Melee Mechanics script

Hello, my name is Chris Wagar. I write about video games on my blog at Critpoints.net, most of the posts coming from my ask.fm, a site where people have asked me 4800 questions so far, I enjoy playing in Fighting Game tournaments, and my favorite is Super Smash Brothers Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube, released in 2001. Super Smash Brothers Melee was the best selling game on the gamecube, moving 8 million copies, and the Smash Bros series is one of the most popular fighting game series around, being a popular pick for parties everywhere. It's likely that most of the people in this room have played a Smash game at one point or another.

Despite its simple appearance, Melee is an astonishingly deep game, making it great for people who enjoy learning complex systems in an approachable and actionable way.

A large component of Melee's depth comes from its movement system. There are many forms of movement, each with unique tradeoffs, allowing players to carefully jockey for position at a rapid pace throughout a match. You can dash back and forth in the initial dash state, at the cost of being incapable of performing normal ground attacks, only dash attacks and grabs. You can dash further to enter the run state, allowing you to crouch to regain your ground options, or you can wavedash, spending 10 frames, a frame being the smallest unit of time in the game, where you cannot act in exchange for being able to move almost as fast as a dash, and act in a neutral standing state. Alternatively you can walk, remaining uncommitted with access to all your options, but at the cost of going slower than the alternatives.

By utilizing these movement options, you can attack opponents in 3 general ways, with an early attack, called a poke, a late attack, which I call a deep poke, or a whiff punish. These create a loop, much like rock paper scissors, that centers on the limitations of human reaction time. If something occurs within less than about a fourth of a second, you cannot react. So you can do an early pre-emptive attack during this time, halting people from moving into your space, you can spend that time evading the early attack, to catch it during its recovery, or you can spend most of the time moving into the opponent's space so they have nowhere to evade to. Different characters have different proficiencies and methods of performing each of these, as well as skewed risk and reward relationships depending on which move they choose to try to strike their opponent, some being safer, or more likely to hit, in exchange for being more or less rewarding on hit, potentially leading to a combo, a series of different attacks that follow the direction the opponent is hit to deal more damage and/or get a positional advantage.

Combos are particularly interesting in smash bros because of the Directional influence mechanic, which allows you to alter the trajectory you are sent flying after being hit by holding perpendicular to the move's innate knockback angle. This means that there victim of the combo needs to quickly react to being hit and prioritizing escaping or surviving the next hit, which allows the attacker to confuse the defender by going for a move they don't expect, potentially sending them to their deaths if they're trying to escape versus a high knockback finisher, or extending the combo if they're trying to survive versus a low knockback extender.

These among other features make Melee a fun and mentally engaging game to play on offense and defense, demanding rapidfire decision-making and prediction of your opponent's actions. Melee is a game for people who enjoy paying attention to other people to learn and exploit their habits as well as demonstrating both system mastery and dexterity at a rapid pace. Fighting games don't have randomness or team mates to blame your mistakes on, so it comes down purely to your own decisions and skill at the game, making them a great way to improve at competitive mentality and mental composure as you push yourself to improve without being too harsh on yourself for your mistakes.

If you enjoyed this, check out my blog at Critpoints.net. I also have a twitter @aGrimVale, and I run a facebook group Shitpost Fighter V, with 300 members and growing, and the Facebook page More than Mashing with over 11,000 likes.