can snatch her away from getting hit by using your up+b, it could be worth your while to do so.

3) Nana will not do anything for you while she is teetering on the edge of the stage.  She will not up+b with you, she will not forward+b with you.  I think you can force her to act if you hit the c-stick but that's it.

4) Sometimes it's best to let her die.  If Nana is really far out there and the opponent has a free edgeguard situation, don't bother helping her.  It will get the both of you hit.  I'm sometimes criticized for not helping my Nana enough, but the problem is that most of the time, belay will leave the both of you wide open.  Either she'll die, or you'll eat something really deadly.  And it's super tough to aim her so she'll grab the edge, so half the time she won't even make it on her own.

This is where the up+b ledge-cancel comes in handy.  It lets you save her when she's kind of close to the stage without putting yourself at a significant positional disadvantage.  She becomes invincible above the level, and you get edge invincibility too.  Even if she gets hit by the opponent, you're in a prime position to punish them for it, so at least you get a trade.  Remember, you lose a stock when Popo dies, not Nana.  It feels like the stock is over without her, but you can still attack, deal damage, land stupid d-smashes, and chaingrab a bunch of characters with SoPo.

5) Nana has a special platform AI.  When she is on a platform or above it, she goes into a different AI pattern than normal.  You cannot up+b and collect her if she is in this mode, even if you are close to her.  Try falling through a platform then up+b'ing immediately; she won't join you.  If she's stuck above a platform for whatever reason while you're trying to recover, do NOT try and belay because she won't do anything to help you.  If you want an example of this, stand on a platform, drop down and immediately use your up+b.  Popo will belay, Nana will do nothing.  If you wait for a few frames, THEN you belay, she will go with you.

That's all for today.  Thanks for reading!

Oh boy, 2010

Welcome to the new year, Smashers.  2009 was an interesting year for Smash, and I'm looking forward to what happens in 2010.

To start, a moment of respect for NES N00b; it's bad enough the Smash community lost a rising Falcon, but a family lots a loving son and the world lost somebody with a bright future ahead of him.  This kind of tragedy happens all the time, all over the world, to the point where we forget it's a tragedy; it's not until it strikes close to us in some way that we get reminded of it.  I felt it and I never even met him.  He was somebody behind a controller in a bunch of YouTube videos, and hiding behind a wall of text on SWF, and I felt it.  I will never get the privilege of playing his Falcon, or get the privilege of meeting somebody with a reputation for being a very cool guy.  So... farewell, NES n00b.

What does 2010 have in store for us?  Pound 4 is almost here, for starters.  I wish I could be there, instead of not there (which is where I'll be instead).  But I will be cheering from the sidelines for nobody in particular, hoping only that every interesting match gets recorded and I get to watch them all.  If there's a livestream, I'll try and tune in as well.

2010 may also yield the finishing of Bipolar, my video, which will shake the very foundations of all you believe to be true about this world and the universe.  If I can get my recording equipment back, that is.  On the bright side, I've actually pulled off enough cool stuff in tournament that I may just cobble it together from footage out of tourney videos.

Some insight into how I am determining what goes in the video.  After a recording session, I go back and comb through the footage, taking notes of combo times.  Then I rate each combo from 1-5.  1s and 2s aren't going in the video unless I absolutely NEED them.  They're either little or boring, or an otherwise decent string of gameplay that takes too long to do.  Not very entertaining, only to be included out of necessity.  3s aren't half-bad, but I'd prefer not to have them in.  The majority of the combo video will be 4s, hopefully; these are solid combos that would provoke a decent reaction from a crowd if I pulled them off in tourney.

A 5 is pure gold.  Zero to death, unbelievable, audacious, never before seen gold.  As you can imagine, this rating is given sparingly.  It's not THAT hard to zero to death somebody with ICs, but it's hard to do it in a way that looks interesting.  So there may be one or two classics in there, but I'm trying to be creative and do stuff most people haven't seen, including other IC players.

Some combos have a .5 appended to them as an afterthought.  "This is like a four, but just a bit better."  (Why didn't I just rate the combos from 1-10 then?  Because shut up, that's why.)  If I ever land something that deserves a 5.5, I'll probably quit Smash right there and devote my life to God or something.  After finishing the video, obviously.  Additionally, certain clips are rated based on how funny or catastrophic they are.  These will go in the credits or worm their way into the video proper.

This is one of the songs that has a 90% chance of being in the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRnZtn1a9bM

If it doesn't sound very... icey, that's because it's not supposed to.  The video will be segmented based on combos that are mostly out of grabs and combos that are mostly out of ordinary hits.  This song is intended to be in the faster-paced, non-grab section.  The slower, more grab oriented stuff with consequently have a slower, more relaxed song.

So apart from Pound 4 and my video, there will be tons of tournaments and lots of Melee and probably some Brawl too.  And, of course, I'll be writing stuff down.  Check back tomorrow for something new.

Peace, and welcome to the new year.