Category: Videos

Continuing his series of matchup guides for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, Zinoto has turned his attention to the psychic Pokémon Mewtwo. With strong true combos, a great projectile to camp with, the best air dodge in the game and his odd jump trajectory, Mewtwo can be quite the roadblock for many players. By breaking down his neutral game, his advantage and disadvantage state, this episode of Cram School should help those who are struggling to defeat the psychic cat.

Seeing as Mewtwo is a pseudo-floaty character, Zinoto suggests that your combos should be focused around keeping Mewtwo in the air, rather than going for the most damage. He uses the analogy of passing a beach ball around; your goal is not to spike the beach ball, but to keep it in the air for as long as possible. As Mewtwo’s neutral can be so frustrating to deal with, thanks to Shadow Ball and down tilt, you need to maximize the character’s disadvantage state by continuing juggles whenever possible.

The Mewtwo player will most likely spam air dodge once in the air, so your goal should be punishing their landings rather than pursuing them relentlessly. Remember the beach ball and knock them back into the skies.

Source: Zinoto

After witnessing RZR|Xian’s amazing Ibuki at Final Round 20, Alienware’s Naoki “Nemo” Nemoto decided to share some notes about the match up to help players fight the nimble ninja. However, Nemo himself got the chance to put his own notes to good use in an extended online set against the highest-ranked Ibuki online (as of this writing): Narikun. In the video below, recorded by Fighting Game Replays, we can see Nemo applying his own notes, especially regarding Ibuki’s EX kunai usage. Now, while Narikun responds in kind and doesn’t get baited out into wasting his kunai, this allows Nemo to get close up and bully him for the win.

Source: Fighting Game Replays

Leona is a very strong character, that sees a lot of usage at high-level play on a lot of teams. Many players have trouble countering the character; if she scores a knockdown, she has a plethora of options to lock you down, and any incorrect guess can lead to nearly your entire health bar being diminished. She not only has a low that can be special canceled, an instant overhead that can be special canceled, but also an option select off of the low that can catch rolls.

However, as explained in this video, people are missing one of the most vital options on wake-up against Leona–that not only lets you escape her mixup, but also punish her should she attempt the 50/50–and that is backdash. Outside of characters such as Goro, Kim, K’, Hein, Chin, and Verse, every character can backdash and counter the mixup attempt. This forces Leona to dig a little deeper into her tool box to take rounds off of you.

Source: PlsX

PIE|Smug and Liquid|NuckleDu have quite the rivalry brewing on this year’s tournament circuit. After NuckleDu’s declaration that Next Level Battle Circuit is free (after defeating Smug at Final Round 20), Smug had even more than personal pride and victory at stake in going to South by Southwest’s Fighters Underground tournament: he wanted the 2016 Capcom Cup champion to eat his words.

And Smug made sure to cook up those words and serve them hot to NuckleDu in the Grand Finals. While it looked like NuckleDu–who was in the losers bracket–would reset the bracket, Smug quickly adjusted to take the win. The replay below is well worth the watch.

Source: YogaFlame24

After taking a look at Capcom’s modifications for Dragon Punches and the jump/back throw tech option select that will be implemented in Street Fighter V’s late April balance patch, VesperArcade next explains the alterations that will be made to V-Reversals and charge moves.

The V-Reversal change is fairly simple to explain: for some reason, when being activated from a crouching block instead of a standing block, all V-Reversals currently take an extra frame to come out. According to VesperArcade:

Though that isn’t really a big deal, it doesn’t make sense from a gameplay standpoint. So Capcom doesn’t want to encourage players to just stand and block, leaving yourself open to low attacks, just so your V-Reversal comes out faster. That’s just silly. I guess the worst-case scenario is that one extra frame could possibly give your opponent enough time to block your V-Reversal , or even worse, bait it, jump, and land with an attack, before you would recover and not be able to block it. So the easiest solution Capcom has done is simply make V-Reversals activate 1 frame faster while crouching. Now both are the same speed, so you don’t have to worry about if you’re standing or crouching.

The change to charge attacks, however, is much more complicated; the “hold frames” for charge moves have been increased from 6 to 10 frames.

What they did was increase the input buffer window for charge moves. So this has already been changed once, in case you guys forgot. When the game first launched, the input buffer window for charge moves was 12 frames. But then they recently lowered it to 6 frames, so that’s what we’re playing with now. Basically, they cut the total time in half. This is the amount of time you have after you charge to press a button and finish the input before you lose the charge.

Utilizing Guile, Alex and Urien as examples, VesperArcade goes over the pros and cons of this decision:

One of the pros–and the main reason why Capcom changed this–is to keep unintentional charge moves from coming out when you don’t want them to. So basically, they wanted to tighten the leniency. They didn’t want you to just accidentally do charge moves if the charge was for too long. So what about the cons of this change? For one, it’s harder to pre-charge buffer, since we have less time to keep our previous Charge in the first place. Another con is that it’s a lot harder to do down charge specials into standing attacks. So for example, Canceling Guile’s standing light kick into a Flash Kick, that was hard to begin with. Now that window’s cut in half, so you’ve got to do it a lot faster now. So as you guys can see, there are a lot more cons to this change than pros, and as such, Capcom has listened and extended the window to 10 frames now. So when the game launched, it was 12, then they changed it to 6 now, then coming in April, they’re bringing it to 10. So, it’s not quite as long as when the game first came out, but I think it’s a good middle ground, a good compromise. So when the April patch comes out, players that play charge characters should feel a bit more leniency now for doing their charge attacks.

You can catch the full video–with visual examples of these changes–below. Stay tuned, as VesperArcade intends to go over the character balance changes in detail for all 20 characters that will be impacted.

Source: VesperArcade

Sheik is already quite the technical character in Smash 4, with plenty of precise perfect pivot combos and 50/50 setups which can lead into big damage or a kill. However, there is still room for Sheik to become even more technical. The Beefy Smash Doods have outlined just three difficult Sheik techs which are underused in competitive play but have untapped potential. They vary in usefulness, but they all have some utility in battle.

The first is the intangible ledge grab, where Sheik can refresh her ledge intangibility with an aerial Up B. It is somewhat similar to Shino stalling in Super Smash Bros. Melee, where Sheik can continually Up B at the ledge to slow the pace of the match. It is pretty useful, as it is a possible kill option but you need to have some precise aim to regrab the ledge, or else Sheik falls to her death.

The second is instant needle cancelling which allows Sheik players to cancel their momentum out of a dash with their neutral B, before instantly using a jab or tilt attack. To perform this, players must do the opposite of a regular needle cancel by inputting their select attack before tapping the shield button. The timing is super tight but if done correctly, it’s a great way to catch people on the ground.

Finally, the third technique is the defused grenade, where Sheik can pick up and throw the projectile without it exploding. This requires Sheik to take damage just as she begins the attack animation, dropping the grenade and allowing anyone to pick it up. You can also drop the grenade by slipping on Diddy’s banana. It isn’t particularly useful in a match but it can lead to some super situational setups which may catch your opponent off-guard.

Source: Beefy Smash Doods