Cobrevolution
Smash Master
In the oldest installment of the Super Smash Bros. series, there has been a steady decline in high level hype, which has caused everyone but those select dedicated few to become less interested in the game and its community. There's a simple solution to this problem...
Where Has the Hype Gone?
Sitting front row at Apex 2014, watching Isai and Moyashi compete in the finals for Smash 64, my eyes drooping from exhaustion, I noticed some things.
The game audio was coming from the speaker aimed in the opposite direction of the crowd, so we had only half a fuzzy ear full of what was going on. The commentators couldn’t be heard due to their distance from the seats. There were no gasps from high-reward risks and there were no sighs of relief from a missed punish. All I heard were bated breaths and light chatter, as if the finals of the largest North American Smash 64 tournament were not happening, as if two of the best players from America and Japan weren’t competing.
Afterward, I noticed that Moyashi’s controller was signed across the top, above the start button, by Isai.
Isai and Moyashi shaking hands at Apex 2014
Friend and Foe: Is it Wise to be Both?
This tells me something – that even at the highest level amongst our best players, the competition takes the backseat, and being friends comes first.
The overall feeling of familial acceptance the community extends to its players is not necessarily a bad thing. It drastically lessens the potential for drama to unfold. Players generally seek nothing more than to spend time with people they only get to see once a year, and thus, most hostility or bad blood is cast aside in favor of playing Smash, often times crammed together in a hotel room or shoved into a spare part of a venue with little room to move around.
Smash 64 doesn’t have national events beside Apex and Zenith. There are few players whose goal lies in proving they’re the best in their states. There aren’t monthly invitationals that involve regional carpools traveling from the East coast to the Midwest to face off in bracket and in a crew battle to settle beef. Hell, there are barely even any more crews around.
As a result, there are fewer groups of people training together with the intent to improve and beat everyone else.
Regardless, those who do play together a lot have fallen into the situation of being both a friend and a foe: someone with whom practices can take place, but also someone you're quite likely to fight in bracket. A common problem of sandbagging or even guilt from winning arises from this dual role, and the result is a less competitive game...set...player base...and eventually, community.
Chanting and Crowd Support
When sHEERmADNESS faced off against Ruoka Dancho for the second time at Apex 2014, there was a chant in the crowd of ‘USA! USA,’ to which Ruoka smiled and raised his own fist, yelling back, ‘Japan! Japan!’ sHEER looked on, impassive.
Everyone laughed.
In our most friendly form, nobody meant harm to Ruoka and certainly nobody meant disrespect to the Japanese visitors. The pride that should come with rooting for the hometown competitor was strangely absent, replaced instead with the love of Smash brethren. The crowd chanted something similar during Isai and Kikoushi’s grand finals set at Apex 2013, but once again, it had a very foreign feeling. I fear that we have crafted this idea that we should not be explicitly rooting against anyone, that in doing so it lessens the love, so to speak.
However, there is a large difference between chanting against an opponent purely because he hails from another region, and supporting a hometown hero - or in the following case, a homegame hero.
When Fireblaster made a tournament appearance during the summer's Gluttony edition of Smashacre, we watched as he faced off against Mew2King in Loser's Finals; a Mew2King who spent most of the day running through some of the stronger players in the 64 community, seemingly without effort.
At that point, it was no longer about rooting against Kirby or a frustrating playstyle; it wasn't about wanting Mew2King to lose to force the tournament to end sooner. There was a palpable schism in the room, and the consensus among one side was to blindly support a fellow 64 player who had been competing for over a decade, and not a (primarily) Melee player who doesn't even own an N64 controller.
After the crowd begin chanting Fireblaster's name, he appeared to snap out of a trance and start to over-analyze and over-think the game. He went on to lose the set, taking third behind Mew2King, who lost to Sensei. Since then, the two have met three more times in bracket, with Mew2King emerging victorious each time.
Needless to say, the audience has since stopped cheering for Fireblaster at events, having become cognizant of the adverse effect it had on him. Still, the effort was admirable - in a room with a supposed hero and villain, it was clear who the majority favored. An intense, invested crowd will yield more scenarios like this, the results of which can only be positive.
Reaching the Apex
Smash 64 is fifteen years old. Generally speaking, most competitors are keenly aware of the limits that have been reached, and stick to abiding by these boundaries whenever possible. Combos are memorized by percent, stage position, and character relativity; character matchups are dissected and abbreviated to simple strategies; and techniques and skills are honed to being unconscious muscle memory.
The game has been around so long that few things are surprising anymore. Most hits are expected, and a lot of hype stems from the unexpected, from the hard reads and the high risks. However, the surest, safest paths to victory lie in bread-and-butter combos, and most players have adopted that mindset of simplicity yielding wins, and stuck to it. That is, they have reached a comfort zone they can fall back on, one that involves playing the game as a learned sequence instead of a freestyle.
Complacency is the murderer of competition. From it comes laziness and autopilot, and 64 has suffered through its fair share of all three.
Which is why it has become necessary to stop considering pure gameplay as the primary deciding factor of hype, and instead focus on the players themselves. Pit overly aggressive players against annoyingly defensive players and watch the differences unfold. Put a guy with strong fundamentals and patience against someone who performs only for the crowd and let the games begin.
Or watch a player like tacos (who, though generally favored to place highly, was not assumed likely to make top-8) make a historic trek through Loser's bracket at Apex 2014, finishing in fifth place overall after a third-round loss in Winner's to Isai, and stand in awe of the achievement.
Then again, Isai still pulls off new things each week...
The Debris
It is not difficult to see that the community at large has taken a less actively competitive approach to the game, whether it's by avoiding rivalries or becoming complacent with itself and its performance. The primary audience of Smash 64 consists of its players, and if the players shy away from a fundamental component of competition (conflict), there will be a loss of interest.
The only thing that will remain will be a plateau upon which the community sits, content with ignoring the peaks of improvement and expansion visible on the horizon.
In a game nearly as old as most of its players, it simply doesn't have the natural means of staying relevant and competitive on its own through resale, upgrades, easy acquisition of necessary parts or stable, flawless online play. Only the community's interest, care, hype and ambition can keep Smash 64 afloat.
Cobrevolution can often be found in strange places, if you take the time to look closely. If you cannot find him, you can try reaching him via his twitter, @
Cobrevolution
.
Where Has the Hype Gone?
Sitting front row at Apex 2014, watching Isai and Moyashi compete in the finals for Smash 64, my eyes drooping from exhaustion, I noticed some things.
The game audio was coming from the speaker aimed in the opposite direction of the crowd, so we had only half a fuzzy ear full of what was going on. The commentators couldn’t be heard due to their distance from the seats. There were no gasps from high-reward risks and there were no sighs of relief from a missed punish. All I heard were bated breaths and light chatter, as if the finals of the largest North American Smash 64 tournament were not happening, as if two of the best players from America and Japan weren’t competing.
Afterward, I noticed that Moyashi’s controller was signed across the top, above the start button, by Isai.
Isai and Moyashi shaking hands at Apex 2014
Friend and Foe: Is it Wise to be Both?
This tells me something – that even at the highest level amongst our best players, the competition takes the backseat, and being friends comes first.
The overall feeling of familial acceptance the community extends to its players is not necessarily a bad thing. It drastically lessens the potential for drama to unfold. Players generally seek nothing more than to spend time with people they only get to see once a year, and thus, most hostility or bad blood is cast aside in favor of playing Smash, often times crammed together in a hotel room or shoved into a spare part of a venue with little room to move around.
Smash 64 doesn’t have national events beside Apex and Zenith. There are few players whose goal lies in proving they’re the best in their states. There aren’t monthly invitationals that involve regional carpools traveling from the East coast to the Midwest to face off in bracket and in a crew battle to settle beef. Hell, there are barely even any more crews around.
As a result, there are fewer groups of people training together with the intent to improve and beat everyone else.
Regardless, those who do play together a lot have fallen into the situation of being both a friend and a foe: someone with whom practices can take place, but also someone you're quite likely to fight in bracket. A common problem of sandbagging or even guilt from winning arises from this dual role, and the result is a less competitive game...set...player base...and eventually, community.
Chanting and Crowd Support
When sHEERmADNESS faced off against Ruoka Dancho for the second time at Apex 2014, there was a chant in the crowd of ‘USA! USA,’ to which Ruoka smiled and raised his own fist, yelling back, ‘Japan! Japan!’ sHEER looked on, impassive.
Everyone laughed.
In our most friendly form, nobody meant harm to Ruoka and certainly nobody meant disrespect to the Japanese visitors. The pride that should come with rooting for the hometown competitor was strangely absent, replaced instead with the love of Smash brethren. The crowd chanted something similar during Isai and Kikoushi’s grand finals set at Apex 2013, but once again, it had a very foreign feeling. I fear that we have crafted this idea that we should not be explicitly rooting against anyone, that in doing so it lessens the love, so to speak.
However, there is a large difference between chanting against an opponent purely because he hails from another region, and supporting a hometown hero - or in the following case, a homegame hero.
When Fireblaster made a tournament appearance during the summer's Gluttony edition of Smashacre, we watched as he faced off against Mew2King in Loser's Finals; a Mew2King who spent most of the day running through some of the stronger players in the 64 community, seemingly without effort.
At that point, it was no longer about rooting against Kirby or a frustrating playstyle; it wasn't about wanting Mew2King to lose to force the tournament to end sooner. There was a palpable schism in the room, and the consensus among one side was to blindly support a fellow 64 player who had been competing for over a decade, and not a (primarily) Melee player who doesn't even own an N64 controller.
After the crowd begin chanting Fireblaster's name, he appeared to snap out of a trance and start to over-analyze and over-think the game. He went on to lose the set, taking third behind Mew2King, who lost to Sensei. Since then, the two have met three more times in bracket, with Mew2King emerging victorious each time.
Needless to say, the audience has since stopped cheering for Fireblaster at events, having become cognizant of the adverse effect it had on him. Still, the effort was admirable - in a room with a supposed hero and villain, it was clear who the majority favored. An intense, invested crowd will yield more scenarios like this, the results of which can only be positive.
Reaching the Apex
Smash 64 is fifteen years old. Generally speaking, most competitors are keenly aware of the limits that have been reached, and stick to abiding by these boundaries whenever possible. Combos are memorized by percent, stage position, and character relativity; character matchups are dissected and abbreviated to simple strategies; and techniques and skills are honed to being unconscious muscle memory.
The game has been around so long that few things are surprising anymore. Most hits are expected, and a lot of hype stems from the unexpected, from the hard reads and the high risks. However, the surest, safest paths to victory lie in bread-and-butter combos, and most players have adopted that mindset of simplicity yielding wins, and stuck to it. That is, they have reached a comfort zone they can fall back on, one that involves playing the game as a learned sequence instead of a freestyle.
Complacency is the murderer of competition. From it comes laziness and autopilot, and 64 has suffered through its fair share of all three.
Which is why it has become necessary to stop considering pure gameplay as the primary deciding factor of hype, and instead focus on the players themselves. Pit overly aggressive players against annoyingly defensive players and watch the differences unfold. Put a guy with strong fundamentals and patience against someone who performs only for the crowd and let the games begin.
Or watch a player like tacos (who, though generally favored to place highly, was not assumed likely to make top-8) make a historic trek through Loser's bracket at Apex 2014, finishing in fifth place overall after a third-round loss in Winner's to Isai, and stand in awe of the achievement.
Then again, Isai still pulls off new things each week...
It is not difficult to see that the community at large has taken a less actively competitive approach to the game, whether it's by avoiding rivalries or becoming complacent with itself and its performance. The primary audience of Smash 64 consists of its players, and if the players shy away from a fundamental component of competition (conflict), there will be a loss of interest.
The only thing that will remain will be a plateau upon which the community sits, content with ignoring the peaks of improvement and expansion visible on the horizon.
In a game nearly as old as most of its players, it simply doesn't have the natural means of staying relevant and competitive on its own through resale, upgrades, easy acquisition of necessary parts or stable, flawless online play. Only the community's interest, care, hype and ambition can keep Smash 64 afloat.
Cobrevolution can often be found in strange places, if you take the time to look closely. If you cannot find him, you can try reaching him via his twitter, @
Cobrevolution
.
flowing through the tournaments is to call 1-800-nojohns
