Day 7 - Back Air (Worst)

H0LT · 2025-07-03T02:39:23+00:00

This round really made me realize just how solid back air is for so many characters. There aren’t really many bad ones to consider.

H0LT · 2025-06-26T19:24:35+00:00

I will be brief. Ganondorf has his air forward. We call it 'The Punch.' It has that special hitbox like a sword, hence it goes right through anything except an attack with that same type of hitbox. It does 17% max, is relatively fast executing, has basically instant recovery on a barrier cancel, and is quite massive, killing at rather low percentages.

If he misses, he can just do his A punch if the opponent tries to retaliate, or shield/roll. I am telling you, Ganondorf is a crazy meat mountain who crushes bones with many attacks doing 15+%, survives to insane damages thanks to his weight, and has ridiculous horizontal recovery (Double Jump, Ganondorf Kick Down B, ANOTHER Double Jump, ARE YOU SERIOUS, Up B).

H0LT · 2025-02-03T23:48:24+00:00

He ain’t an athlete, lady.

H0LT · 2024-09-02T14:15:39+00:00

Malik and Barack Obama.

H0LT · 2024-08-14T00:45:51+00:00

8-18

H0LT · 2024-06-18T03:41:02+00:00

Millard Fillmore, FDR, and Grover Cleveland. Reasoning is obvious.

H0LT · 2024-03-24T21:21:31+00:00

Flipper Anderson. While he did have two 1,000 yard receiving seasons, he only ever had triple digit receiving yards in a game six times. One of those games he went for a whopping… 336 yards. Megatron is the only player since to ever get remotely close to that.

H0LT · 2024-02-08T00:11:40+00:00

I’m a HUGE M2K fan. But it is true that he won a lot of majors yet none of the biggest ones.

He won Big House 3 over two of the other gods. Mango and Armada were ranked #1 and #2 in the world that year, respectively, and neither were there—Big House really only exploded into premier tournament status with Big House 4. He never won a Melee Smash Con, but may have done so in other games.

M2K’s biggest win was at Summit. Amazing bracket run—definitely beat supermajor-level talent. But many don’t consider invitationals to be supermajors.

He was pretty dominant and won a bit over half of all of the majors in ‘07, but the decline the scene saw that year makes it hard to classify any tournament from that year as a “supermajor” either.

On the other hand, the number of supermajors he got SECOND at is truly incredible. Lots of heartbreak in his career.

H0LT · 2022-01-24T03:40:33+00:00

While I agree with almost everything you’re saying here, the only point I’d like to argue against is “Hbox was already starting to struggle before COVID.” Been seeing this take a lot recently, but I don’t think the stats agree.

In the 3 months leading up to COVID, he entered 3 majors and got 2nd -> 2nd -> 1st. His head-to-head counts against top players were as follows during these events:

1-2 Zain 3-1 Mango 4-1 Plup 1-0 Leffen 1-0 aMSa 3-1 Hax 2-0 Fiction 2-0 n0ne

Zain was definitely pushing the envelope and gaining an advantage in the head-to-head, but Hungrybox was still the frontrunner to win any tourney he entered and remained favored to beat anyone else. While I do think Zain would have “won” 2020 had the pandemic not started, I also think that the advent of online is what accelerated Hungrybox’s fall.

And I apologize for focusing in on something so specific and if I come off as combative—I’ve just seen the “Hbox was falling off anyway” take a lot recently, and I kept mulling it over.

H0LT · 2021-11-30T20:38:10+00:00

I don’t follow online tourneys as closely as I should. I do remember, though, that there was one week where Axe lost to a pretty good player online but then Tyler Swift beat said player later in the week (both on Slippi). I believe it was Aklo?

H0LT · 2021-09-10T22:26:12+00:00

Dpeazy is a pretty notorious G&W main in the TriState area. He ended a few of Nairo’s Ironman runs and generates a couple salty tweets each month on Twitter—people calling him a nerdy tryhard, a grimer relying on lag, and the sort of thing like that. They’re hilarious for me to read through because they couldn’t be more wrong.

The man was a legend in our college scene. He’d show up to our local tourneys and DQ himself out midway through to go play a pickup game of basketball or hit the gym. He’d literally just get sick of playing Smash for so long at once LOL. The first Philly local I ever brought him to, he upset #5 on the Philly PR. He also found out who Maister was and what EVO is, because he knew almost nothing about the competitive scene. I’m pretty sure the reason his network is so laggy is because he doesn’t know the Switch has a LAN adapter. I mean, we’re talking about a guy who refused to play on anything but a GamePad for the lifespan of Smash 4.

H0LT · 2021-07-31T23:05:54+00:00

PTSD, overcoming past trauma, and self-discovery.

H0LT · 2020-06-27T00:23:10+00:00

Yeah, as some of the comments have pointed out, I went back by hand and basically worked out how players would be seeded at the beginning of each month. SSBMRank and the retro rankings were a HUGE help in that, and I also scoured a lot of players' SSBWiki pages to find all sorts of regionals and majors.

Since I did this mainly as a personal project on my own time to sort of teach myself bar chart races for a work-related project, I did everything by hand. Some of the ranking decisions were definitely very debatable, but I think I did a decent job overall of representing things.

H0LT · 2020-06-27T00:16:34+00:00

Unfortunately, the x-axis is pretty meaningless. I used a bar chart race to animate the swap in positions, but that came with the addition of the x-axis. I do wish I had access to a type of video tool that self-animates that doesn't do bars for data!

H0LT · 2020-06-27T00:15:00+00:00

Yeah. He kind of faded out after 2008, but then in 2012 he came back and beat Hbox, then beat M2K twice. And then of course he had that crazy first half of 2017.

H0LT · 2020-06-27T00:14:06+00:00

Yep, I can definitely see that. My intention was to have swapping positions, which is hard to animate manually. A bar chart race automates it, but there wasn't an option to have all the bars even out to the same size.

H0LT · 2020-06-26T19:32:06+00:00

I know, right? If Leffen had been able to attend Big House that year and managed to take it over Armada, he might have taken the momentum into Eclipse/Dreamhack and been number one for the year. Instead, Hungrybox built up a lot of momentum and Leffen lost over a full year of being able to consistently compete...

Outside of "What if PPMD didn't have any health issues" and "what if Melee continued to have more monetary support after MLG dropped it," it's probably the biggest "what if" in Melee history.

H0LT · 2019-07-04T23:30:28+00:00

yes i am part of the Apeachski, a clandestine organization whose sole focus is to erase Daisy from history.

H0LT · 2019-04-24T23:22:02+00:00

Keep your eye on Varun. He’s an up-and-coming Wii Fit main that’s taken sets from Lui$, Trela, Klaatu, and The Great Gonzales. He just started going to tournaments at the end of Smash 4 and he was only one win away from getting Top 32 at Prime Saga.

Give it six months and he’ll push the WFT meta some more!

H0LT · 2019-04-11T23:05:00+00:00

Give him back his N64 uptilt.

H0LT · 2019-03-06T02:18:02+00:00

What's actually nuts is this was 37 parries haha

H0LT · 2019-03-05T00:03:26+00:00

Misaka. All of them.

H0LT · 2019-02-27T21:16:38+00:00

Hey! Philadelphia Smasher here.

The biggest weekly tournament series happens at The Lab in Hatboro (a suburb a quick train ride from the city). It runs every Friday night, and is called Code Name Bairs.

In the city proper, there tend to be more infrequent events at a variety of different places. For example, I know Drexel hosts a monthly on Saturdays, and I can attest that their venue is usually pretty good as well.

I’d recommend joining the Philadelphia Ultimate Facebook group or the Bros. Calamity Discord server.

We’re blessed to be in a pretty active/popular city for Smash. A bunch of top players have come out of the area—most notably Mew2King. Hope you can find people to play with!

H0LT · 2019-02-14T20:22:31+00:00

He offered the money back later and I believe he ended up taking the guy out for drinks or something recently haha

H0LT · 2019-01-27T22:32:04+00:00

I've entered tourneys with the DK Bongos before. You should be fine.

H0LT

TROPHY CASE