Author: Lance "Tarnot" Hood

Marth is a great example of how character reception changes over the years within any given game series. Even to this day, if you check out a Super Smash Bros. Melee stream, chances are you’ll see a Marth or two swinging their swords around and aiming for tippers to stylishly shut out a set. Sadly, the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament scene hasn’t been graced by many Marth players, and this may be due in part to the nerfs that he received from one iteration of the game to the next, or could be more heavily related to the sheer power of other contenders.

Until system changes or balance patches bring Marth back to the forefront, we’ve got Alpharad’s newest video to stave off your hunger for swordplay. In it, he takes two of Fire Emblem’s heroes–Marth and Lucina–into some For Glory matches to slice open the online competition. And while comedy is the most important component in this video, there’s no question that it also offers one clear lesson to everyone new to Smash: Marth’s neutral B can and will break your shield. Get out of the way.

Source: Alpharad

Marth is a great example of how character reception changes over the years within any given game series. Even to this day, if you check out a Super Smash Bros. Melee stream, chances are you’ll see a Marth or two swinging their swords around and aiming for tippers to stylishly shut out a set. Sadly, the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U tournament scene hasn’t been graced by many Marth players, and this may be due in part to the nerfs that he received from one iteration of the game to the next, or could be more heavily related to the sheer power of other contenders.

Until system changes or balance patches bring Marth back to the forefront, we’ve got Alpharad’s newest video to stave off your hunger for swordplay. In it, he takes two of Fire Emblem’s heroes–Marth and Lucina–into some For Glory matches to slice open the online competition. And while comedy is the most important component in this video, there’s no question that it also offers one clear lesson to everyone new to Smash: Marth’s neutral B can and will break your shield. Get out of the way.

Source: Alpharad

Killer Instinct fans got their hands on Cinder for the first time yesterday when he took his place among the game’s cast of playable characters. Whether you’ve been lighting up the lab, blazing through ranked matches or casually making terrible fire puns–guess which one I’ve been up to–Cinder is full of potential.

But how do you harness that potential?

SupermanSajam took a brief break from providing Mortal Kombat X tutorials to take a look at the new Killer Instinct contender in the form of a detailed character breakdown. This breakdown does include some simple combos, but they take a back seat to the character’s basic concepts including movement, important buttons, the properties of his special moves, his various combo enders as well as a detailed look at how being “fired up” affects his arsenal.

If you’re looking to burn up the competition with this new fighter, be sure to check out the tutorial below.

Source: SupermanSajam

By now, the concept of Short Hop Fast Fall L-Cancelling, or “shuffling,” is old news to those who have been involved in the Super Smash Bros. community for a number of years. In a game so reliant on movement and space control, players who have been grinding Smash titles for as long as they can remember likely picked this up some time ago.

But with the influx of players, not only in the most recent release but Melee as well, Super Smash Academy knew that it was time to break this concept down for the new guys and gals.

In addition to detailing how to perform this technique, this useful tutorial also offers insights into its history, covering the various iterations that have sprung up over time. Additionally, to ease the learning process, the video includes some handcam footage to show how the whole maneuver should look when properly executed.

While the full technique (including the L-Cancel) only works in Super Smash Bros. Melee and Project M, Smashers who enjoy other titles in the series stand to learn a lot in this footage as well, as the importance of understanding how short hopping, full hopping, and fast falling function in all of these games cannot be stressed enough.

Source: Super Smash Academy via Smash Boards

It’s easy to slip into the habit of keeping a single punish on deck for any time an appropriate situation arises. Just because the easy, go-to punish may work to drain the health of opponents when they make mistakes by producing reliable damage, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best for every situation. Tacking, say, an extra neutral jump fierce on the front of that punish, under the right circumstances, could lead to a stun and a subsequent victory where a loss would have been the result if the standard punish had been employed.

The video below, from GroundedSF, focuses on the sorts of punishes that Cody players can use in a variety of situations. These take into account invulnerability frames, start up times, damage, and stun output–pretty much everything that could stand to make one punish superior to another. Even though this video is dedicated to Cody, this is something that every player, even those who shy away from shank-wielding fugitives, should keep in mind to help take their play to the next level.

Source: GroundedSF

Back in December, My Smash Corner released a video detailing the art of jump cancel glide tossing in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. This technique allows all characters to slide forward or backward across the stage while throwing an item. Naturally, it benefits those who can spawn their own items, such as Mega Man and Diddy Kong, the most, but that doesn’t prevent, say, Ganondorf from grabbing a stray banana and gliding his way across the stage.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U player RED recently took this technique a step further with the discovery that Mega Man can amp up his glide tosses to achieve alarming speeds. This allows the boy in blue to traverse the entirety of the stage to execute surprise attacks in the blink of an eye.

To see this technique in action, check out the video below.

Source: RED via Smash Boards

It took two weeks, but someone finally found a couple of infinite combos in Mortal Kombat X. These strings, discovered by Xero18, are interesting not only because they are, indeed, infinite, but also their unlikely source: Kitana’s Mournful variation.

The blue-garbed assassin feels a bit out of place in a game currently dominated by characters with strong 50/50 options, as she is equipped only with a slow overhead which results in a knockdown and the slimmest selection of low-hitting attacks that can lead into combos. This forces Kitana to play a full-screen game of fan tossing in order to secure victory, which, in a game so rushdown heavy, is not an easy task to achieve. So, as a variant that’s even more out there than the other two, Mournful hasn’t attracted too much attention prior to this discovery.

While traditional infinites regularly require ridiculous timing or setups to get the hits rolling, there isn’t a whole lot of that here. Thanks to what appear to be some frame data oversights, this glaive-tossing variant has two separate options to crank out massive damage in the corner, both of which can be found in the video below.

As with any infinite combo, the damage scaling weighs heavily on these strings after only a handful of repetitions, but that shouldn’t stop players from using this tactic as a method of timer scamming their way to victory.

Does this mean that we might start seeing some Kitana players pop up to challenge the current reign of Kung Jin and Quan Chi? Only time will tell.

Source: Xero18 via Alioune