Video & Critique Thread

[Froggy]

My last tournament. WF, LF and WQ

Where is WS?

 

[PEPESPAIN]

Where is WS?

Post eddited

 

[PEPESPAIN]

My new video!!!!

 

[Nu~]

My new video!!!!

Excellent video as always dude!

Although, I think you can get more distance with the forward DITCIT depending on the timing. It explains why me and @fromundaman sometimes get longer DITCITs than the ones in this video.

 

[PEPESPAIN]

Excellent video as always dude!

Although, I think you can get more distance with the forward DITCIT depending on the timing. It explains why me and @fromundaman sometimes get longer DITCITs than the ones in this video.

You are right! One of the last DITCITs, the strawberry one is longer ...I think you only need to a correct timing... but this is the idea!

 

[ToxoT]

if only i knew tap jump had to be off, this is way easier now

 

[Nu~]

We have no Ike vs Pac videos soooo

http://youtu.be/PXktHvlmNwI

EquinoX (me) vs Oni-Chan
Any critiques? I know I won, but I still don't feel too comfortable with my play. I roll too much

 

[ToxoT]

well you weren't getting punished for your rolls, i think you handled the match well and did good with trumping ike's recovery.

 

[PEPESPAIN]

Me against the best Spanish Rosalina Mainer (Ranked #2 @ Spain). I did a big missclick on the last match.... Any critiques?

I will say one. Too much Air dodge when I'm nervous

 

[Norkas]

Me against the best spanish Rosalina Mainer. I did a big missclick on the last match.... Any critiques?

I will say one. Too much Air dodge when I'm nervous

Pretty good Rosalina Mainer you played against.

I would recommend keeping a greater focus on killing Luma. Even when Rosalina is shielding and can punish you, Luma can't shield and a dead Luma is worth more than the ten percent damage Rosalina can do to you with a punish. Also try to learn the way Luma recovers from a hit and instead of going after Rosalina after you hit and separated them try to follow Luma and do a dashattack, dair or smash to finish him.
After you killed Luma try to avoid using hydrant and trampoline too much, our long range game is not really effective against Rosa and a hydrant helps her camping you out till Luma is back.

Also a Rosalina without a Luma is not really dangerous at close range, you can start pressuring her in a defensive, reactive way since she has literally no fast spacing options to keep you away and is very punishable. In your fights you often started to charge your fruit, when Luma was gone and ended up being pressured by her, because you respected her way to much at close range.

I hope this helps you, fighting Rosa becomes a lot easier once you figured out how Luma works, I would highly recommend playing her for one or two hours and you should become much more familiar with Lumas options and limitations.

 

[BSP]

PEPESPAIN I agree with what Norkas said, especially regarding killing Luma. Pac-Man can do it easily and consistently with hydrant and dair. If the two are remotely near a ledge, Dair Luma off and take the 10% punish. It's worth it unless that punish will actually kill you. Like Norkas said, become more familiar with how Luma acts, because it's very easy to kill once you separate them and quite important. If Rosalina is calling it back immediately, throwing out Dair will usually catch it. If not, Dair anyway. Remember that it will always put Luma into tumble.

After you kill Luma, you can proceed how you want. Charge to what fruit you want, but make sure you keep applying pressure. Trampoline her over and over if she keeps shielding.

That player was also very quick to Usmash your hydrants, which leaves Rosalina open for a punish every time. You weren't really picking up on that. Keep track of how people are tending to deal with you hydrant.

In general, I would not retreat to charge fruit when Rosalina is offstage. Her recovery is very susceptible to our pressure and you need to take advantage of that fact, which you can't do if you retreat to charge fruit. When she's offstage, you need to be out there preparing to Nair her up B on reaction. If she doesn't get stage control back quick enough, you can easily set up for Luma to be KO'd again by using hydrant when she grabs the ledge or Dair'ing them whenever they land. Abuse the fact that Luma can't block.

As for fruit usage, be careful with the z drops since Rosalina can shut down that type of pressure fairly simply. I don't think you are using the lower fruits like strawberry, cherry, and orange to their full effect. They do decent damage and, again, Luma can't block them. If Rosalina steals your fruit, she can't command Luma on the ground at all outside of Luma shot and starbits. Her holding your fruit is such a liability to her, I sometimes spam the lower fruits just as bait because I know her best punishes on me become capped at 8%, and I can try to KO Luma with that assurance. I highly recommend you try orange out more, because it will consistently damage and knock Luma away even if Rosalina blocks. If she takes it, it hurts her more than it hurts you.

Lastly, is there a reason you aren't pellet healing off of her gravitational pull? It's very easy to do on reaction and Rosalina can't really punish you for it. It's only 2% per individual heal, but it adds up and lets the Rosalina player know that they can't use the move without aiding you every time. 2% can also very well be the difference between life and death, so I would practice healling off of the move on reaction.

Also hydrant water pushes Rosalina off of the edge, shielding or not, starting when we're at 45%. That is very low, meaning you will usually have that technique available to you. Take advantage of it.

 

[PEPESPAIN]

More of my matches from that tournament:

 

[BSP]

http://www.twitch.tv/larrylurr/v/27797474

I play against Larry @ 4:00:29

 

[ToxoT]

lot of the same stuff from my other vids here, but i show how the tricks ive talked about like z drop + trampoline can be used, and some other setups for the bell.

 

[verbatim]

I got to play #2 on the Chicago PR in pools today, and went Pacman for the entire set. Unfortunately it didn't go well.

This was my first experience with someone who places top 32 at US nationals. I kind of felt like he shut me down before I could get anything big set up (z-drop, etc) and forced me to play a lot more reactionary than I'd like.

IK I made a lot of technical flubs, (missing the sliding fsmash, dropping a hydrant when I can't, landing on not next to my trampoline and giving up the positional advantage) that were unusual of me. I'm more worried about how Pacman can really respond to high level rushdown. IK Diddy Kong is one of like the three matchups that Abadango still plays Pacman in so I doubt it's bad, but it sure felt like it.

Any advice would be wonderful.

Also to clarify, the announcer messed up, I secondary Ganondorf, not Brawler.

 

[MachoCheeze]

Hey guys! Finally got some videos up to to critique. C+C would be greatly appreciated. :D

I know I complain about Mario a lot, but I FINALLY beat my long standing rival at our local scene with Pac-Man! I've only beaten him one other time and that was with Ganondorf. I get a really cool melon kill in the first match.

I lost these two but I did okay! Would love some advice.

 

[BSP]

I got to play #2 on the Chicago PR in pools today, and went Pacman for the entire set. Unfortunately it didn't go well.

This was my first experience with someone who places top 32 at US nationals. I kind of felt like he shut me down before I could get anything big set up (z-drop, etc) and forced me to play a lot more reactionary than I'd like.

IK I made a lot of technical flubs, (missing the sliding fsmash, dropping a hydrant when I can't, landing on not next to my trampoline and giving up the positional advantage) that were unusual of me. I'm more worried about how Pacman can really respond to high level rushdown. IK Diddy Kong is one of like the three matchups that Abadango still plays Pacman in so I doubt it's bad, but it sure felt like it.

Any advice would be wonderful.

Also to clarify, the announcer messed up, I secondary Ganondorf, not Brawler.

I might do a play by play at some point, but you're giving Diddy way too much respect, and you're giving him the leisure to do what he wants. JJ was constantly rushing you down, which is expected, but you can challenge Diddy when he comes in. Bair is your best friend.

Also, do not double jump and then charge your fruit in mid air. Whatever you do after that is very predictable, and you'll be in an awful spot if you get hit.

Edit: Machocheeze, I think you're actually not being aggressive enough vs. Mario. Realize that every time you land a hit against Mario, he is forced to face you,. Then you can expose his poor aerial forward facing options with Fair very easily. We can combo him with Fair chains and Fair -> Nair pretty well.

You were too focused on pellet healing (practice that btw) the fireballs instead of punishing Mario for throwing them by either run up -> fair or powershield them to something, or hitting him with Apples (you'll win that damage race). They're a much bigger commitment than you'd think. Healing is great and all, but you don't have to heal if he's dead.

Keep in mind how great trampoline is when you're on top of him as well. You should always win point blank encounters.

Also, when you knock Mario offstage, I'd pursue him a bit more aggressively than you did. One good fair or nair and he's dead. Think hard about when it's more valuable to go for a setup as opposed to an outright gimp attempt.

For fruit, you stuck with Melon quite a bit. For Mario, I'd stick with Orange, Apple, Galaxian, and Key primarily to punish him for doing things. That player was prone to Fsmashing your hydrant, which a free orange for you every time should you have it available.

 

[verbatim]

I might do a play by play at some point, but you're giving Diddy way too much respect, and you're giving him the leisure to do what he wants. JJ was constantly rushing you down, which is expected, but you can challenge Diddy when he comes in. Bair is your best friend.

I wish I had another streamed match but you'll have to take my word for this. I started off as a very campy Pacman but have improved significantly on it as I've gained tournament experience.

I was relatively nervous going in (you can see me put my phone on the table and pick it back up a few times in the "3 2 1 go!") but right out of the gate he ran in, read a roll, hit me, read another roll, threw me up in the air, and forced me offstage. I'm incredibly proud of my ability to consistently recover, even against characters with phenomenal edge-guarding (bar that one air dodge dairspike read), but after those first 5-10 seconds I instinctively fell back on the campy route, which for better or worse did serve to keep me alive for a little bit.

In between games I had a chance to recollect myself, counterpicked Omega Bridge of Eldin to throw him off guard and because if you put a trampoline under the curved pillars on the ledge your recovery hugs the curve and lets you recover and Diddy Kong loses his jump, his jetpack fails, he bumps his head into the ceiling, and then instantly depletes all the remaining uses on the trampoline and dies if he gets caught in there. I feel like I did slightly better but the outcome wasn't that much different.


Anyways going forward my plan is going to focus less on fruit tech and more on matchup training, both against players and against characters. I'm planning to spend a few hours drilling Pacman Mario and Pacman Rosa soon, and I'm challenging PR players to money matches so I can get some more experience with players who are better than me but also will last long enough that I can adapt mid fight.

Out of curiosity how does everyone here feel about labbing versus tournament results? I feel like the general consensus is that being a good Pacman is having insane tricks, and that most people spend all day practicing tricks that mean nothing if you can't use them.

As an example, I can Fruit Cancel, do all of the basic hydrant launches (bair jab, bair ftilt, bair fsmash), stuff people that try and hit me right after I drop my hydrant with bair, techchase with fruit, do key fake outs, and do basic z-drop strings.

I struggle with following up really far away Bell confirms and could maybe work on intentionally zdropping fruits into moving water but honestly anything other than most of those things feels like I'd be better off fighting people than practicing.

Obviously we have to push the metagame, and things like u-turn pellet, crazy Galaxian to side b kill combo's, and such are cool, but at the end of the day whenever I watch Abadango run through pools at super majors with Pacman 90% of the time he's playing a much more fundamental based game and not fishing for super cool setups. In fact he lost game 5 at big house to Anti after messing up a Bell to side b combo then got Luigi Cycloned out of nowhere.


I I feel like at the end of the day both optimizing AND teaching Pacman involves significantly more focus on his basic neutral, aerials, tilts, trampoline and hydrant placement, and outright when to straight out toss each fruit is way more important than ending up on reddit. Obviously once you are truly confident in your neutral and your play style the best thing to do is optimize your punish game, but I feel in Smash 4 in general, and especially for Pacman, lots of players focus primarily on how to do the ultra complicated setups to the exclusion of the character's fundamental gameplay, which is why half of the Pacman guides on this site are only a description of his 4 specials.

 

[BSP]

verbatim as far as labbing vs. tournament results goes, I think Koolaid is showing us that fundamentals can still carry you far even with Pac-Man. He doesn't go for many complex setups and he tends to stick with 3 fruits, but he has such a solid boxing game and reads that he still hangs with the good players. He almost plays Pac-Man like a Mario without a grab or as much followup potential in exchange for a better recovery and a chargeable neutral B. Upon further inspection of the cast, Pac-Man does have the best CQC capabilities of anyone that can charge a projectile.

I tried playing like him a bit last night and noticed some things. Not going for setups constantly makes Pac-Man feel kinda boring to me, but it does help me focus on my opponent much more. I would focus on them to begin with, but when I focused on using my normals like Koolaid does, I realized that I tend to sleep on Pac-Man's moves. He doesn't have a grab to piece them all together, but the guy is capable in CQC and has combo potential. He'd probably be as good as Mario with a normal grab. I also found that when I threw less fruit and focused on hand to hand more, it was easier to land fruit hits, namely key, because my opponent couldn't predict my tosses as well.

I guess both styles have their place. I'll keep experimenting with them.

In other news, Nairo vs myself finally got uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg90DhXwzKk

I had a lead on the second best player in the world for a bit! Then I took a stiletto to the face...real talk though, I didn't do that poorly. However, I could've done much better. Had I been playing similar to how Koolaid plays now, I could've given Nairo a better run for his money. I wasn't using Pac-Man's normals to their full potential in the slightest, and that's something I need to work on next time I run into ZSS. I wasn't thinking about it mid match, but Pierce was right. Why did I throw Nairo back towards the stage game 2?

Missed a free punish game 1...sigh, need to not be flustered. Missing free punishes sucks.

Also bad DI on boost kick ends lives. I know how to handle the move better now though.

 

[Froggy]

BSP since you seem to be focusing primarily on your Pacman now any chance you'll change back your avatar?

 

[verbatim]

In other news, Nairo vs myself finally got uploaded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg90DhXwzKk

Missed a free punish game 1...sigh, need to not be flustered. Missing free punishes sucks.

Also bad DI on boost kick ends lives. I know how to handle the move better now though.

Thanks for replying, if you don't mind I have a few questions about some of the things you did in that fight, specifically using dtilt and uair from relatively grounded positions. For whatever reason I've gained the notion that dtilt is a poor mans ftilt and that uair doesn't have enough of a disjoint/too much endlag to be used like say, Mario's uair, but you repeatidly capitalized off of uair and dtilt didn't seem like it helped or hurt you.


Also, this is really minor but I might have spotted something that you could have done to live other than Boost Kick. Investigating what looked like a weird animation out of the corner of the eye, I slowed down and played back your second death at 2:34 game 1 and saw this.

These two stills are part of Pacman's animation where he's flying and rolling over. This is pretty normal but literally right before you die I see this.

This could possibly just be you leaving hitstun right before you die, but if I may ask did you try to jump right before you died? In Smash 4 inputting with anything other than the control stick while you're in hitstun makes you fly further, I've seen it in the past where someone dies when they would have lived because on a ultra delayed reaction to being hit they try to air dodge out of hitstun. I think it was added to Smash 4 to prevent things like Mr. Game and Watch's Bucket Breaking from Brawl.


If not then technically you probably had a 5 frame window where jumping and then immediately using fair the instant you hit out of histun would modify your hurtbox such that you'd live 3% longer than if you didn't, but that is the most minutiae of minutiae in a situation that you may very well never experience for the rest of Smash 4.

 

[Froggy]

I'm really sorry I haven't had time to offer critique of anything lately. I've been job hunting and my computer is broken so needless to say I'm very stressed out. And while I already have a fair idea of the stuff I've done wrong I'd really appreciate additional pointers.

From Gamers Underground 11 -17
Losers Quarters: Me(Pacman) vs Foh Xorn(Toon Link)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_lAkVQIZVY

Losers Semis: Me(Pacman) vs XCVII(Ryu)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbnPLPZl06M


From Hypest Wii U 12/4
Winners finals: Me(Pacman) vs Mlak 15(Wario)
http://www.twitch.tv/hypeststream/v/28294923?t=02h42m47s

Losers Finals: Me(Pacman) vs Oogamania(Duck Hunt)
http://www.twitch.tv/hypeststream/v/28294923?t=03h54m35s

 

[flashypirate]

I did a Truth or Dair on the smash subreddit and got this: "Win a For Glory match using only Pac Man's grab"

I did it twice but I kind of dash attacked twice on accident ;_;

 

[BSP]

verbatim I didn't try to jump

Me getting wrecked by peach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-1s9gp0_tw

 

[Tornado]

Please disregard the last 30 seconds of this match for reasons you will see xD

Things I know off the bat:
1) The grabs, I'm trying to cut back.
2) Didn't utilize trampoline as well as I could have.
3) I show a lot of impatient play.

I did work on all 3 of these things in a couple of recent events and fared better. But this post is about to match below

 

[Nu~]

I fought a bowser main on anther's ladder.

Got a ledge combo video out of it.

 

[Dezmu]

TEG PacmanPow vs SilverWolf

 

[LanceStern]

I fought a bowser main on anther's ladder.

Got a ledge combo video out of it.

I was in the process of making a video about that ledge trap, but then you took it to ANOTHER level with the beautiful addition of the hydrant. He was TRAPPED. We have to make a topic about that.

I loved the slow hydrant to bair too. That was beautiful!

 

[Neutricity]

We need to abuse our hydrant water...A LOT

ToxoT Amazing showing as usual my friend

Would you mind making a video on using the hydrant to jump extra high?

And if you guys haven't seen this vine then check it out. I played around with it and the odds of you getting your opponent in this situation are low but if you see the opportunity then take it:
https://t.co/kT5W6DiwjX

 

[PEPESPAIN]

My last tournament videos:

 

[Lonpos]

My very first two recorded matches. Both are from local tourneys here in the Netherlands.
I really notice that it gets inside my head that it is a tourneymatch and that I can't focus properly.
Any feedback is welcome as I try to represent PacMan in the Netherlands

 

[Dezmu]

 

[PEPESPAIN]

Why don't you use JC glide toss? I saw that you throw the bell with dash throw.... he has a lot of % so it doesn't care but at low % it is really important.

Look how I throw the bell (And almost every fruit on my hand).

Spoiler: Video

 

[Dezmu]

Why don't you use JC glide toss? I saw that you throw the bell with dash throw.... he has a lot of % so it doesn't care but at low % it is really important.

Look how I throw the bell (And almost every fruit on my hand).

Spoiler: Video

I'm not pacma pow but i'll pass the message along

 

[Nu~]

Couple of matches between me and my training partner, Dinoslashz

 

[CostLow]

Been a bit busy lately but here's an update with a few more videos added. I need to simplify the layout of the library. Any ideas?

I'll pick up where I left off by adding ToxoT's video from this post.

 

[PEPESPAIN]

Been a bit busy lately but here's an update with a few more videos added. I need to simplify the layout of the library. Any ideas?

I'll pick up where I left off by adding ToxoT's video from this post.

Not sure how to do it, but there are a lot of videos that are outdated with the new meta and we should remove them .....like the fair combo etc....

 

[Dezmu]

 

[CostLow]

Not sure how to do it, but there are a lot of videos that are outdated with the new meta and we should remove them .....like the fair combo etc....

If someone can give me a list of outdated videos I'd be happy to remove them. I just don't have time to sort it all out at the moment.

 

[PEPESPAIN]

If someone can give me a list of outdated videos I'd be happy to remove them. I just don't have time to sort it all out at the moment.

I think we should remove:

- Barrage-Man
- Key Recovery From Abadango
- Pac-Man Fair Combo Video

Discuss