Waffle House

Thanksgiving Break just ended. Mslano came back into town from chicago during the break, and he came over to Tuscaloosa to play with me, anomaly, and munkus. it was just me and him for a few hours before anomaly and munkus arrived. I played about as good as I think i can at this point that night. taking mslano down to one stock almost every time. (i only beat him a couple of times, and usually due to his own mistakes :-P). His ganon is really good. Like I feel like I should be able to beat ganon with roy, he's easy to edgeguard with roy, and roy gets his DED combos and d-tilt upair combos on him easier than some other characters. but ganon's definitely mslano's best character, plus mslano also plays roy, so he knows the character in and out. we played some teams and I confirmed just how much I suck in teams. I've decided to, for now, play sheik if I ever have to play teams in a tournament. I'm a defensive player, and like you can't play defensive in teams. or something. with sheik I did alright but I found it hard to really get any kills. My main focus was trying to help my partner . If i can do this and get kills as well I think I could be a good teams player. That's the same thing that happened when I teamed with NES Noob at theifs 3rd tournament. I just kind of helped him and let him kill everyone.

The next night, mslano, george, and I drove to Huntsville. I hadn't played with those guys in a while so that was cool. i didn't play that well. part of it could be that I had to use a whole different controller than one i used the previous day. i played george, palmer, jwt, and moogle the whole time, basically. i didn't get to play coach, majist, or mslano. I dont know how to really fight kirby, who is george's new main. I think i went back and forth with george. Palmer's fox beat me a few times. These kinds of things kind of frustrate me, because I think I should be winning some of these matches against gimmicky players like Palmer. I'm just not good at developing ways to counter strategies, even if I'm fully aware of what the person is doing. and I think I have a few bad habits that have been programmed into my muscle memory. not to put palmer down though, he's gotten a lot better since I played him a few months ago. i played a bunch of matches against moogle. and he was raping me and george for an hour or two. especially when he played sheik or marth. I think those are his two best characters. i think moogle has gotten even better. I dont think he did any less than 3 stock me all night.

after that I played a bunch of matches against jwt. and I think by then I was as warmed up as i was going to be, and i played the best against him. jwt loses the matches for you sometimes, he gets frustrated easiily and can get into ruts because of it. he wants to play falcon, but his falcon isn't that good :-P his fox and g&w are good though. munkus told me once 'i think you have a better g&w than jwt'. thats no where near the truth lol. g&w is among my worst characters, i think.

i played a lot of IC's against JWT. he says IC's are the "joot counter" because he doesn't know how to play against them. I've noticed that not many people know how to. shit, I don't know how to. but I'm starting to think IC's are my second best character. I really think they are a superb character and even though they are high tier, i think they are still underrated. They're almost broken, in my opinion. you can do some dangerous stuff with them. and its not that hard to do either. Jwt complimented me on my desynching, but I was like "its not that hard to do". at least not the simple things. theres some advanced continuous desynch that's a bit harder. I can sort of do it, but I haven't found too much of a use for it yet. IC's like all my characters are pretty simplified. I've begun 'wavejab'ing, thanks to a good tip from Shai Hulud, and it' s a really sweet approach. if you hit the jab, you can follow with a downsmash, and if you are shielded, you can jab again or d-smash if they drop their shield, and if they don't you can grab. and grabbing with the IC's leads to30-40 damage at the very least if you know what you're doing. if you're in a position to wobble, you're given a stock. I can't bring myself to wobble though. i think, jab-ice d-throw-d-air, grab, repeat..finish with fsmash is much more fun and cool looking any way.

Reflex is holding a tournament this weekend and I have plans to go. I haven't been playing my best recently, but I should go anyway. i'll try to get some practice in this week. it will be interesting to see how everyone reacts to Roy, who is probably a character many of them don't play against that often.


Improvement Thoughts
I still think the best thing for me is to play against good people as often as possible, but there are a few things I need to work on even when i'm not playing really good people.
A while ago i asked moogle what I should work on, and he said 'you should tech chase more', and i'm still working on that. only recently have i really been trying to do it. but i've noticed tech chasing is why I lose stocks a lot of the time :-P. I get hit with get up attacks a lot when I tech chase, its hard to predict when the opponent is going to do that. well i suppose you could just stand by him and assume he's going to do it and shield grab.
Also I just need general practice on controlling my character. Nothing's more frustrating than screwing up a dash-dance and getting smashed because of it.

oh we went to waffle house with mslano because he missed it.
that's where the title comes form :-D

Post-Tournament Thoughts

I didn't mention it before, but a lot of good people showed up to Thief's Tournament, including Chad, Iori, ihavespaceballs, NES Noob, Mookie Rah, ragnarock and Mr. P
So that was cool to play with those guys again. I hope they come to all thief's tournaments. I get better quick when I play people like that.

anyway, I played a few training matches by myself recently, and it was actually more productive than usual. I was practicing getting my movement speed up without messing up and I was doing alright. I also played a little Sheik, who I haven't played in ages. I might use sheik as a Marth counter, and also for teams. She's easy to control and play.

For some reason I'm just finding out that Roy can use D-tilt-> f-smash on fast fallers. Like that would have helped me a lot during the tournament, such as against Xandre's Falco. It probably works on other characters at low percents too. and if i can f-smash, I can always up-air to f-smash :-D. I like Roy's simplicity. he's got a definite simply gameplan, I play better when I don't have tons of junk to think about. Like with Roy, theres generally only one or two options in every situation. If you play someone like Fox, theres like a dozen different ways to handle any given situation.

This will probably sound stupid, but I figured out how to not miss L-cancels with Falcon, which I've been doing a lot. Like with Roy, since he's laggy, jumps low and falls fast, you have a huge margin of error with your L-cancels, which is why I never miss them. With falcon, you might think that since he falls fast, you have to press L immediately after you attack and fast fall but really you have to wait about a half a second. Basically wait until your attack connects. Like previously I'd just immediately fast fall and L-cancel, and alot of times I'd whiff it.

Moogle suggested that I try Luigi against Jiggs instead of IC's. Because he has the same evasive wavedashes, but more ways to kill her.

I've also decided that at this point, the only way for me to get better quickly is to play good people on a regular basis. So I've got to find a way to get myself to huntsville and to more tournaments.

Thief's 4th tournament

Thief had his fourth tournament in tuscaloosa this past weekend. I did okay i suppose, not as good as I could have done. But I get inspired to get better after every tournament. My goal is to either place top ten at one of thief tournaments or make it out of pools in a larger tournament before Brawl comes out.

Anyway, a little bit before this tournament, i decided to go mostly Roy instead of Marth. Roy is easier for me to control, and controlling the character is a lot of the reason why I dont perform as well as I ought to. I always mess up a dash dance or something with marth. But with roy i NEVER ever miss L-cancels, and his wavedash doesn't require fingers as fast as with other characters. The only problem is that roy has a harder time killing that most characters. He also has the worst recovery on the game :-P

Before the tourney, my Roy was looking pretty good in friendlies. I play a really defensive Roy, which I think is good for him. I actually did pretty well against Iori's mewtwo with Roy. I've noticed, that since i'm a defensive player, I dont do well on small stages like Yoshi's Story. I need to work on that. Anyway, the tournament started.

Thief does a Swiss style tournament, instead of Pools like most people. It's a lot more fair in determining who advances to brackets, the only downside is you don't get to play as many matches sometimes. My tournament experience wasn't that enlightining. For my first match, I played against this good Falco, Xandre. Afraid to use my Roy, I actually went Marth. I did okay, but he beat me decidedly. The second round I went Captain Falcon. I'd been practicing with Falcon, but he wasn't really ready yet and the results showed it. I'm still not sure what to do against falco. Maybe I'll just pick roy next time. My next match is Majist from Huntsville, previously known as Mackendra. I'd played some friendlys with him the day before, he was beating me usually. I think he went sheik both rounds against me. I made a couple of mistakes that cost me stocks like missing my Up-Bs and silly stuff like that, but I probably still would have lost. I think I maybe should have warmed up just a little bit more, my movements were not as fluid as I'd want them to be.

The next two guys I faced had left, so I got two free wins. Then I faced a guy X-Pac, who played Jigglypuff. After hesitating, I picked Ice Climbers, because after lots of practice against Munkus's Jiggs, my ice climbers had always been the only characters I could consistently beat his Jiggs with. I played absolutely terrible, I could barely wavedash. I think I was nervous because this match could have decided whether or not I made brackets. the whole round I basically wavedances until I could downsmash, and I ended up winning. He counterpicked Mute City, which doesn't seem like a good IC's stage, so I switched to roy, and lost. I don't like roy vs. Jiggs AT ALL. I think I went to FD next, went back to IC's and barely beat him. Munkus watched over my shoulder. He probably would have been dissapointed if I lost to a Jigglypuff :-D
Funnily enough, you had to make at least the 16th best record to make it to brackets. I made 17th. :-/