Gaming
Gaming
Why practice is so important for new players in Super Smash Bros Melee
Super Smash Bros. Melee has nearly 20 years of history, but you don’t need to fear your local top player. We’ve asked one of Canada’s best, Moky, about playing catch up in such an established scene.
Super Smash Bros. Melee, released in winter of 2001, is a pillar of the gaming community. From its humble party game beginnings, the sequel to Smash 64 has grown into one of the most exciting competitive titles to watch. As it approaches its 20th birthday, the game still pulls thousands of competitors and viewers thanks, in no small part, to the dedicated grassroots community that helped shape it.
Long-time competitors have helped guide the meta, and learned many difficult techniques to become masters of the game. Sure, there are people who have been playing since the start, but the game still manages to attract new players. One of those newer faces is Curtis ‘Moky’ Pratt, who hails from the Durham region of the Greater Toronto Area.
I just knew I wanted to beat people.
“When I found out about Smash, I watched the melee documentary by Samox. I didn't really want to watch it at first. My brother told me to watch it and I was like, ‘Dude, why would I want to watch this? It sounds so lame,’ but I ended up watching it and, as soon as i’d finished it, we whipped out the GameCube, and I started grinding,” says Moky, who was around 14 years old when he saw the doc.
We asked him how he managed to catch up and surpass players who had more experience than him. If you’re wondering if it's worth hopping into the game now, his story might have some useful tips for you.
1. Start.. and stick with it
Moky told us he was about 15 years old when he went to his first local tournament, where he placed third. He got second at his next tournament and finally, by his third time at locals, he had won. That’s pretty quick for someone just breaking into a competitive community where trying to escape 0-2 hell is almost like a rite of passage.
He didn’t just get lucky. Moky started out by grinding hard for the first few months after his introduction to competitive Melee. The game is extremely fast and full of several small interactions that lead to situations you can’t solve without practice. Despite starting in 2014, 13 years after the game first released in North America, he did his due diligence by recognizing how he learned best and practicing in a way to complement that.
“Since I was so young, I wasn't able to go to many tournaments because a lot of them were in Toronto and it was kind of a pain for me to get there from Durham as a kid. I was doing a lot of solo practice,” explained Moky who started off playing Captain Falcon, but ended up switching to Fox so that he could “hit more buttons”.
For Moky, that practice ended up paying off. The casual viewer of a Melee tournament will recognize that these top players are very good but, without actually trying advanced techniques themselves, may not realize how much work players like Moky had to put in to be able to play like they do.
“It takes so long to do stuff. The thing that blows my mind [about Melee] is how everyone who's a top player always forgets how hard the game actually is. It takes time to be able to learn a technique that you have to do like 300 times in a match. It could take you months just to learn how to do it at the start but now it’s like, yeah we're doing it every couple seconds because we have to or we're just gonna get dusted,” says Moky.
“For the first couple of years, I'd make sure I least practiced at least an hour a day but probably did like two hours a day. That's not including playing. It was just solo stuff. It was a super grind.”
These days, Moky prefers to practice his skills in live matches and not so much through regimented training mode drills. However, that’s only because he put so much effort into mastering things like movement, L-Cancelling, and a wide range of other Melee minutia. With an untold amount of hours poured into the basics, he’s able to focus on being creative (a quality which he thinks is most important for an upcoming Melee player) and use practice time more effectively to continue refining his gameplan.
2. There’s opportunity for everyone
Over the years, Melee has been thoroughly explored and most of its secrets have been revealed. The general average skill level for melee players has gone up in recent years thanks to an abundance of assets. Years worth of archived tournament footage, volumes of system/character information, and third party tools make the barrier to entry lower for new players.
“People are just so good now, it's insane. I think they're good at situations that are so small. Like, it's hard to be really good in those situations, because they're very miniscule things. Now, you can lab out all those tiny, little aspects and be good at all of them,” says Moky about how the playing field of competitive Melee has shifted to allow more people into the upper echelons.
In 2019 alone, 5 years into his playing career, Moky was able to pull off notable wins against longtime Melee mainstays like Plup, SFAT, Westballz and Leffen across various tournaments. Some of these players had almost a decade of experience playing Melee at a high level, but a proper work ethic combined with a wealth of available information gave Moky the resources necessary to get top 8 in stacked brackets like GOML 2019 (he placed 7th) and Shine 2019 (he placed 5th).
“The base skill is really high because now people can netplay too. Before, in order to play somebody good, you'd have to travel a lot like if there wasn't anyone within an hour of you. But now it's like, ‘Okay, I'm just gonna play this top player from Maryland or Virginia’. With all the other tools, I’ll go to a major and look at the bracket to see, before I even get to top 64, I have to play [so many talented players]. It’s rough. Everyone's so good.”
The higher overall skill level is a big reason why Moky is such an advocate for self awareness. You need to play a lot and be honest about the mistakes that you’re making, but also not get too caught up in the moment. One thing he struggles with is getting beaten by a decision a player keeps making, and then getting tunnel vision and focusing on beating that one option instead of thinking about what comes next once he solves that piece of the puzzle.
He says that a lot of the thinking that goes into Melee success comes from outside of the game. With all the data out there, it’s easier than ever to re-watch old matches, see what you’re losing to, and then look up the information you need to beat it successfully next time. Just trying to implement these new strategies on the fly isn’t always the best look, though.
“If you're not actually labbing, and you're just trying to play the game in matches, you're not going to actually get the time you need to do it consistently. You need to be sitting down and actually spending time on these specific techniques to learn them,” says Moky.
3. Think outside of the game
One of the things helping players like Moky, has been the improvement of emulation technology and the introduction of mod packs. Lab time isn’t just watching a YouTube breakdown and using Melee's stock training mode tools anymore. Mod packs like Training Mode by UnclePunch and 20XX streamline the Melee experience to get you straight to tournament settings and also vastly improve training mode.
With UnclePunch’s training mode, you can do things like set the CPU to random DI so you can practice combos in real match-like situations, use save states that have the CPU perform certain actions, and run drills to help you work on your core skills more efficiently.
“I like doing that a lot. Just practicing like, ‘okay, in that situation, I might be able to win if I do this tech that I just thought of,’ and then trying that out over and over again. I think that's a very useful thing to do. It's very cool to be able to just test out anything,” says Moky. He doesn’t rely on lab tools as much as he did in the early stages of his playing career, but he still has his favourites.
“The one I like a lot is the breaking egg challenge. Eggs fall from the sky and it gives you a minute where you try to break as many eggs as you can, moving around the stage as fast as possible.”
One of the biggest changes to Melee came in 2020 when Rollback netcode was introduced to the Dolphin Emulator, one of the most popular ways to play Melee. Slippi is a Melee mod which, along with Rollback netcode, also gives players access to integrated matchmaking. Before, to be able to play online, Melee players would have to use a separate program to connect them to others.
As far as netplay goes, using Rollback netcode is about as close as you’ll get to the offline competitive experience, and is a vast improvement to the delay-based netcode found in many modern games. The fact it was added so recently, unofficially, is a testament to the hard work of a dedicated community that wishes to see their favourite game thrive. Nearly 20 years after release, the barriers to entry are still being knocked down, allowing new players to enter and learn the game.
“Another thing with Melee: because it's been around for so long and is such a fast, technical game, it's very daunting for a new player to get into it and just start from the bottom up. They just look at these people playing for like a decade, and say, ‘well, I'm never going to catch up.’ But with all these new tools and stuff that people who have been playing for a decade didn’t have before, you still have to put in work, but it makes it less long. You don't have to play for a decade to be good anymore,” says Moky.
