LiteralGrill
Smokin' Hot~
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Goin' Solo
Project M is great at tournaments or with lots of friends, when there’s a big pool of people you can play against and a variety of styles to learn and beat. But many don’t always have that luxury. Maybe tournaments aren’t happening 24 hours a day, or none of your friends enjoy Project M, or it just happens to be a weekend where your friends aren’t free to hang out with you. Then how exactly can we enjoy Project M whenever there’s no one for us to spar with?
Welp, we can’t. Project M is over. Pack it up, we’re done.
Not really. We can still play Project M alone. In most cases it’s not as fun, but despite this there are still ways to make the most of your opportunity to play Project M by yourself.
”Only Road That I Have Ever Known”
Throughout the last 5 years, Smash has often been a rather lonesome game for me. In high school, my friends were not very good at Smash, so they didn’t like playing against me when they couldn’t keep up very well. And even if they wanted to play, we were so busy most of the time that it was never practical to even entertain the thought of having a training partner.
My game of choice for the most part was Super Smash Brothers Melee earlier on, and the only local Smash scene I knew of was based on Brawl. On top of that, I didn’t know much about that scene, so I was shy and reluctant to go try out the scene. As a result, I withdrew and had to just play Melee on my own.
I did not learn of Project M until college, so the content I could have access to in Melee was much more restricted; fewer characters, fewer stages, and less single-player-specific content. I was becoming interested in the competitive scene by this point, so I would only play on 6 different stages and against about one out of 4 different characters usually.
I’ll tell you, this was better than nothing. But it was boring, and I often would just play this way because there was nothing better to do. Seeing the intensity of competition ruined my enjoyment of item matches on Rainbow Cruise against CPUs. I was set in a “tournament” path, but I believed that Super Smash Brothers was not popular enough for me to ever enter a tournament. So I was playing a constricted way and not having fun, for the sake of playing Smash.
But then I go to college. There’s a Smash Brothers scene, much bigger than I could have imagined here. And it’s even bigger than my school, it extends to the whole town! Over time I learn more about the local players, big and small, and become friends with the people in my scene. And I learn about Project M.
Project M was a weak success among my friends for a short time after I heard about it, but it was clear that my friends, especially those who were better at Melee, were not interested or even disliked the game. I naively thought I was building a Project M interest among my friends, but I was fooling myself. And as Melee became less and less enjoyable, I found myself playing Project M alone more and more, a full circle.
My point in this story is that I understand the frustration of playing Smash alone. As a result, I learned a few things that helped me continue to play, even when every instinct or intuition should suggest I stop and do better things with my time. And I’d like to share these things with you.
Choo Choo - The Train
I found when I came to college, my Melee Luigi did relatively well against Fox players, Falco players, and Captain Falcon players. My friends were quite surprised by how well I did against them. But prior to experience against real players, I’d managed to give myself an edge in these matchup somehow, to where I felt quite confident against these high tier characters.
Here’s how: the two years of Melee alone turned out to be lots of training for the opponents I would face later on. During those two years, I had not only learned to wavedash, L-cancel, and mash Luigi’s down-B like it stole my house, but knowing that Fox, Falco, and Falcon were common characters competitively, I learned how to chaingrab and edgeguard these characters to some degree.
Playing alone is, as might be obvious, an opportunity to learn and hone technical skills. “Hitting the lab,” or “labbing it,” as it is colloquially termed, is the process of taking time alone to improve at specific technical points. There’s a lot of facets to what you can do “in the lab,” so I want to take a note about a few of the possibilities.
First, I should mention that in general Project M CPUs are unrealistic, in that they often do very fast reactions most humans would not do, and paradoxically often fall off the stage in stupid ways. However, they are programmed to DI in random ways, which is great for learning how to follow up on DI for your combos and techniques.
For players who are still quite new at the game and not yet familiar with all the basic techniques (aerial attacks, recoveries, grabs, etc), playing against CPUs in Project M is great practice! I highly recommend you use this low-pressure high-focus environment to your advantage. It was only through this kind of play against low-level CPUs that I made a habit of using the C-stick for aerials, and trying to sweetspot recoveries. I have at least two friends who are currently looking to learn the game, and I’ve seen marked improvements after they take initiative to play against CPUs or use training mode (remember: C-stick attacks are possible in PM’s training mode, while they are not in Melee’s!) when no one else is around.
Classic and All-Star modes are also great to master the basic attacks and familiarize yourself with the game. Similarly, events are an engaging way to get more and more familiar with the controller and techniques. I’ll admit, Project M requires an intimidating amount of technique and understanding to experience it fully, but the resources of the game like these extra 1-player modes make it easy to quickly grasp the basics.
For players already familiar with the game, use time alone to grind out tech skill. I only learned to wavedash by practicing it alone and then forcing myself to apply it poorly and then more effectively against increasingly higher level CPUs. The level-9 AI in Project M can do a few rather advanced tactics themselves, so playing against them is a good way to compare your progress to your goals. As I said before, these are low-pressure contexts, so you can just waveshine/wavebounce/wavecheat/whatever against the level CPU you choose, or just use training mode.
Although CPUs are more human-like in PM than in Melee, they are still not perfect substitutes. However, there is one way I’ve learned to abuse the AI: practicing chaingrabs. During chaingrabs, CPUs are mostly helpless except for how they DI (just like humans), and this is largely true in Melee as well. At the least, you can practice learning the rhythms for chaingrabs, and use the CPU’s random-ish behavior to practice tech chases and follow ups on basic combos.
The Project M Dev Team put effort into building these resources to maximize your training, so take advantage of them!
Expedition
I want to mention one other personal experience of mine. When I started playing Project M and realized that my friends were generally not interested, I took time to try and learn the game a bit better. With 41 characters to use and play against, there’s a lot to take in, so I broke it down a bit at a time.
For hours, I would set a CPU to level 9, and set both our character icons to “Random.” Then I would select a random stage, and just play out the match, regardless of who I get and what the stage was.
This type of play was fun and engaging, because I had no idea what I was going to get, and often once I got it, I didn’t know what it was. Sure, I’d read or seen some things about the various characters but once a Lucario is in your hands for the first time, the feeling of exploration is unbelievable. “You can throw Spirit Bombs?! And you can mash A forever and just win!?”
Playing random-random battles against CPUs is both informative and entertaining, whether or not you have a main character by that point. It’s especially helpful for players new to Project M (preferably with some competitive experience in another Smash) to explore the game in some way. There’s a lot of content in PM, and you’re likely to see just about every character in tournaments. Playing as and against essentially the whole CSS can teach you enough to understand the basics of every character you’ll fight in brackets.
Maybe randomizing everything isn’t your style, but in Project M, I highly encourage you to spend time, if you have not already in the past, just learning the game character by character (perhaps in a more systematic way than I did). For more information on playing a large variety of characters outside of brackets, you might check our previous MoM on the topic.
Brakes on the Train?
While I’ve just extolled several ways to play PM by yourself, largely against CPUs, there are some cautions I must address.
As I mentioned earlier, CPUs in Smash are notoriously - non-human. Training against them builds bad habits, just by the nature of trying to replace human play with computers. I’m largely a casualty of this fact; by playing against Melee CPUs essentially exclusively, I never learned or even heard of a neutral game until college. Watching youtube videos didn’t teach me fundamentals or neutral game, it just taught me that people scream when you do combos and knees, and that’s all I took with me. I didn’t learn how to deal with pressure by lasers, shines, projectiles, speed, swords, or anything else, just how to chaingrab three characters more or less. I’m a weaker player for it.
Playing alone is great for certain things, but you must, must, must know what you’re doing and what you’re trying to learn. As I said before, playing modes like Classic Mode in 1-player is great to teach you the game, build endurance, and expose yourself to battle. But CPUs don’t flinch, DI consistently, use a proper neutral game, or apply most other facets of playing tournaments. Some CPUs like Fox will pressure you hard, but they also frequently Illusion to their death.
At every level of play, I recommend you learn about the neutral game more and more, either by playing against humans or learning about it from the dozens of resources on the internet. This is the pivotal skill that separates chumps and champs, regardless of how much tech skill you learn. Playing a pseudo-neutral game against CPUs helps to learn the basics of it (i.e., spacing and continuously adjusting yourself in response to where the CPU goes to learn how to react to opponents). However, as I said before, your human opponents will show different movement patterns from what you’ll generally see in Project M, so be aware!
The other caution I’d like to issue is in avoiding burnout. Frequently, I would find myself bored and tired of playing Smash for so long by myself. There’s only so many hours in a day for so many days that you can play alone without wearing down your resolve. And in a game like Smash, it’s important to make sure you don’t waste your enthusiasm; it’s an amazing game, but getting tired of the game even for an hour leaves a sour taste in your mouth for days or up to months. Here’s a few things I recommend you do to avoid this sort of burnout:
- Don’t play for too long at once. The way you wear yourself down is in playing continuously for a long time while your boredom builds up and you don’t notice. Then you suddenly realize how bored you are, and it’s hard to come back to the game afterward.
- Play other modes. Grinding waveshines for 6 hours is draining. If you don’t have fun with the game at least periodically, you end up feeling mentally tired. Unless you’re at a level where playing against CPUs can make you worse, it may be fun to try some of the event matches or All-Star Mode, just some fun little challenges to give yourself a break by doing something less intensive in Smash
- Play other games. All work and no play makes Jack a mindless Smashbot. Other games, from slapping in Mario Kart to going outside and playing basketball, will keep your mind refreshed. If you just spend all day staring at Smash while missile canceling for hours ad nauseum, Doing other things really helps to recover from that kind of mental stress.
- Have your life. You have other obligations to take care of, so prioritize things that matter more than practicing Smash. I’ve found that after life kicks in and I take long breaks from the game, I come back to PM refreshed and ready to learn again. On top of that, when you’re busy with obligations, PM feels like a sweet reward to play, and even boring tech skill practice can be refreshing.
Lonely, But Not Lost
Playing alone is tough sometimes, but there are still always things you can do to help your tournament performance later. Anything from exploring Project M to practicing highly-specific tech skill by yourself is a good use of single-player play.
Even when things look bleak for your local community, the world is always changing, and you don’t know if your efforts will pay off. I certainly may have just been lucky that Smash erupted the way it did, and all my efforts just before it did had some kind of payoff. But I made those efforts, despite having no one to share the game with, for the same reason almost everyone in the Smash community has done anything:
It’s for love of the game.
And that’s all you need to find the game rewarding. Just love the game.
While playing with others is still always more fun than alone, I hope that this article helps you make the most of the times you’re stuck playing by yourself.
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SmashCapps hopes people enjoyed this piece and can use it to maximize their alone time with Smash. To keep up with all things Smash follow him on Twitter
