smash melee footsies rant

Evilagram: https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/12046822_1631050970467669_6139700332503480640_n.jpg?oh=47d9bca9cbdacfb255b6c4dba71c928e&oe=56A9FA1B
Nintendo Bootlicker is now Online.
Nintendo Bootlicker: I am extremely drunk atm
Evilagram: cool
Nintendo Bootlicker: this is actually re4ally hard to type
Evilagram: cool
Nintendo Bootlicker: ha ha that comic is great
Evilagram: yup
Nintendo Bootlicker: who made that shit
Evilagram: "Kill me now"
Evilagram: melee hell probably
Evilagram: it was posted there
Nintendo Bootlicker: so
Nintendo Bootlicker: ugh
Nintendo Bootlicker: what exactly is bad about smash 5
Nintendo Bootlicker: 4
Nintendo Bootlicker: \im not noticing it
Nintendo Bootlicker: im actually enjoy
Nintendo Bootlicker: the game
Nintendo Bootlicker: so what happened? whay is it bad
Nintendo Bootlicker: balance ? not balance
Evilagram: it's basically all the things that are bad about brawl
Nintendo Bootlicker: whats wrong with brawl
Evilagram: it's slow, it's campy, everyone survives to 200%
Nintendo Bootlicker: ?
Evilagram: it's a game about slowly whittling your opponent down
Nintendo Bootlicker: campy
Nintendo Bootlicker: isnt that just a fluff thing
Nintendo Bootlicker: like a falvor thing
Nintendo Bootlicker: like its cheesy?
Evilagram: no, it's describing how people play the game
Evilagram: I don't mean camp as in deliberately bad taste
Evilagram: I mean camp as in people metaphorically camp on opposite sides of the stage
Evilagram: instead of ever approaching
Evilagram: because approaching is hella risky
Evilagram: there's so much end lag on aerials that they're really risky to do, so the game gets dominated by a lot of ground play and projectile spam
Evilagram: however because you can't dash dance, the footsie game is mutilated
Nintendo Bootlicker: dash dance\
Nintendo Bootlicker: you mean wavedashing, right
Evilagram: no
Evilagram: I don't
Nintendo Bootlicker: man
Nintendo Bootlicker: what is wavedashing
Evilagram: dash dancing is more important than wavedashing
Nintendo Bootlicker: like what does it do, and how does it make the game better
Evilagram: wavedashing is airdodging diagonally into the ground
Evilagram: its importance to the game is vastly overstated
Evilagram: scrubs focus on it because it's the only advanced technique they know
Nintendo Bootlicker: fuck
Evilagram: so they think competitive players are just mad over that
Evilagram: basically, there's a complex state machine at work in normal movement in melee
Evilagram: when you dash, meaning smash the control stick forward to run
Evilagram: there is an initial dash state
Evilagram: this is typically 15 frames, but it varies from character to character
Evilagram: so some characters can dash further in this initial state
Evilagram: and others not as far
Evilagram: once you leave this initial dash state, you enter your full running animation
Evilagram: in the running animation, you can run cancel by crouching, and attempting to turn around will lead to you doing that long slow turnaround animation
Evilagram: if you stay within the initial dash range, you can turn around instantly
Evilagram: in smash 4, and Brawl, they made the initial dash range extremely small
Evilagram: in melee, because it's so big, you can use it to weave into and out of people's attack ranges
Evilagram: to bait out attacks, and move around them so as to punish them
Evilagram: this allowed smash bros melee to have a high speed footsie game, much faster than any other fighting game
Nintendo Bootlicker: oh
Nintendo Bootlicker: so
Nintendo Bootlicker: okay thats not
Nintendo Bootlicker: h
Nintendo Bootlicker: I see
Evilagram: however because it's not allowed in smash 4 and brawl
Evilagram: those games require the players to move more slowly
Evilagram: or commit harder to running
Evilagram: rather than being able to weave in and out
Evilagram: the pace is much more slow and deliberate you could say
Evilagram: there's more walking
Evilagram: or running into shield, then rolling
Evilagram: bonus, smash 4 decided to make the roll animations faster and more invincible
Evilagram: so those tend to dominate play as well
Evilagram: and wavedashing happened to serve kind of a linker role for a lot of things in melee, like if you were in shield the fastest way to get out of it was to wavedash actually
Evilagram: because you can jump to get out of shield
Evilagram: then wavedash to stay on the ground
Evilagram: Wavedashing is essentially forcing yourself to land, transferring the airdodge momentum into the ground
Evilagram: there's 10 frames of landing lag at the beginning of it + the frames you spent jumping
Evilagram: however after those you can move in a neutral state
Evilagram: it's the only way to move backwards while facing forward
Evilagram: also there's wavelanding, which allows you to jump up through platforms, then dash across them, instead of having to wait to land on the platforms
Evilagram: and edgedashing, which helps characters get back on stage from the ledge
Evilagram: wavedashing is really situational in neutral
Evilagram: it's slower than running
Evilagram: but there's less commitment
Evilagram: because you can do any action out of it
Evilagram: rather, the commitment is up front
Evilagram: Beyond that, in Melee there's L canceling, which halves the landing lag of the move you use it on
Evilagram: L canceling isn't good or bad in of itself
Evilagram: however it means that moves have a landing lag time that's really low
Evilagram: in smash 4, not only is there no L cancel to reduce landing lag, but landing lag times are higher than ever before
Evilagram: what they should have done was make the L canceled landing lag times the default, but instead they made air attacks more unsafe than ever before
Evilagram: unless they fully recover in the air of course
Evilagram: so playing smash 4 is like betraying all my instincts as a melee player
Evilagram: rather than dance around my opponent with pokes and baits and grabs, I need to very carefully walk up to them and choose the right move that beats theirs
Evilagram: and the moves on each of the characters has less potential too
Evilagram: I play as marth, and there's a billion things I can do in melee that don't work in smash 4
Evilagram: http://pastebin.com/f7gFLpy0
Evilagram: here's a copy of my notes
Nintendo Bootlicker: there is a lot more to this game than i realized.
Evilagram: yeah
Evilagram: that's a common reaction
Evilagram: beyond that
Evilagram: Brawl had a number of advanced techniques like Dash Attack Cancel Up Smash (DACUS)
Evilagram: or glide tossing
Evilagram: and other stuff
Evilagram: and smash 4 has had some glitches
Evilagram: but they've all been successively patched out
Evilagram: a friend of mine in australia is trying to get into sm4sh because he's a fighting game savant, and that's where the money is, and he's lamented to me how he keeps trying to find a character that's good and doesn't win by slowly wittling down the opponent, that actually kills early
Evilagram: but there are none
Evilagram: characters like Fox, in smash 4, are a total joke compared to melee for a number of reasons
Evilagram: primarily his shine
Evilagram: in melee, he could jump out of his down B, his reflector
Evilagram: this gave him a lot of options from it
Evilagram: considering it's a move which comes out on frame 1, makes him invincible for that frame, has fixed perfectly horizontal knockback
Evilagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXrudMRVc-U
Evilagram: he can jump out of it, and wavedash, then hit them with it again
Evilagram: which is called a waveshine
Evilagram: this allows him to send people across the stage
Evilagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6QSjotZ2Lk
Evilagram: he can spike people with it offstage
Evilagram: he can jump into down air as a pressure setup
Evilagram: or even multishine (which is frameperfect)
Evilagram: to shield pressure
Nintendo Bootlicker: hold on
Nintendo Bootlicker: why is there money in smash 4?
Evilagram: because it's new
Nintendo Bootlicker: i thought Melee was more popular
Nintendo Bootlicker: ?
Evilagram: it sort of is
Evilagram: depends on the region
Evilagram: on average smash 4 events are bigger
Evilagram: and more people are willing to financially support it
Evilagram: due to its legal status
Evilagram: like, people who don't see the difference between melee and smash 4, don't understand the depth of melee
Evilagram: because, and I say this as an expert, melee is one of the most complex fighting games ever made
Nintendo Bootlicker: fuck
Nintendo Bootlicker: my roomie owns melee
Nintendo Bootlicker: how to start gitting gud at melee? i just mash button
Evilagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vckV2MJgBzo
Evilagram: there's this guide
Evilagram: it's outdated though
Evilagram: missing some info
Evilagram: like SDI
Evilagram: which is critical for ledge teching
Evilagram: and it gets DI wrong
Evilagram: like, you know directional influence, hold towards the stage to go towards the stage
Evilagram: do you know how it actually works?
Nintendo Bootlicker: ...no?
Evilagram: basically, every hitbox is marked with an angle of knockback
Evilagram: like up, up and away, sideways, etc
Evilagram: the majority of them are marked with * which is like Burst, also known as the Sakurai Angle, because of a coincidence
Evilagram: these hitboxes hit people lower at lower percentage and higher at higher percentage
Evilagram: roughly 45 degrees
Evilagram: when you get hit, the direction you're holding on your controller influences the angle of knockback
Evilagram: up to 18 degrees
Evilagram: this is relative to how perpendicular the angle on your controller is to the angle of knockback
Evilagram: so holding it parallel to the direction you're knocked back has no influence
Evilagram: if you are hit straight up, holding down does nothing
Evilagram: you want to hold left or right
Evilagram: if you are high out and away, you want to DI up and in
Evilagram: or down and away
Evilagram: not down and in, not up and away
Evilagram: also in melee, you inherit your speed from running into jumping
Evilagram: unlike brawl or smash 4
Evilagram: I have no idea why they took that out
Evilagram: for shorthops, they also don't explain that in this video
Evilagram: basically there is a pre-jump animation
Evilagram: called a jumpsquat
Evilagram: where the character gets ready to jump
Evilagram: it's really long on bowser and ganondorf
Evilagram: which is part of why they feel heavier
Evilagram: to shorthop successfully, you should release the jump button before this animation ends
Evilagram: there is a glitch in meele that makes it so the last frame of this doesn't count
Evilagram: *melee
Evilagram: so for fox, who has 3 prejump frames, you need to release it during the first 2
Evilagram: for marth who has 4 (the normal amount), you need to press and release in 3 frames
Evilagram: I advise you try out the top 7 characters
Evilagram: and find one of those you like
Evilagram: Sheik is probably the easiest of these to play
Evilagram: Fox is probably the hardest
Evilagram: Fox is also the best
Evilagram: by a wide margin
Evilagram: the primary things to get down initially if you ask me are SHFFL and dash dancing effectively
Evilagram: SHFFL is in this video, Short Hop, (attack), Fast Fall, L cancel
Evilagram: it's the fastest way to do aerial attacks
Evilagram: which are really important in smash
Evilagram: L canceling is especially important
Evilagram: you gotta press L or R 7 frames before you land, every single time you attack
Evilagram: unless it's an autocancel, which you only really have to worry about if you're marth
Nintendo Bootlicker: im kind of annoyed
Nintendo Bootlicker: pikmin is my favorite nintendo series
Nintendo Bootlicker: mostly because its so unique in the lineup
Nintendo Bootlicker: and its only in brawl
Nintendo Bootlicker: is P M any good yt
Evilagram: yes
Evilagram: it's really good
Evilagram: olimar is considered viable as of this patch
Evilagram: because they fixed his up B
Evilagram: by replacing it with a new one
Evilagram: he's still not considered that great, but he's unexplored
Evilagram: I've faced a few olimar mains who have given me trouble in P:M
Evilagram: Dash dancing, dash dancing works a lot like footsies in Street Fighter
Evilagram: the key thing is to keep moving back and forth within that range
Evilagram: find out how far you can go before you need to turn around
Evilagram: and try to get good at going exactly that distance
Evilagram: then going shorter and longer distances within the range
Evilagram: a normal exercise is dash dancing across final destination, going the whole length without doing a long turnaround
Evilagram: to do that, you need to dash far, then short, then far, then short
Nintendo Bootlicker: hm
Evilagram: doing that will improve your control with it
Nintendo Bootlicker: So how do you play olimar
Evilagram: I don't
Nintendo Bootlicker: I havent figured him out
Evilagram: I don't really remember the strategies of the people who do
Evilagram: he's an uncommon pick
Evilagram: his smash attacks are really good
Evilagram: as are his aerials
Evilagram: his pikmin toss is alright as a ranged attack
Evilagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHK34W1pC0M
Evilagram: this is relatively recent
Evilagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcZt2SKcgzk
Evilagram: unfortunately both are versus the same character
Evilagram: shokio is probably the guy to watch
Evilagram: just guessing
Evilagram: I mean, for olimar
Evilagram: so one way to start is to look up more shokio olimar footage
Evilagram: olimar's new up B is a rocket blast that can be aimed
Evilagram: his tether was too inconsistent to be fixed
Evilagram: http://smashboards.com/threads/olimar-advanced-tech-video.415602/
Evilagram: this has some of olimar's advanced tech
Evilagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Iv4XyXPiZY
Evilagram: the most basic thing with dash dancing is you want to be able to whiff punish with it, meaning, move out of your current position, so the opponent's attack misses, then back into that position, grabbing them usually
Evilagram: so you weave out of the way, then back at them to hit them
Evilagram: or grab them
Evilagram: the footsies game in smash essentially works like rock paper scissors
Evilagram: you have pokes, that you do when your opponent moves up to prevent them from moving up
Evilagram: then you have whiff punishes, which is making the pokes whiff, miss you, so you can move in to attack them
Evilagram: then you have going deep
Evilagram: if they want to get out of the way of your attacks, then you can just move into their space, and hit them
Evilagram: ideally at the far edge of their dash dance range
Evilagram: what I like to do to beginners who seem to just want to dash dance aimlessly, is just walk up to them and hit them with an attack that covers their entire dash dance range
Evilagram: beyond that you have counter pokes, which attempt to hit a person that is poking in an undefended area

http://smashboards.com/threads/olimar-general-discussion.357382/page-12#post-19573452


Neutral is really built around side B. Getting your colors together work out your gameplan, keeping pikmin alive so that they have the opportunity to flower, and adding passive DoT to your opponent is what the cap' is all about. Getting pikmin on an opponent, so that they have to get the pikmin off, and following up accordingly.

Approach methods are your Ivysuar like Nair, spaced Fairs/RAR Bairs, and your side B.
Each one has different applications, but those are the three safest tools to approach and mitigate the game with.

Olimar's greatest attribute however are his grabs. Due to the frames and the distance, of course depending on the pikmin. Grab has astounding option coverage (rolls on stage, tech rolls, landings) and combo's into his moveset absolutely "cray".
With a combination of purples which reset a character, and his grab combo's. You can reliably combo your opponent to ~50-100% as soon as their stock starts.

Experiment with your U-Air (a majority of the cast has a REAL problem getting down vs Olimar. His yellow and white upairs, combo into a stringed up-air of your color preference. Luigi in particular gets hit hard by it) and attempt to keep opponents above you.