The Mid Level Smash Bros. Experience
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’s (SSBU) online play is actually garbage. No game will ever have a flawless online experience, but the way SSBU presents itself online borders on ridiculous when compared to how other games handle their online play in 2020. for comparison, fans of the series predecessor Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game released for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2001, has just recently implemented rollback netcode and matchmaking using a program called project slippi.
Rollback is seen as the netcode option that is best suited for fighting games as it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the fight by stopping to wait for both players inputs as it would be in delay based netcodes. For a fast, technical game like Melee, this approach works extremely well and these improvements will also allow for the expansion of regions that can be comfortably played in.
This brings us back to complaining about SSBU’s delay based netcode. A netcode that results in delayed inputs, freezing, and frequent disconnections. This online environment promotes the heavy use of camping, zoning and staling as delay based inputs means that you physically can’t react to moves as you would be able to offline. This has given rise to twitter hate and feuds where Sonic players, zoner players who main characters like Samus and the Belmonts, and characters with easy and early kill confirms reign supreme. Not to mention that all of this is also under a paid subscription while setting up slippi is basically free. Nintendo has shown to be hilariously inept when it comes to running a stable online service and have been famously uninvolved with the smash series’ competitive scenes.
All of which serves to fill in smash twitter’s discussion of the week along with the reveal of the ARMS’ character Min Min as the new DLC fighter, the resurgence in the discussion of stage legality for competitive play, and making fun of the people breaking quarantine to go to locals in order to go 0–2.
This is the type of timeline that causes me to stop, sit back, and realize that I am trying to get better competitively at a party game with little chance to go pro and whose community is constantly complaining about a new problem that has little to do with anything else outside of smash.
And I wouldn’t change that for anything.
I’m still relatively new to the competitive smash scene, I remember finding out about it around 2017 by stumbling across the video (or vod) for the grand finals of Super Smash Bros for Wii U (Smash 4) at Frostbite 2017, a fighting game tournament held annually in Detroit. The set was between Zero, a Chilean Diddy Kong main who ended up being named the best player in Smash 4 for the majority of its lifespan, and Tsu, a Japanese player who was known to be one of the best Lucario players in the world. This set ended up being very famous as one of the hypest sets in the lifespan of Smash 4.
After watching that set and looking up some more information on the competitive smash scene, I found a video on Melee techskill and was immediately fascinated. At that point, I had dug out my old Wii, my copy of Melee, and an old gamecube controller, and began to teach myself how to wavedash.
Nowadays, I’ve been playing a lot more Ultimate as I realized that I’m actually not all that great at Melee. Since Ultimate was the newest release at the time and everyone I knew was playing it. I decided to put my full competitive attention on learning Ultimate.
So far, in the year and a half since Ultimate’s release, I have dedicated myself to being the best wolf player I can be. continually, I try to muster the courage to go online into my scene’s discord in order to ask for games and practice while also trying to establish myself not only as a competent player, but as a competent and trustworthy person. I’ve also decided to try and better myself at Melee’s close cousin Project M and Project + as well as the indie game Rivals of Aether (Ranno is best boi). As with SSBU, I’m trying (with mixed results) to muster the courage to go online, play against people who will absolutely squash me, and ask for help.
I’ve enjoyed using the last year and a half to go to my locals in order to try and get better and hopefully win something. Though, I won’t lie, it was stressful trying to get to a point where I wouldn’t be shaking about my results or trying not to succumb to salt, rage, or complacency. Getting better at a fighting game is like trying to steer a drunk animal in a race. You’ll stumble and fall, you won’t know where you’re going exactly or when you will even get there, but there is only one way to go.
Forward. You have to keep going forwards. Even though it is definitely nerve wracking to no end.
I can’t really tell you how many times I’ve gone 1–2 or 2–2 at this point. I can’t help but feel envious of people who are placed higher than me in my scene’s PR who I know for sure I could beat the next time I see them in bracket or envious of the player’s who seem to be naturally gifted at the game. I can’t really express how demoralizing it can feel to lose to a guy much younger than you are, who plays a somewhat gimmicky character, and then to not show a response when he starts bragging and showboating because you are expected to be the ‘bigger man’ in that situation. At that point, you have to beat yourself up a little bit more when you say to yourself that that character wasn’t actually all that gimmicky, you weren’t ready for it, and that you aren’t all that great at the game despite the time investment.
Being a mid level smash player can also leave you somewhat voiceless when it comes to talking about smash online. I love talking about matchups and frame data whenever I’m at locals or learning what characters are capable of. I also understand that I’m not good enough at the game for the opinions of high level and top level players to be super relevant to me.
I am just one guy among the endless sea of local players who try to justify their own opinions on twitter.
Though, in a way, it’s somewhat comforting to know that the only thing stopping me from getting better or putting myself out there is me. Competitive Smash, at the end of the day, is a social experience. Fighting people who are better than you and who challenge you primes you to surpass them in order to fight the people who are better than them. Top players who go to as many events as they can, face off and practice against each other constantly and then go on social media to further those relationships, whether they be as friends, rivals or as a goal to overcome.
The names that rise from the scene are arguably as important as the results. It’s why we remember MKLeo as the one who made Joker his own, how Esam became the best Pikachu, Samsora as the best Peach, or Dark Wizzy as the best Mario. It’s why streaming and content creation has thrived with these personalities.
I don’t really want to come across as this ‘woe is me who can’t get twitter followers.’ I also don’t really want to come across as pretentious though I get that that can be hard for me. These are just some general observations mixed with my experiences. For a mid level player like me, I guess I’m just beginning to understand how little I actually know about the smash scene in general and what it actually takes to “git good.”
Due to Covid — 19 and the resulting quarantine, being forced to only use a crappy online system to play smash until I get the courage to try the new slippi build, I really had some time to think about my relationship to this game series and this community. It allowed me to come to terms with the fact that I’m just another generic smash profile who swears to make it big someday. But, I’ve also realized that I end up thinking about this game a lot. Mostly about how I can fit smash and Esports into my career and how I can practice mentality and mindfulness outside of the game.
Innuendo Studio has a great video on this called Things of Beauty: Super Smash Bros. as a Spectator Sport in which he says that being a fan of watching and playing smash is akin to being a sports fan a la Robin Williams in the movie Good Will Hunting. There is a sense of purpose in getting better at something, anything, and then watching people execute that skill at a high level. It’s in this vein that playing smash is akin to learning and practicing an instrument, with top level players being likened to musicians and tournaments being likened to performances and concerts.
It’s a weird realization to me that I essentially used the practice skills I developed in music school to put more hours into learning my character’s kill confirms. How I can feel relaxed playing my oboe for a room of hundreds of people but feel nervous playing loser’s semifinals for a group of 20 who are all half worrying about their games as well.
In this way, the biggest thing I’ve realized is this validity to practice, to failure, to social connections That I wasn’t completely able to piece together as a teenager. I think a lot of the early resistance to Esports by our parents and grandparents stemmed from the fact that it seemed unbelievable that these experiences that they took for granted or learned through other skills could also be learned through something as redundant as a video game. It’s coming to terms with this figurative funnel where all of your practice, dedication, and studying only results in a tiny increment of progress.
To pay $5 to go 2–2 in the back of a comic shop seems absurd in this light, let alone paying hundreds to travel and play against hundreds of others in a major event. Learning of people bunking together by fives or tens in hotel rooms or sleeping under tables in between sets under tables, or even starving yourself to stay sharp during top 8 would make you seem like a lunatic. all of that extra effort just for the potential of a slightly bigger nozzle. Another part of being a mid level player is being told that anybody can be successful by competing but then learning of the overwhelming sacrifices and effort put in in order to attain that goal.
I hear those stories and a part of me says that ‘yea, I’d be ready to do that for a game I like to play’ while that same part of me dreads the prospect of sitting at a desk job for the rest of my life. So I’ve made and customized controllers, watched hundreds of vods and completed getting getting a training mod that would potentially flag my switch for piracy and hardware manipulation just for a sliver of a shot of making it big to a scene that hardly pays anything. I’ve probably talked the ears off of my non smash friends about the values of learning fighting game theory in order to have an extra training dummy to practice combos on. I’ve convinced myself that smash will be a big part of my life over my actual career even though I can barely make top 8 at my locals.
Then existentialism will hit and I’ll picture myself on my death bed asking myself if that was worth all of the trouble. I haven’t been able to say to myself that it isn’t. Plus, the thought of my grand kids looking at me with a melodramatic shock that encapsulates the sarcastic look of “really?” as I tell them about the time I reverse three stocked my bracket demon with a wolf flash combo is a future I’m looking forward to.
