PixlBit

Kyle details his latest tournament travels for Nintendo's most competitive brawler.

Last weekend I attended a Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament in Ottawa, Ontario (Canada). It’s certainly not my first one, but it’s the first since I’ve joined PixlBit. Despite being pretty small (the largest I’ve been to had around 243 entrants for Melee and around the same for Brawl), it was a lot of fun, and I got to hang out with a bunch of people I hadn’t seen in far too long. I’ve been playing the game competitively for years now, and with all the people I’ve met and the stuff we’ve done, I don’t see any reason to stop. Also, insert something sappy about friends and making memories .

On Friday, the night before the tournament, my friend and I play some Melee until around 11:00 PM. He goes to sleep then, but I’m still up around 2:00 AM... Another friend picks us up around 7:00 AMSaturday morning, and we all head for Ottawa. His five-seat car now has six people in it, and we’re on our way to pick up another. With one car broken down we were left to split 13 people between two cars, and we all just really hoped not to get pulled over.

We stop for food in Kingston, Ontario around 10:30 AM and everything is still closed. I hold up our trip slightly by choosing to get fries from a no-name burger place instead of McDonald’s. I only went there because the line at McDonald’s looked too long, but in the end it would have been faster to wait for it.

At this point we have seven people in the car: one is lying down in the back area behind the seats, on top of all the bags (full of controllers and clothing and such), and another is awkwardly seated on top of the three people in the back seats. Hey, we’re all good friends.

Finally we arrive at the tournament an hour late, but it turns out that Melee has been pushed back in the schedule so that other games can be finished first. As it turns out, this one venue is being used simultaneously for Melee, Brawl, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Super Street Fighter 4, and BlazBlue tournaments. Unsurprisingly, there are not enough TVs to go around. We basically have to wait around until Brawl finishes since both Smash Bros. games are sharing TVs. There are three TVs free that end up being dedicated to Melee the entire time, which is nice, but there are also around 40 people there wanting to play the game. There are more people there for Melee than any of the other games, but we end up with the least TVs overall.

Luckily, I get onto a TV playing 2-vs.-2 matches with a few of the guys from Montreal , some of whom I already know, and no one asks to jump in for over an hour. Toronto has a good Melee community, and so does Montreal, but Ottawa has almost none. It’s kind of funny... the first time Toronto and Montreal get together in ages, and it’s not in Toronto or Montreal.

I guess I should say something about the game itself. My main character has pretty much always been Jigglypuff. She’s just always felt the most “comfortable” for me. I can use pretty much any character with some level of competence, and my Fox and Falco have been improving steadily, but Jigglypuff has always been by far my best character.

By far the most popular character is Fox. He’s also arguably the best overall character. What does it mean to say that one character is “better” than the others? There’s a short answer and a long answer to that question. The short answer is that he’s the fastest, his moves are far stronger than they need to be for something so fast, he can be difficult to kill, and he can kill you in seconds. He’s kind of got everything going for him. The long answer would require a whole feature of its own.

The general consensus (and I agree) is that Fox is also the hardest “matchup” for Jigglypuff. It’s not an unwinnable fight, but in general, one should expect a Fox player to beat a Jigglypuff player of equal skill. But this is also a good example of where theory deviates from practice. There are few Jigglypuff players, but many Fox players. The average Jigglypuff player has much more experience playing Fox than the other way around. On top of that, even though Fox wins the matchup in theory, that doesn’t mean that every Fox player understands what they have to do to win. The Fox has to play very defensively to beat Jigglypuff, but not everyone wants or knows how to do this. If they just rush in recklessly with Fox, Jigglypuff has the tools to dispatch with them very quickly. So really, if the Fox player doesn’t know what they’re doing, the Jigglypuff player can be expected to win. It’s interesting how that works.

Anyway... at around 4:00 PM, the 2-vs.-2 (Doubles) part of the Melee tournament finally starts. Usually tournaments do this before the 1-vs.-1 part (Singles) since everyone cares more about Singles and it’s better to save the main event for last. I think my teammate and I ended up getting fifth place out of maybe twelve teams total. We played well enough, but there were just better teams there. Montreal has historically been really good at that event; this time around they took first and third place.

Next up are Singles “pools.” Usually these are used both to determine who plays who in the main part, the “bracket,” and to eliminate enough players to make the bracket manageably small (since some tournaments have upward of 100 people). In this case, exactly 32 people enter Singles, so there’s no need to eliminate anyone. The best brackets are those with a number of players that is a multiple of 16, but it’s hard to explain why without a picture, and I’m not going to draw one, so... just trust me.

The actual Singles bracket only starts around 9:00 PM (surprise, surprise). In the end we have to move the whole tournament to another friend’s place . Thanks to all the delays, we don’t have enough time to finish everything before the venue has to kick everyone out, so it’s pretty lucky that my friend is willing to house all the people who haven’t been eliminated yet. He only just recently moved to Ottawa from Toronto, but fortunately his roommates are okay with around 20 people showing up to play video games at 1:00 AM. The Melee community is really tight-knit since it’s made up of all the people who were unwilling to migrate to Brawl. That means that not only have most of us been around since before Brawl came out, but also that we’re united for our love of an old game. That connection means that’s we can shift everyone from a semi-formal venue to some guy’s house in the middle of the night without any complaints.

I’ve been playing pretty well all day and I end up getting fifth place. I still need to check if I won anything... sometimes the top three win stuff, sometimes the top five, sometimes more. In the end, I get eliminated by a Fox player from Montreal and another Fox from my own region. Come to think of it, there were only two people I played in the whole tournament that didn’t use Fox. There usually isn’t that little character diversity. Yet another friend and a guy from Montreal tie for first. It’s 5:00 AM by the time they start their Grand Finals set, and the remaining guys from Montreal still have to drive home that night, so they decide to split the first place prize.

Some sleeping bags are brought out. I take one as fast as possible and lay it out in a corner of the floor. Familiar gameplay sounds wake me up... I don’t really know how many hours later, but it’s light out at this point and people are still playing Melee in the other room. I get up and join them. I haven’t figured out why yet, but I really never get tired of this game.

We get back on the road around 12:00 noon on Sunday . This time, I’m the one in the “trunk” space behind the seats (it made sense for the second skinniest guy to be next to take that spot). It turns out to be more comfortable than squishing into the seats in front of me, and I take the chance to catch up on some sleep. We stop for food in Kingston again, but this time everything is open, so the one of us that lives in Kingston (the seventh passenger) tells us we all have to try the best poutine we’ll ever taste. I decide on regular fries instead, but two of the people who do get it said they’ve had better poutine, so I guess he was wrong anyway .

The guy who lives in Kingston walks home after we finish eating, and we’re finally able to fit everyone into the actual seats in the car. Hours later we arrive back at my place, and, before dispersing, decide to play some more Melee. Again, don’t ask why we weren’t tired of it by that point.

After about two hours they all leave. I start to check my email and such, but basically collapse around 10:30 and sleep for about twelve hours. All things considered, it was a good tournament, and I’m really glad I went. Hopefully it won’t be too long until the next one...