Category: Fighting Games

Calm down everybody–not that kind of trump. With Smash 4’s changes to the ledge, where players can push other players off it in a process called “ledge trumping,” a whole meta has developed around whether to trump or not. In their quest to advance the Smash 4 meta, the Beefy Smash Doods have dedicated a whole video to the power of faking a ledge trump.

They outline two major ways to fake an edge trump, by either just dashing to the ledge and waiting for the opponent’s get up option, or by jumping off stage and then jumping back on to line up with their get up. The Beefy Smash Doods suggest dashing to the ledge to fake a trump, then doing a short hop back-air to cover both the roll and jump get up options. Quite a few characters can autocancel their back-airs, meaning that the back-air whiffs, you can then punish with your most damaging option. This short hop back-air does not cover a get up attack, but seeing as that is the most uncommon and slowest option off the ledge, you could just full hop to avoid most get up attacks.

You can also footstool a player jumping back on stage, which can force them to regrab the ledge. You can then punish the ledge regrab with a meteor or a down-tilt, seeing as the recovering player loses their ledge invincibility.

Source: Beefy Smash Doods

You’ve watched tournaments, you’ve poured over frame data and you can recite lines from the Smash Brothers documentary by heart; now it’s time to start playing Super Smash Bros. Melee. However, unlike most fighting games, getting started with Melee take a little bit more set up time than something Street Fighter V or King of Fighters XIV. In order to instruct new players on what to get and where to get it, SSBM Tutorials has created a comprehensive beginner’s guide on how to begin your Melee career.

The guide first tackles getting all the kit needed to play Melee. If you want to go the old fashioned route, this means finding a physical copy of the game, a Gamecube or Wii to run it on, a CRT television to avoid input lag along with a Gamecube controller. If you are wanting to use an emulated version of Melee in order to play netplay, you’ll need a computer capable of running the Dolphin emulator and the Netplay build of Melee, alongside a Gamecube controller adapter.

Once the physical aspect of playing Melee is out of the way, the rest of the guide details how to pick a character, how to learn basic tech skill and where to look to improve as you are learning the basics. Seeing as they are called SSBM Tutorials, I’m sure they may have a few videos to help you out.

Source: SSBM Tutorials

Street Fighter II will never stop being a conversation topic, simply due to it’s status as our first taste of what we know today as a “fighting game.” While usually people looking back on Street Fighter II look back to Super Turbo, it–of course–wasn’t the only version to hit arcades or grace home consoles.

Today, jmcrofts takes a look back at one of the versions prior to ST, Hyper Fighting. This review is similar to the one he did for Vampire Savior, in that he breaks down the basics of the game before walking us through some replays to analyze what the game is all about.

Source: jmcrofts

Known for her tricky V-Trigger setups and wild mix-ups, Ibuki’s more unpredictable tools don’t mean much if you cannot hold the neutral for very long. To teach Ibuki mains how to approach the neutral and play an effective footsie game with her, Rommaler has created a 40-minute tutorial, covering many of the aspects of Ibuki’s neutral game.

How to move around the stage, controlling space with pokes, knowing what are the best ways to whiff punish with Ibuki; all these things and more are covered by Rommaler in his tutorial, making it required viewing for anyone looking to main this teenage ninja. I’d even recommend having Training Mode open at the same time, in order to practice certain options Rommaler suggests you learn.

Source: Rommaler

A large aspect of playing a fighting game competitively is ensuring that your opponent has as few options to retaliate as possible. A lot of the best tech for various characters revolve around setting up a scenario that the opponent has to deal with, without any easy solution aside from blocking and guessing correctly. Safe jumps are just one example of this tech, and essentially set the opponent up to block an overhead while leaving the attacker free to block if the defender tries to reversal.

Here, we have YouTuber Corkscrew_Blow compiling a list of similar set-ups with every character. The video claims to contain safe jumps against all 3 frame reversals, but that’s not quite right; what you see are set-ups that appear to be overheads, meant instead to bait reversals. The calling card of a safe jump is forcing the opponent to block, but be safe on reversal–while these set-ups will whiff and not actually hit overhead. It’s a good tech video, nonetheless.

Source: Corkscrew_Blow