STUNLOCK THE PRESSES: combo breaking news (Part 1)

also love how crts let the stars have trails during the credits.

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Been improving my melee Ganondorf and have been on the lookout for neat tech.

Then I see this nonsense:

I love this ridiculous game.

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What is it about Smash fans and giving incredibly stupid and impenetrable names to their techniques.

Like… Why the fuck is it a “koopabackdashwaveslide hoverwalkmoonlanding” that’s just an obfuscatory word salad

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Half the time they are concepts that exist in fighting games and they just don’t know better and want to stand alone in their conventions.

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Or perhaps it’s the exact opposite of obfuscation? that sounds like a set of instructions on the steps to perform it in the form of one single word

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i mean it’s mostly a bit, right?

right?

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A koopabackdashwaveslide hoverwalkmoonlanding is… tilting your analog stick the minimum distance in the opposite direction that you’re wavedashing. It’s literally only one extra step on top of a wave dash yet they totally tried to make it sound like… this impossibly complex technique

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Fighting game jargon is itself famously mystifying though. Just ask Stephen King

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Trying to translate game states and frame data into human readable contexts is its own game.

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That’s a good 30% of my job as a software engineer too. The profession constantly requires inventing new ad hoc jargon and agreeing with your coworkers on what it means in order to discuss the code and data you’re writing or debugging with some semblance of clarity and concision

And just as with fighting games the original idea is often to model some realistic intuitive scenario (physical brawls on the one hand, or let’s say truck drivers making deliveries for instance on the other) but the nature of doing it by computer forces you into an explosion of abstractions with their own rigorous and slightly misaligned principles

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oh boy, is this the thread where I finally get to link the greatest Smash Bros youtube video of all time and it’s actually RELEVANT?

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image

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some of those are actually real

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thinkumed all the messy guessies at friendly daycare

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Mauve had a tweet or post somewhere about how even the designers and programmers of old fighting games didn’t have solid codified terms for more than half the stuff going on until players started filling in the dictionary. Stuff like frame advantage, hit/block stun and “priority” (which has fallen out of favor now that we just state start up for buttons/specials now).

Back to smash. When Ryu came in on smash 4, a player was trying make his own mark by naming his discovery the “Mamma Mia” because Ryu could do a invincible get up off ledge and everyone was like, “It’s called Wake up DP”. It’s been so long I forget if that was a bit or sincere but that’s what we’re dealing with alot. Also, there’s what called a Tomahawk Grab but all it really is an empty short hop grab. Dunno where tomahawk came from but it seems to have stuck. Granted tomahawk is easier to say for a commentator. That’s another variable for weird tech names. How easy it is to spit out for commentators can also bleed into it.

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A tomahawk grab is a running, jumping grapple in pro wrestling if I recall correctly. I only know this because I play Tekken

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What’s cool when I think about this that each model is at once a description and a physical reality, and therefore there’s no limit to how deeply we can chain the models. The original fighting game programmers produce a bunch of code to simplify and model a brawl in a partly intuitive, iterative way and wind up producing a system with its own emergent reality they don’t fully understand. The players create a formal model in their discourse to simplify and understand that. In turn we are having a meta discussion and simplification of the space of jargon.

I think this is connected to the postmodern aphorism “the text is also part of the world”

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im sorry i will never be calling it “layered mixup.” marina and i spent too much time firing rockets at each other in Halo yelling about messy guessies for me to ever change

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I’ve watched lots of Smash content both from entertainer and pro-level perspectives and I have never in my life heard of “messy guessies” or most of the other things on that list, so I’m given to assume it’s some sort of satire?

Most of the things in Smash that have a different name than in the FGC are either because they work in a slightly – but significantly – different way, or just because the community grew up independent from the FGC (see ‘friendlies’, ‘ditto’).

Top players being called “gods” isn’t a widespread thing, it referred to five specific Melee players only, because they were untouchable. The same group of five players took every top prize in every tournament for like an entire decade. They were also nearly all assholes, so a non-zero percentage of the use of the term was accusatory rather than reverent.

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