Introduction

Before I get started with the blog, I just want to make an introduction/disclaimer/whatever so people understand more of who I am and why I am writing about this! So lets get started!

Disclaimer: 

I'm hella dumb, so the grammar and use of punctuation throughout this blog will probably set some people off. Sorry in advance, you a snack tho.

Who I Am: 

So for anyone that has no clue who I am, or for anyone that has no idea why I'm making a blog i'll just tell a little bit about my "career" as a fighting game player. I first got into fighting games in 2007 via Street Fighter 3: Third Strike (3s), its to this day my favorite game ever and its the sole reason why I wanted to pursue fighting games as a hobby. I went to my first tournament in early 2009 I believe and it was called Sinsation, I lived in Northern Virginia at the time and it was in the hotel right by the Fair Oaks Mall so it was only about 10 minutes away. Me, my dad, and my friend Winnie (he's important) went to see what was up, my dad was intimidated at first over the very obvious age gap. To put it in perspective, I was 12 years old at the time, Winnie was only 13, and everyone else there was significantly older by a half a decade or more. Sinsation had vanilla SF4 being played as the main tournament game via arcade board, so the console version isn't even out at this point in time. So this was before the real "SF4 boom" that really blew up the FGC as a whole. Not that many people were playing and it certainly wasn't a scene that had any kids in middle school, thankfully though everything worked out and I was hooked. After that I just played whatever I had fun with while keeping 3s as a strong focus, and it's been nothing but a good time since!

A long time has passed since then of course and things have changed, one of the biggest being my "success" in Skullgirls. SG is similar to PM in the sense that its a game that was created by the community, FOR the community. For some reason I was able to get a strong grasp at the game extremely early on, and it just steamrolled into staying a top level player throughout the games life span. From 2012 all the way to current age, now i'm a sponsored player for team Critical Reaction, and waiting to see what I can do once Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite and Dragon Ball Fighter Z are released. While I've never really been able to catch up fully in 3s and compete at the highest possible level that Japan and others are able to replicate, I am still a solid Dudley player at a American level that can make some things happen sometimes. 

So why Smash? 

During the period of 07-09 I really just watched any fighting game that had any competitive scene at all, I might not want to play them but i'd want to just be a sponge to all of the information I could get for any game. So I ended up watching a lot of Melee/Brawl vod's and streams and watched as much as I could, all while casually learning wavedashing and L canceling and stuff in my own time. During freshman year of high school, my friends and I got REALLY into Melee. My dad and I purchased a bunch of cheap CRT's for no money at all, and I got a lot of setups, and just had my basement be a really cool spot to hang out in growing up. So we'd play every day after school, learn the game the best we could and I even hosted a tournament at my school. 65 entrants, with very little changes to the actual official rule set the game had in place. Of course none of us were spectacular and we knew that but it was still a lot of fun, I ended up winning the tournament with Winnie getting 2nd. Our tournament got notice from other neighboring high schools and they started hosting some as well! The craziest thing about this whole thing is that during this time I hosted a fest at my house where we invited the top 3 of the Thomas Jefferson High School to come over and play us. 2 of these people happened to be Rishi and llod, totally not kidding! They came over and just wasted all of us and it was definitely a learning experience to say the least. At that point in time I only went to real Melee tournaments maybe twice ever, so seeing that level of play in person was pretty cool. 

PM I just heard about through friends and just lightly following the smash scene, I remember trying the first public demo that pretty much only had Melee meta characters in it. I thought it was cool and just didn't really bother with the game again, I'd watch some combo videos here and there during the 2.5 days but never touched the game. Once I heard 3.02 got released I gave it a try and showed it to my friends, we thought it was pretty fun! I moved to Jersey from Northern VA during 2014, so during this whole time I still lived in MD/VA. Seeing Xanadu hosting the game was cool, but it was really out of the way so during that whole time I only managed to ever go twice. I mostly attended this local in VA at a comic book shop during that time, and i'd just be that guy that would place below everyone good with 3.02 Lucas. I completely just stopped playing Smash for awhile, and kinda just focused on SG and UMVC3. I had a random little "give Melee a shot" phase that fell short, and didn't touch 3.5 at all. 

So I went to Guts 4 last October, it was a part of the SG tour so I wanted to make sure I could make it out. While looking at the games to register for I saw PM, now at this point its been years since I went to a tournament that hosted anything for PM. So I just entered for fun, my friend gave me the hook up to 3.6, and I just messed around and just figured out Wario at a scrub level. Going into the bracket I expected to just get maybe 1 or 2 wins but ended up not doing that terrible believe it or not! Switch was the first seed of my pool and we bonded over being white guys with long hair, and he happened to live in Jersey too! After he 3 stocked me both games he told me about Nebs annnnd that's it! He'd scoop me for Nebs and everyone has been chill as fuck since! If literally anyone else was the first seed of my pool.. especially anyone not from NJ, I probably would've just stopped playing the game and it would've been a fun one time thing. 

So yeah! PM's sick, I'm strictly playing Meta Knight, and my goal is to just see how strong I can become at the game! Smash as a whole has always intrigued me so much, and I've always really wanted to achieve a high level of skill since it seems so damn fun. We'll see what happens! I hope this intro helped give you a better idea of who I am and my background, my next post i'll be talking about things I REALLY like about PM coming from a FG background. As well as things that confuse me!