I’ve had this really weird relationship with melee where like, the late 10s’ resurgence of it as a popular competitive game has seen a bunch of people come into it with a lot of excitement and energy to the point where my perception of the average melee player is that they’re a lot better than they actually are
like, I’ve played melee at work with people who are really, really into it and I find myself surprised at how natural it feels to beat them considering that the tech side of the game has become so much more advanced? the only match I lost against the person who literally brought a CRT into the office was when I was playing link on a controller that I was stiffer than I’m used to so I couldn’t jump cancel my up-b out of shield, but even my out of practice falco and marth and falcon held up pretty well despite not playing for…years
I’ll get slippi set up soon! been busy with things
I may be perpetuating this perception since I am definitely not a very skilled player but unranked does make me wonder how some people are as technically proficient as they are while having zero strategy in mind.
Decent Falcos regularly wipe the floor with me though.
Played this by myself last night just to see how it’s made. And it is pretty cool, very detailed. There is Walt’s apartment above the Main Street firehouse, and in there is a secret compartment with a mechanized shelf that rotates out a mini-bar for a grenade launcher stand, money in a suitcase in the closet with two pistols. Funny stuff. My biggest complaint (and I guess this is huge) is that there’s like no atmosphere, everything is very sterile and not in a Disneyland sort of way. Would have been nice to have this at night just so there could be lighting.
a lot of the time it’s because you can skate by on technical proficiency and until recently, the people that you were playing against were literally just your group of friends that also played, so if there’s any kind of moderate skill gap between those players, the more technically proficient one will just win because they’ll play a character with high priority attacks and win every exchange until the less proficient one figures out how to properly space and shield. but since that’s much harder to understand and you can only ever learn it through playing against another person, most people just go into practice mode and do combos
it becomes really evident when you’re playing an “honest” character like mario or ganon and you actually have to think about what moves you can afford to throw out because you only have one or two of them that can compete priority-wise
(on the other hand it’s kind of fun to play those non-meta characters because no one knows how to play against them since they’ve been practicing against fast fallers the entire time)
like, in this video where mango (sorry, scorpion master) plays mario he explains a tiny bit about playing against newer people where he forgets that you can kind of just run at them and they can’t punish him even while he plays mario (it’s in the game where he plays against a marth named “Andrew”): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMq2v9JzP2w
and then it’s followed up by a marth that can actually play and you’ll just see that the pace of the game is so much different because mario has nothing that can outrange marth
in my experience, the trick is to build beacons that attract the good people while also repulsing the bad people and then you’ve got a little pocket of good people
yeah I never had any significant interaction with the smash scene, I only got good because I had a group of like 2-4 friends in college that wanted to play all the time and before that I played with my brother a bunch
I feel like this is one of the biggest reasons why smash kids can’t deal - it’s a combination of the complete lack of netplay until literally 4 months ago coupled with skill in melee being pretty much the only marker of whether a person is worth keeping in a community
like, a lot of people who play smash would be completely ostracized from the communities they are in if it weren’t for the game, and so many people talk about it as though it’s an unqualified good reason to have these kinds of communities but it’s also a super unhealthy way to run a community and the rash of abuse stories that all came out from the smash scene a few months ago is the logical endpoint of that, with the added note that all those stories only became public knowledge because of the increased popularity of the smash scene and would very likely would have stayed private if it weren’t for that
like no one is going to care that the melee scene has separate tournaments from the ultimate scene when players from both scenes have abuse allegations levied against them and players from both scenes admit to it? there might be more allegations in the ultimate community because it’s a younger one but it’s not like that shit didn’t happen in melee, it just happened before all the money happened
the netplay similarities remain the same and both scenes sit in contrast with both the FGC and esports so I don’t really know what the point of picking apart the two is
I have not been awake long enough to form cogent thoughts, I’m just saying it’s unfair to Ultimate players to say they’re the same as melee-only assholes
I nodded my head all the way through this. This is basically my melee experience of the last two years going from exclusively playing with a friend group to skilling up and taking things online. We went to a tournament in London last year for the first time and it was kinda bizarre how the skill gap was huge (we weren’t great) but the social skills gap was equally huge in the opposite way (I’m no social butterfly but this event was an eye-opener). I felt bad because there were some really friendly Smash guys who were really stoked to see us and there was a sense that they desperately wanted new blood. Despite this, the community was mainly tech snobs who were very good at the game but had nothing else going on.
I kind of regret not getting into the FGC or any local communities in a way but I definitely don’t want any part of the abuse shit that was cropping up all this year (and presumably has yet to crop up in some scenes). I just want to share my love of games where I get to have a favourite playable character and talk about silly movement mechanics. I don’t need high school sports socials where we compete to out-masculine one another and gradually erode our emotional competence to nothing.
Wow, I have a lot more to say on this than I thought. Maybe there should be a general purpose fight game thread.
the mid-late 00s fighting game scene here was a joy and where lots of my long term closest friends are from, just one of those rare things (like sb really) where you have a really nice group of people in one spot
this was when there were still a couple of surviving arcades and immediately before sujoy opened up a few nice venues that were obviously bleeding cash from day one and didn’t last very long
Fffuuuckkk I forgot how much I like Magic I’ve been sucked into Arena pretty damn hard.
Playing against unranked randos I feel like I have an acceptable win/loss ratio thus far and this is the one multiplayer game my shitty internet can handle
I think the tech-first, fundamentals later mentality is because Melee is a spectator sport. People get into in (now) because they want to do the cool shit Mango does, but he’s mastered an aspect of the game that’s basically invisible to them, so they just try to learn the cool flashy stuff.
