Blog Posts
Rants, reviews, writeups, reactions, and anything else that doesn’t qualify as a guide goes here.
Groups on the Top 8 Bubble at SSC
Football has Monday Morning Quarterback. Melee has Monday Morning Marth. Now get ready for Monday Tuesday Morning Pikachu, here to tackle the topic on all your minds in January - Super Smash Con.
Everyone wants to make top 8 at SSC and play on the big stage, but what does it take to get there? There are some players that we expect to be a shoo-in to make it any year they’re there,, like Isai, SuPeRbOoMfAn, Kurabba, Wario, and (recently) Nax. But there are rarely 8 players of this caliber in attendance, leaving 1 or 2 spots open for the much larger group of players on the bubble. Some examples of those who went the distance include Josh Brody in 2019, Shihman in 2022, and Stranded in 2023. I’m going to group these players by character, and look at who you’d need to beat if you want to take that spot.
Read more...Tempo
Do people know what I mean when I talk about 1 player having a tempo advantage? I think ult players call it advantage state? When one player has the ability to act first repeatedly and the other player is trying to stabilize. A common one is when player 1 recovers on stage (with pika upb for example) , and player 2 can get over to them, but can’t hit them before their recovery endlag finishes. 2 can’t get a guaranteed punish, but they can chase 1 and pressure them into making a mistake.
Read more...Headphones and Smash
After Spring Time a bunch of people asked me what I listen to in my headphones while playing in tournament, so here is my long-winded explanation.
Why?
I have a hard time tuning out background noise, especially noise with meaning, like people talking. Even if it’s irrelevant, I’ll end up thinking about what they’re saying, so I use noise canceling headphones to block it out. I don’t have game audio in my headphones, which means unless the TV volume is high I play without game audio. I practice this way as well, with no sound on emulator, which is convenient since I don’t have to deal with pj64k’s broken audio plugin. Occasionally people tell me this puts me at some huge disadvantage in terms of reaction time, which I’m skeptical of, but maybe I’m just really skilled to compensate, who knows. It is possible to have game audio in your headphones, but it requires plugging in a splitter and adapter to the console audio line.
Read more...Describing skill levels in competitive 64
⚠️ Note: This page was written in 2017. The concept is still interesting, but the skill levels and player examples should be considered only for historical value.
I occasionally run into situations where I want to describe someone’s skill quickly to a 3rd party, but I don’t have an easy way to do it. The current popular system seems to be to use the “D1 D2 D3 D4” results of waterfall brackets to categorize players, but I’m not a huge fan of this system because division results for the same player can vary widely from tournament to tournament.
Read more...Review of the 'Best Redesigned Replacement Joystick'
Original Listing:
This is a knockoff N64 joystick, of the kind I usually strongly recommend against. The advertising was very up-front about it being a 3rd-party replacement and claimed to be very faithful to the original, so I gave it a shot.
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