This is an article about growth in the competitive gaming scene for Super Smash Brothers Brawl.
Last night I brought my friend Brett to his first competitive Smash environment at MetalMusicMan's weekly Smash-fest. After I left, Metal sent me a text about my friend Brett being a natural at the game and my first feelings were of jealously. Brett had just started playing competitively that night whereas I have been playing for months. I mean no one called me a natural the first night and when it comes down to it before playing with the Smash crew, Brett and I went fairly even, with me coming out slightly winning somewhere between 50-65% of the matches between us (maybe even more). So I tried to think of what the differences were between us and it was completely obvious what it was.
A good move at the wrong time is a BAD move
Before my first night I had already lurked the Smashboards for months trying to do the techs and tricks I saw the pros do, trying to Wall-of-Pain with Mario's back-air or an infantile attempt at banana dribbling with Diddy. Now that I am looking back I have been trying to recreate scenarios the pros are in, I'm not playing but when I see a situation that even closely resembles something I have watched in a vid my brain thinks "I know what to do...", but it doesn't because that situation isn't the same. There is no situation that is the same and I am foolishly auto-piloting what is most likely a heavily telegraphed attack because I assume that the situation will fall into place because the characters started in the same general location. Instead of just mindlessly performing actions that I have seen before I need to think about the game and who I am playing, the person not the character.
During Metal's first 1$ tourney he commented on how mentally exhausting it was to play against ASC853's Olimar, and I remember thinking "exhausted, but it's just a game no big deal". now that I have been thinking more carefully on the subject all sports are just a game, but when the physical and mental conditioning are at it's height that is when it becomes a competition. Since there is little physicality to this it leans much more on the mental aspect, which is what Metal meant. He wasn't tired of thinking: olimar is in front of me, it's time to attack in front of me. He was thinking: there is Olimar, what can he do to me from there, where can he get to to do something to me from there, where can I get to to keep him from getting to me while I get to him.
The thing that makes me mad isn't that brett is considered better than me when I started, but that I went in handicapping myself by limiting my thought process. When I used to play my friends in smash all I was good at was spacing and timing smashes and predicting where my opponent would be to get hit by them. Since then I have added the use of many other moves but I lost the focus I had, the focus I saw brett using last night when playing.
So in conclusion when next we meet I will be playing harder than ever and focusing on what you are doing, as well as what I
SHOULD be doing in response. Metal: I know when you finally see this you will think "LOLOLOLOLOLOL that's what I've been telling you to do" and all I can say is that is what I honestly thought I was doing. I thought that using what the pros did was inherently better than anything I could think to do and therefore did that instead of responding to that specific situation. I know I probably restated things more than once but I seem to have a problem conveying my thoughts through type.
