Black_Heretic
Smash Lord
Link to original post: [drupal=1273]Smasher [[Chapters 1+2]][/drupal]
*This story is fictional and is related in no way to me and my smash experience though I may include real smashers as characters in later chapters (with permission of course)*
*copy and pasted directly from my blog on AiB :D*
March 9, 2008:
I'm in line at Gamestop. Somewhere in the middle, probably another 30 minutes or so until I get my copy of Brawl. I've been here for about 20 minutes, not too bad. Within the hour, I'll be home playing Brawl and hopefully having an amazing time doing so. I'm standing here with 4 friends, Darrel, Jack, Anthony, and Carl. We already made plans to just ditch the upcoming week of school to unlock everything and basically get really beastly at this game. I've heard that Melee had tournaments and stuff, so maybe Brawl will too. Yeah, if there are, we're totally in on that. Winning money will make playing the game that much sweeter.
Ok, its been a little over 2 hours now. We unlocked a bunch of characters and stages through playing a ton of Free For Alls with the person in last place giving up his wiimote/nunchuk. Carl was winning almost every match, he played a lot of Melee and I guess Smash experience transfers over well. He even brought his old Gamecube controller because he didn't want to try to play with a wiimote. Oh well, to each his own and its working for him. We were talking a lot about entering tournaments in the upcoming weeks and just trying to picture what it'd be like. Probably a bunch of no life asian kids will be there. But we're doing pretty good. We took turns being on teams against level 9s and we could beat them already so I figure we all must catch on fast, those computers were tough.
"What do you guys think the rule set will be at Brawl tournaments?" Jack suddenly asked. Stumper. Nobody had thought about any kind of rule set, we all assumed that it'd be default settings, all items on mid, 2 minutes, 4 man FFA. I said so and Carl laughed. "No way man, it'll probably be a one versus one stock match."
Darrel was at my laptop, looking up Smash stuff while waiting for his turn. At Gamefaqs.com he found a competitive rule set. "One on one, 3 stock, neutral stages, no items" he said.
"Neutral stage?" I asked.
"Apparently the crazy guys who got the game at the Japanese release say that Final Destination, Battlefield, Smashville, Lylat Cruise, and Yoshi's Island are neutral stages, whatever that means." He responded.
"Umm... ok, we'll practice on those stages. And no items? Oh well, Final Smashers were kinda boring anyways, whoever got it won. Oh, and I'll put it to stock match right now." So I did.
"I think we're missing some stages guys" Anthony said after looking at the Gamefaqs page for Brawl, "Let's go and make sure we unlocked all characters and stages."
Everyone nodded at this idea and looked over the ways to get the stages. Simple stuff like playing Luigi 10 times, using DK a bunch of times. We were still doing one on ones and we changed it to 1 stock to make getting the stages faster. In another hour, we had most characters and most of the stages. We agreed to switch to the 2 player SSE mode so we can unlock the people we were missing.
"Ok, 35 characters, 39 if you count Pokemon Trainer's different Pokemon and Zero Suit Samus. Every stage, lets practice with this tourney rule set and get good so we can win." I said.
Everyone agreed and happily placed their in-game tag into rotation mode. Darrel was Bang!, Jack was Loser, Anthony was Skill, Carl was B*tch, and I was Iwin!. Now to practice.
Chapter 2
Three months have passed.
Carl, Anthony, Jack, Darrel, and I have been playing basically every day. Always using the same rule set we discovered the first time playing. We are all hooked. We wake up, go to school, then after school, we head to either mine or Anthony's house and smash until our eyes burn and our thumbs are sore.
Carl is still by far the best. Much better than any of us. We all jokingly blame his use of a Gamecube controller, but secretly, I do think that is it. The wiimote and nunchuk work well, but it feels like its missing a few things and like its holding us back. I've tried using the gamecube controller, but it feels awkward and I find the button placement weird, I much prefer the 360 controller. Even the Playstation controller feels better to me.
After Carl, I won the most matches though. This makes me feel pretty good about my skill overall. Carl is just amazing. He uses Zero Suit Samus and just kicks everybody's ***. Its no fair how she has two paralyzing attacks. He can combo into his kill moves easily and racks up damage with them too. I use Donkey Kong. Everybody else tells me he sucks, but I won a lot with him and have fun doing it so I just shrug off their statements. There's nothing quite like landing the DK Punch.
As for Anthony, Jack, and Darrel, they're all about even and almost tied for number of wins and losses on the in-game records. Its actually kinda cool how even they are. Anthony uses Ike, he could be down by 2 lives and then land 3 smashes. Its pretty cheap, I don't like Ike, he even kills DK early. Jack moves characters around a lot, but most recently, and probably for the longest, he's been using Wolf. We told him time and time again that Wolf really sucks and has the worst recovery, but he says he's determined to make him good. He's doing a pretty good job too. And finally Darrel, Toon Link main. He used Link first, but got tired of getting hit offstage and then not being able to make it back. His recovery is even worse than Wolf's. So he picked up Toon Link and has used him since early April.
As for tournaments, we haven't been able to find any near us. We live in Oakland, CA. We googled "SSBB tournaments Oakland" but only got a bunch of random unrelated things, but we still have a lot of fun just imagining being at one.
We also started looking up pro matches on youtube. People like Psychomidget, Ninjalink, DSF, Azen, and many others influence my playstyle immensely. I feel like I probably can't beat them, but I think I could give them a good run for their money. Carl is probably just as good as them. He's been watching some guy called Claw for tips and has been doing some really crazy combos.
"You guys should check out this site later, its called Smashboards. Its so cool, you can actually talk to the pros on there!" Darrel exclaimed one day. "It also has hella information about characters and guides on the best ways to play"
"Go there now and pull up a DK guide, I have to see what it says" I responded.
He complied, within a few minutes, I was reading this huge, in-depth guide on the website. I understood little of it though. I knew what smashes were, B moves too, but seriously, what the hell was a fair? Or a bair, spikes? What the hell did upBOoS mean? Super Armor, teching, cargo holds, perfect shields. I guess its study time.
And one last thing caught my eye. Tournament discussion and a Regional Zone. It looked like we were gonna be finding tournaments after all. I click on the top link in the Pacific West region. Axis Gaming. Looks like its time to prove ourselves. We will all study up on this forum and get better. I think I can place well, hopefully top 10. We'll see.
*This story is fictional and is related in no way to me and my smash experience though I may include real smashers as characters in later chapters (with permission of course)*
*copy and pasted directly from my blog on AiB :D*
March 9, 2008:
I'm in line at Gamestop. Somewhere in the middle, probably another 30 minutes or so until I get my copy of Brawl. I've been here for about 20 minutes, not too bad. Within the hour, I'll be home playing Brawl and hopefully having an amazing time doing so. I'm standing here with 4 friends, Darrel, Jack, Anthony, and Carl. We already made plans to just ditch the upcoming week of school to unlock everything and basically get really beastly at this game. I've heard that Melee had tournaments and stuff, so maybe Brawl will too. Yeah, if there are, we're totally in on that. Winning money will make playing the game that much sweeter.
Ok, its been a little over 2 hours now. We unlocked a bunch of characters and stages through playing a ton of Free For Alls with the person in last place giving up his wiimote/nunchuk. Carl was winning almost every match, he played a lot of Melee and I guess Smash experience transfers over well. He even brought his old Gamecube controller because he didn't want to try to play with a wiimote. Oh well, to each his own and its working for him. We were talking a lot about entering tournaments in the upcoming weeks and just trying to picture what it'd be like. Probably a bunch of no life asian kids will be there. But we're doing pretty good. We took turns being on teams against level 9s and we could beat them already so I figure we all must catch on fast, those computers were tough.
"What do you guys think the rule set will be at Brawl tournaments?" Jack suddenly asked. Stumper. Nobody had thought about any kind of rule set, we all assumed that it'd be default settings, all items on mid, 2 minutes, 4 man FFA. I said so and Carl laughed. "No way man, it'll probably be a one versus one stock match."
Darrel was at my laptop, looking up Smash stuff while waiting for his turn. At Gamefaqs.com he found a competitive rule set. "One on one, 3 stock, neutral stages, no items" he said.
"Neutral stage?" I asked.
"Apparently the crazy guys who got the game at the Japanese release say that Final Destination, Battlefield, Smashville, Lylat Cruise, and Yoshi's Island are neutral stages, whatever that means." He responded.
"Umm... ok, we'll practice on those stages. And no items? Oh well, Final Smashers were kinda boring anyways, whoever got it won. Oh, and I'll put it to stock match right now." So I did.
"I think we're missing some stages guys" Anthony said after looking at the Gamefaqs page for Brawl, "Let's go and make sure we unlocked all characters and stages."
Everyone nodded at this idea and looked over the ways to get the stages. Simple stuff like playing Luigi 10 times, using DK a bunch of times. We were still doing one on ones and we changed it to 1 stock to make getting the stages faster. In another hour, we had most characters and most of the stages. We agreed to switch to the 2 player SSE mode so we can unlock the people we were missing.
"Ok, 35 characters, 39 if you count Pokemon Trainer's different Pokemon and Zero Suit Samus. Every stage, lets practice with this tourney rule set and get good so we can win." I said.
Everyone agreed and happily placed their in-game tag into rotation mode. Darrel was Bang!, Jack was Loser, Anthony was Skill, Carl was B*tch, and I was Iwin!. Now to practice.
Chapter 2
Three months have passed.
Carl, Anthony, Jack, Darrel, and I have been playing basically every day. Always using the same rule set we discovered the first time playing. We are all hooked. We wake up, go to school, then after school, we head to either mine or Anthony's house and smash until our eyes burn and our thumbs are sore.
Carl is still by far the best. Much better than any of us. We all jokingly blame his use of a Gamecube controller, but secretly, I do think that is it. The wiimote and nunchuk work well, but it feels like its missing a few things and like its holding us back. I've tried using the gamecube controller, but it feels awkward and I find the button placement weird, I much prefer the 360 controller. Even the Playstation controller feels better to me.
After Carl, I won the most matches though. This makes me feel pretty good about my skill overall. Carl is just amazing. He uses Zero Suit Samus and just kicks everybody's ***. Its no fair how she has two paralyzing attacks. He can combo into his kill moves easily and racks up damage with them too. I use Donkey Kong. Everybody else tells me he sucks, but I won a lot with him and have fun doing it so I just shrug off their statements. There's nothing quite like landing the DK Punch.
As for Anthony, Jack, and Darrel, they're all about even and almost tied for number of wins and losses on the in-game records. Its actually kinda cool how even they are. Anthony uses Ike, he could be down by 2 lives and then land 3 smashes. Its pretty cheap, I don't like Ike, he even kills DK early. Jack moves characters around a lot, but most recently, and probably for the longest, he's been using Wolf. We told him time and time again that Wolf really sucks and has the worst recovery, but he says he's determined to make him good. He's doing a pretty good job too. And finally Darrel, Toon Link main. He used Link first, but got tired of getting hit offstage and then not being able to make it back. His recovery is even worse than Wolf's. So he picked up Toon Link and has used him since early April.
As for tournaments, we haven't been able to find any near us. We live in Oakland, CA. We googled "SSBB tournaments Oakland" but only got a bunch of random unrelated things, but we still have a lot of fun just imagining being at one.
We also started looking up pro matches on youtube. People like Psychomidget, Ninjalink, DSF, Azen, and many others influence my playstyle immensely. I feel like I probably can't beat them, but I think I could give them a good run for their money. Carl is probably just as good as them. He's been watching some guy called Claw for tips and has been doing some really crazy combos.
"You guys should check out this site later, its called Smashboards. Its so cool, you can actually talk to the pros on there!" Darrel exclaimed one day. "It also has hella information about characters and guides on the best ways to play"
"Go there now and pull up a DK guide, I have to see what it says" I responded.
He complied, within a few minutes, I was reading this huge, in-depth guide on the website. I understood little of it though. I knew what smashes were, B moves too, but seriously, what the hell was a fair? Or a bair, spikes? What the hell did upBOoS mean? Super Armor, teching, cargo holds, perfect shields. I guess its study time.
And one last thing caught my eye. Tournament discussion and a Regional Zone. It looked like we were gonna be finding tournaments after all. I click on the top link in the Pacific West region. Axis Gaming. Looks like its time to prove ourselves. We will all study up on this forum and get better. I think I can place well, hopefully top 10. We'll see.
