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.