How quickly did you get into competitive melee

[Pogogo]

So I was reading this thread about a guy trying to teach his gf melee and it reminded me of PEEF saying he taught reneblade from scratch in the same way. I came into competitive melee with 5 years of casual play. Do you think this gives me a disadvantage or and advantage and why? Also, I would curious to know your situation(though I expect 90% start casual).

 

[King Funk]

I started playing Melee last year when I moved from Portugal to Denmark. I used to be a Brawl player, but since everyone in Denmark played Melee I decided to switch games and so far it's been pretty cool. Especially being close to Sweden and all, I get all sorts of nice practice.

 

[CloneHat]

I had only played Melee a few times, and bought Brawl when it came out. I tried switching to Brawl+, but it was such a hassle, I ended up playing what the rest of the community was: Melee.

 

[Moritaka]

Started in Melee in 2007, usually mained Fox and I didn't went to a lot of tourneys, but I was understanding how the game was.

 

[Mr Wizzrobe]

Having the experience with fighting games as a child was a huge asset. Even though I was just a casual player as a kid, you develop certain skills along the way automatically that still apply today. You get the sense of basic spacing, you can identify patterns among your opponents, and you have better execution overall. I picked up Melee competitively in 2009 and it wasn't that hard to learn everything when a lot of the non-technical things were already implanted into my brain. Of course, they needed work, but it was nice to have that foundation.

 

[Mr.Jackpot]

Brawl+ introduced me to competitive Melee, and I started about a year ago.

 

[MasterShake]

I played the game when it came out (it came in a bundle with my gc) very casually, hyrule temple and pokeballs lol. I stopped playing it for years but when I was a teenager I frequented the gamefaqs message boards quite a bit and was introduced to competitive melee there (mind = blown). 4 years later I'm glad I stuck with it.

 

[Wake]

Not quickly enough.

 

[EPsilon933]

Bought the game in Spring 2004. Obsessed with break the targets and home run contest. Everything I did was my own strategies

Then in late 2006 - June 2007, I had this 1 friend in high school and we played competitively against each other with tournament rules. When he left, I stopped

Brawl release - 2 months after, I played hrc and btt again

January 2, 2009, I went to my first tournament at a gaming convention. Then 3 months after that, I found out there were local tournaments within biking distance from my house

 

[Massive]

Purchased game on North American release day in 2001.
Beat all of my friends, nobody would play me for the rest of high school.

Went to college in 2003, started playing with people there, decided to go to SMYM in spring 2004.
BEEN PLAYING EVER SINCE.

 

[GhllieShdeKnife]

I played melee a bit when it i was young and it seemed really hard.
Then a little over 2 years ago i started playing ssb64 seriously, learning all the techs and trying to
beat my brother(he has mad reflexes). A couple months later my friend wanted to play some melee and it really frustrated me that he could win using very few moves and no techs. I wanted the same level of control that i had with 64 but when i looked up techs for melee i found an overwhelming learning curve
with WDs and moonwalks. So i hated melee, it was too hard and my friend would not believe that shiek's dash attack, uair and shield roll could be beaten. dash attack to uair sooo OP.
now he wont play with me=(

 

[darkgirku]

5 years of casual melee. I was hooked the instant I came across "advanced how to play" videos on youtube lol

 

[Veetaak]

Played Melee as a kid. Came across some competetive melee videos around may in 2010 on youtube and searched for the smash community...

Started practising ATs when I first joined smashboards. I found the swedish boards a few months later but didn't play anyone except my friend for a very long time. I regret that.

 

[Zodiac]

I was always competitive, I was always thinking "Boy, wouldn't it be great if they held tournaments for this game that ran on no items, 3 stock and final destination only"

As soon as I found the scene I was in.

 

[Sinji]

I've been playing competitive since 2006. But I found a crew in 2009.

 

[The Star King]

I've been following competitive Melee since 06 and I still have yet to go to a tournament/smashfest/anything

 

[Zoler]

Never played this game casually, ever.

Started playing in fall 2009 because of the competitive scene, first videos I saw was Silence and Wombo Combo. Started out with Fox but then switched to Sheik because I read somewhere here on Smashboards that she was the easiest to pick up (orly?), FINALLY switched back to Fox in may this year and not looking back.

 

[Life]

Brought in by the NP article on the Smash community back in '05 or so (had the game since around 01-02). Lurked/noobposted on GameFAQs for a while, left for a while, got bored one summer and came here. Still haven't done a Melee tournament, simply because by the time I was old enough for that sort of thing Brawl was out and I do that instead because I figure, as a relatively poor player, I'd probably at least have a shot at doing well in Brawl.

 

[DerfMidWest]

hmmm...
My friends introduced me to it and we played casually from like '05-'07ish.. or whenever the wii came out. once the wii came out we pretty much stopped playing and played the various games out on the wii at that point. Got caught up in the brawl hype and played seriously in brawl from '08-mid '09, when my friend started to get back into melee. At first, I was liek "hell yea, lets play some melee!" not realizing how different the games were. So I was kinda meh about melee for about a month. then tried playing brawl again and realized it sucked pretty hard after about... 2 matches. Picked up Pichu in melee and had some fun learning ****. eventually got semi-decent at the game. tried going to a few tourneys, got destroyed at one, not able to make it to others due to family problems. Now trying to build up the melee scene in cleveland, and doing kind of well in my opinion... got a whole bunch of n00by players interested. hopefully, some of them will get serious about the game.

 

[Robsta]

I originally bought Melee when I was a kid and me and my mates would play it (we were about 6-8 at the time) and like any spoilt little kid of my time pretty much forgot about it when the next popular game came out.
A few years ago I was a big Magic The Gathering player and the place I used to go to play MTG had an old CRT with a 64 and Smash. We all played the game religiously on a casual level except for one guy who was legitimately good at the game. Like most people that found SWF I jumped on the internet to learn how could become a better player. I learnt a ton about 64 and set myself up to play online.
I never left the 64 section until one day by chance I saw a thread mentioning Melbourne in the Regional Section. I had a look and was amazed to see an entire Melbourne community dedicated to Smash and quickly got in contact with the scene through IRC.
I eventually convinced a person I played 64 online with to come to the city to meet these other Melbourne smashers and that's were I saw how amazing melee was. I've had a competive focus ever since.

tl;dr: I played melee competitively pretty much straight away, the only time I played casually was when I was about 8.

 

[Bones0]

I played the game when it came out (it came in a bundle with my gc) very casually, hyrule temple and pokeballs lol. I stopped playing it for years but when I was a teenager I frequented the gamefaqs message boards quite a bit and was introduced to competitive melee there (mind = blown). 4 years later I'm glad I stuck with it.

WTF I almost mistook this for a post of my own. lol

 

[rawrimamonster]

Started playing in 2004 or so, around late 04 I found smash vids online with tournaments and started to research from there. Never got anywhere though because I'm too poor to travel. :S I have a relatively high techskill level, and good ability to read opponents but because I was isolated to either playin 64 online or to playing melee with my ragequitting friends I never got far as I would have liked.

tl;dr found competitive melee in 04, never got anywhere good with it.

 

[stelzig]

Played with certain items off (like starman and health-regenerators) and 5 stocks with friends at first. I Think that's the most common way to play it.
Then in 05 (I think...) I started making some high scores, and then discovered that some people had insane records in break the targets and homerun contest on a website called cyberscore.net (it's now called cyberscore.me.uk if anyone wants to check it out, lol). Scores were so good I had trouble even believing they were real. That got me curious and I started searching lots of stuff and this way also got introduced to the multiplayer competitive aspect of the game.

Umm. From then I played mostly single player high score stuff (mostly multi-man melee) as Denmark didn't really have a scene, and very few people even remotedly interested, and because I was just younger of course. Played a few times with tomber and eagle between 05 and 08, but it wasn't much.

In 07 I attended my first tournament (RoS4) with tomber in Sweden where we unsurprisingly got ***** by most people, but actually also won some games...

Then sometime in 08-09 after brawl came out, new people appeared on danish nintendo forums and we finally got a small community established. Didn't take me long to convince people that melee was better, wouldn't be surprised if melee had been neglected in their first tournaments and maybe not even been picked up if it wasn't for me... And I suppose this is when I really got into playing it myself, rather than just watching stuff because it was absolutely impossible to find anyone in my country to play against (even now our community is really quite small, lol... But I get to play about once a month I think)

Hope this input wasn't too long for you guys

Edit: Oh, as for how simple it makes for understanding stuff and such... Well I think my edgeguarding in general was very limited before watching vid (like don't think I even really did on-stage edgeguarding), but everything people did also instantly made sense to me when I saw vids.
And I think playing stadium mode first makes it easier to pick up different characters as you have already played a fair bit with some of their techniques and somewhat know their movesets (though the effect of some moves ARE vastly different in multi-man melee compared to normal melee).

 

[GOTM]

Bought the game solely for casual play when it first came out, after seeing my cousins get it for Christmas and spending time unlocking characters with them, so fun.

Played it for a year or two on my own until like 2003. Put it down for a few years until I got to college. Started playing extremely casual again in like Sept. 2006.

One of my friends came to visit (I was living with ChiboSempai at the time), and he shined spiked me with Fox. I had NO CLUE what this was, I didn't even know how to incorporate grabbing into my game back then. All I knew was, I wanted to learn how to do what he did, so I started playing Fox and watching Smash videos online to learn more and be better than him.

Then one day, I went to my college's game room b/c I heard people played Smash there. Went down, and Cactuar sat next to me and showed me that there was a whole lot to the game I didn't know about. The practice began...

 

[40secondz]

I played casually for the longest time when the game came out. At first I mained as Kirby, but my friend would always sideB with Falco to run away and I could never get him. Then I switched to Peach for some reason. I was remotely good with her. Then I found some facebook website that said you could only join if you knew how to wavedash, L-cancel, have gone to tournies, ect. At the time I didn't know what those were so I searched it on youtube and wa-la. I found the match where Shiz played M2K at RoM(game 4) and was amazed. I then began to watch more and more...

 

[MuraRengan]

Bought the game in 01, didn't know about the competitive scene till 06. Saw some videos of a Fox drillshine infiniting a captain falcon and I was like, "I wanna do that." So I went to gamefaqs, which is where I was introduced to the scene.

 

[mesa23]

i don't think i've ever played this game competitively.

i mean, of course i've been competitive and stuff wanting to beat my friends at times

like the other day i claimed i had the best bowser in my group and my friend disagreed so we had a bowser ditto king koopa title match and i of course wanted the crown so i got all competitive and won but i think that still counts as casual play

 

[Haxxy]

Got the game right about when it came out, only got really competitive last year after leaving Brawl.

 

[ShroudedOne]

So...

I had never played a Smash Bros. game before 2008. I got started with Brawl. It was pseudo-competitive play for the most part, because I hated items and liked neutral stages (without knowing that they were, indeed, neutrals), but we weren't doing any ATs, or stuff like that. I think it was around the winter of 2009 that a friend of mine gave me a GC, and a Melee disc as a birthday present. I played around with it, sure, but Brawl was still my thing, though I enjoyed Melee quite a bit.

Come 2010, I'm off to college. One of the first things I do when i get there is find the video game club. Sure enough, I found it. There is actually a subsection called "Smash Club" that I joined, where we played competitive Smash. Played Brawl there, trying to be competitive. For one reason or another, I can't really remember, the Brawl players got busy, and weren't coming to Smash club as much. So I started hanging out with the Melee guys, looking at their game, and starting to get into that more competitively. By this time, though, I still thought Brawl was superior. It took until about...maybe March or April of this year before I decided to drop Brawl (let's be honest, it's a terrible game), and go full on Melee. I think it's been a year since I started playing competitive Melee.

 

[Bing]

So I was reading this thread about a guy trying to teach his gf melee and it reminded me of PEEF saying he taught reneblade from scratch in the same way. I came into competitive melee with 5 years of casual play. Do you think this gives me a disadvantage or and advantage and why? Also, I would curious to know your situation(though I expect 90% start casual).

by any chance was that me? cause I remember posting that Im trying to teach this girl im seeing to play Sheik.

On another note, I started playing Melee just under a year ago, then about a month after I started playing, I went to Kirbykaze's house for a smashfest, then another fest, then my first tournament was... 3-4 months after my first fest...

 

[MechaWave]

Bought the game at a Toys R Us in 2002. I was way too young to comprehend the existence of competitive smash. I really wish I did, though.

It wasn't until 2008 I found out about wavedashing and this website. Thanks to my curiosity of Melee I found this site.

Unfortunately, times are tough in my family. My little brother gets the GameCube (which I used to own a ton of games) and I get the Wii. The GC games we have either got lost or damaged, and Melee was a sufferer and (for some reason) have yet to get another copy. It's the main reason I play Brawl moreso than Melee. Especially with the huge decline of Melee.

 

[KirbyKaze]

Played it in 2002 with friends.

Became the best but I always figured there were much better people. As they grew out of it, I needed my Melee fix elsewhere. Found the "Advanced How to Play" by Wak and somehow played with a Falco player in high school a lot at our smash club (back when I was a Kirby main). I could probably do the math to figure out what year but I'm far too lazy (06 is my guess because that sounds about right?).

I didn't really start playing in tournaments or actively going to smashfests or anything until early 2007 though. So I guess it took either four or five years of casual play before I started really playing the game competitively. To our credit, my little group took off items really quickly. Unfortunately, Great Bay and Hyrule were real stages back then too.

 

[LLDL]

I've been following competitive Melee since 06 and I still have yet to go to a tournament/smashfest/anything

Come to Apex!

 

[Palpi]

I never really played this game casually.

 

[the_CAM_factor]

played the game casually when it came out. had over a 100 gamecube games but melee was my favorite and always played with my twin. When brawl eventually came out i didn't really like it cuz chars were slow and lived so much higher. So i would usually play melee if anyone else wanted to play it.
I was at a pasta dinner for my highschool track team and bolt said he wanted to learn to play competitively, being the best person there and still having a love for melee i naturally said yes. For the next year we learned the advanced techniques and only played each other and watched videos online trying to get decent. Our crew grew as other kids in our highschool wanted to get good when we started playing melee at our wow fests and it quickly took over.

 

[Fly_Amanita]

I got the game shortly after it came out and played casually with my friends in the sense that I didn't know much about the game, although I still strived to be better than them. In mid-2006, I came across a Ken vs. Bombsoldier video and realized that I sucked, but I felt that I had a reputation for being good that I had to preserve, so I frantically started learning the ATs that I hadn't already figured out on my own and generally became more fluid within a month or two. I went to one tourney in early 2007 kind of randomly and did fairly badly, did HRC over the summer, and then finally became a regular tourney-goer in late 2007.

 

[N.A.G.A.C.E]

I first got into the competitive scene in late 06 or early 07, before that I played casually for some time, i was aware of tourneys but i wasn't even the best among my friends. Then i went to collage and one day while leaving my room to go to a class i passed a room down the hall with the door open. I looked in and saw smash on the TV. so trying to be somewhat outgoing i stopped and yelled something like " hey do u mind if I come back later and play? I cant now b/c I have class". Then i went back and using my noob marth got i think 2 stocked by this guys ganon. I felt kinda bad about this but at the same time i was use to losing to my friends at home anyway. The guys roommate did give me some encouragement by telling me i did better then he has ever done against this guy. Anyway time went on and i would come by and play him from time to time, then the next semester his roommate was moving out so i moved in (my roommate was a **** so this was a very good move for me.) He was on smashboards at this time and he found out there was a smash club at school that met on Fridays. We started going to that and that is where i first started playing peach.

 

[bossa nova ♪]

it took a while


but apparently, it's worth it

 

[Sizzle]

I was a huge fan of SSB64 and found out that they ran SSBM tournaments at MLG. I was the best among my friends at SSB64 so of course I figured the "skill" would translate to Melee. I bought a Gamecube and started to practice Melee. It was 2005, and I found a nearby tournament at the local comic book shop. I entered and didn't do too badly, but I witnessed ATs for the first time and realized how far away I was from the top players. I continued to enter tournaments as much as I could, and have continued playing since then. So to answer the question, I started playing Melee competitively pretty much right away.

 

[choknater]

i got into it around 2004. i got to a competitive level by late 06.