So, I’m sort of back. I did do some Smash Ultimate playing during my break. I tried out Peach/Daisy, Bayonetta, King Dedede, Dr. Mario, and Jigglypuff. Wow, I see that in my notes but I don’t remember much of actually trying out these characters. The only one I remember liking was Peach/Daisy. I think I’ll return to the Princesses for a serious week of testing.
I also prepped for and played in the Ultimate NA Online Open May 2020 edition. Though my region and many others took place in June. I’ll get to that in a bit.
On a programming note, I’m going to giving these blog posts a bit more descriptions. When I was just trying out the different Smash Bros. games titling something “Melee Week 3″ made sense, but now that I’ve tried them all out, I think more detailed blog titles is a better way to go.
Back to Smash and figthing games in general. I’m sure everyone’s heard that EVO was cancelled and replaced with EVO Online. And Smash was dropped from the lineup. There are other fighting games in competition and I thought the one that I would try for was Skullgirls.
So, the plan was to spend one half of the week on Skullsgirls and the other half on Smash, at least up until Evo Online. And potentially work on only Skullgirls the week or two before the event. That was the plan at least, but after playing Skullgirls for four days I still hadn’t completed the tutorial. At this point the Skullsgirls competition is less than a month away. There’s no way I’m going to be any good by then. I mean I was planning on going 0-2, I wasn’t planning on being so bad it would be a total waste of time. Which it would be. I do think Skullgirls is stylish with some great character designs (even if it is a little male-gazey). It said to be a good beginner fighting game. But I’m already using up my hobby brainpower on Smash. If I had gotten into Skullsgirls two years ago instead of Smash it may reversed. But I don’t want to try to play both games to be worse at each one. I mean, just looking at back at what I knew and was able to do in Smash Ultimate a year ago is embarrassing. I don’t need that for another game.
So anyway to back to the NA Online Open. It was postponed a week because of the protests. Which is something I can get behind. I do wish after they re-scheduled it they would have given us at least a week notice. I would have stopped focusing on Skullgirls sooner. But that’s alright, I doubt it would have changed much prep. But it was down to only two nights.
On the first night I practiced my pocket character. The characters I was planning to use whenJoker wasn’t the answer. I practiced Kirby against Greninja, that seemed to work. I practiced Rosalina & Luma against Cloud and Roy. That didn’t seem to work. I practiced her against Ness and Lucas. That seemed to work, but I really need to figure out the timing of her gravitational pull to gimp their PKthunder recoveries. I was getting it sometimes, but not more than 25% of the time. I didn’t practice any of my Ness matchups, I had practiced them enough before.
On the second night I concentrated on prepping Joker. I’m still working on getting his bread and butter combos and kill confirms down. I think he’s one of the best characters in the game, but the spacing on his combos can very exact, and I think it’s one of the reason he’s a better offline character than on Wifi. So I worked on those first. Than I played some Online Quickplay. Then I practiced what I thought would be some common matchups in the tourney (past on previous tourney stats). I played against my Level 50 Bowser Amiibo. And lost a best of 3 because he’s insane. Then I played Best of 3s against Level 9 Cloud, Byleth, and Sonic. I was able to get the wins on those. And that was pretty much my time to prep.
On the actual tournament day I was able to play in 11 matches. The recommended minimium was 10. I went 3-8. In the Spring Open I went 2-6, and in the February Open I went 4-6. So I didn’t do better, but I think I played better if that makes sense. In some of the past tournaments I would run into people who were clearly in their first Smash Bros. tournament. That didn’t happen this time. Also, in some of the past tournaments I would run into players who would just run me over. I felt like I had no chance. Granted in at least one instance, a player who demolished me ended up in the top 32 so I at least had that excuse. But this time I didn’t feel like that. I went 0-2 a number of times, but never felt like I was completely destroyed.
One thing I enjoyed was that I got a chance to play all my charaters! My three set wins I got only playing a Joker, but I did get game wins with Kirby. Though I lost to a Greninja, the character I practiced for! I only pulled out Ness and Rosa once each as counter-picks and still ending up losing. But I at least the losses were closer than if I stuck with Joker.
I am improving even if’s not reflected in my record. The quality of competition seems to get better the longer Ultimate has been out. There were four matches that I lost 1-2. I won the first game in each of those. I think my problem is I”m not adjusting in game and between games. In two of those sets the first game I was really dominating. But my opponent picked up my habits and then handily beat me the next two games. I need to learn to adjust to my opponent’s adjustments. And mix things up more.
I’ve been up and down on Ultimate the past few months, but I think I’ve got the bug again. Looking back at the previous blog posts in the series I am a bit embarrassed. I went to Smash Con without having my character’s recovery down pat. I crossed characters off as possible mains without ever even learning their bread and butters and kill confirms. I was trying out characters in Online Quickplay. In retrospect that isn’t the way to improve at Ultimate. But at least I had fun doing all those things. And the original point of this series wasn’t too improve, it was just to play every Smash game. I that aspect we should have closed this series by now.
Now,I think I have a better handle on how to improve now, and am looking forward to doing that. Next week random selection says Zero Suit Samus. She’s a character I have down to try out for a week, so we’ll see how that goes.