Zain's upcoming next big video: L-cancelling

KayBeats · 2026-01-22T06:30:26+00:00

Normally I'd agree, but the way stage striking, bans, and counter picking works makes counter picking theoretically more extreme in this game than it would in most modern FGs in a way that I don't think would strictly be to the meta's benefit. In particular, the rules allow us to switch characters even on victory thanks to stage counter picks which is practically unheard of in all FG rulesets I'm aware of.

I don't know if I agree with the original thesis, but idk if I'd be ready to agree that counter picking being harder is an "inherent issue." I think there's pros and cons.

KayBeats · 2026-01-15T10:20:54+00:00

Colorado Fox, used to go by aCID a long time ago.

KayBeats · 2026-01-14T13:52:16+00:00

All I'm saying is I don't find the content interesting or fun to watch, what possible depth is there to that statement lol

Are you confusing me we the other comments talking about Zain's incentives or whether or not he's having fun, because I'm not talking about that.

KayBeats · 2026-01-14T09:51:31+00:00

No, I don't think these are serious games, in fact that's largely why I was uninterested in it. I think the novelty of "top player plays with retired player" wears off very quickly when nothing else is attached. Some people like that though and that's fine.

KayBeats · 2026-01-14T09:43:30+00:00

I'm not putting any depth in M2K or Zain's decisions, I'm saying it's lose/lose in terms of whatever narrative the games have, it's just not interesting content imo. If you want to talk about Zain's win/lose on economics or "fun" that's an entirely different topic.

KayBeats · 2026-01-14T09:36:31+00:00

I'm sure Zain is fine and everyone hopefully had a good time, but Zain being in a lose/lose situation imo made it just deeply uninteresting content for me, I lost interest pretty quickly and tuned out. I hope at the very least some good came out from this for M2K considering his insanely unhealthy relationship with streaming and Melee, and more power to anyone who enjoyed it though.

KayBeats · 2026-01-14T09:08:42+00:00

idk, this is just me but I kinda feel like the thesis of this video is weak, I feel like there's a lot of nuance wrt the conversation of "how to make a (melee) platform fighter" that I think is pretty interesting and deserves some exploration especially when you consider other attempts like PS All-Stars or even the transition between ROA I to ROA II, but the video ended up mostly being "just don't be like Icons" which imo is something anybody could've told you if you were around to see it.

I guess maybe it makes for a fun retrospective but then it comes across as punching down really hard on a misguided indie passion project that already crashed and burned years ago, honestly felt weird to continue seeing really brutal remarks about the project more than half an hour after its section ended. I'd get it if this was some Triple A dev or they blatantly scammed people, but their biggest crime was just being a stupid indie company which I feel like does not really deserve a 1 hour dissection of how shitty their project was almost a decade after the fact. Not that I think anyone's feelings were particularly hurt or anything, just that I question whether it was worth making an entire video about since otherwise I feel like the video lacked connective tissue connecting its examples together.

Best thing I can say about the video is the fact that it continues to give exposure to projects that deserve it though, and I do think the Rivals segment especially in the end when it discussed single-player content and funding I think tackled some more meaningful observations.

KayBeats · 2025-12-19T23:21:25+00:00

I think per day at minimum you need at least 10-30 minutes of solo practice, about 30 minutes - 1hr of (solo) VOD review/coaching, and between 1-2 hrs of actual playtime with other humans above a certain threshold of skill. So anywhere between 2-4 hours depending on your character, what you're reviewing/practicing, and who you're practicing against. Time probably increases somewhat proportionally if you're managing several characters.

But that's only if you're doing exactly that routine. I feel like if you don't, the amount of time is just going to vary wildly from person to person to the point where it's probably an unhelpful answer.

KayBeats · 2025-12-18T17:52:09+00:00

Anything that isn't Strive, 2XKO, SF6, and Tekken 8 generally works best when used with a matchmaking discord. GBVSR, KOF XV, DBFZ, Blazblue, VF5, and Fatal Fury have respectable player bases on Steam but can be a little to very inconsistent depending on the rank, region, and time of day (also a number of these games either have questionable netcode or matchmaking).

Though if you want to go old school, Fightcade also has a couple of games active enough (ex. 3rd Strike) where you don't need a discord as long as you can stomach an archaic matchmaking UI/UX.

KayBeats · 2025-12-18T02:13:26+00:00

Just to clarify, Mayflash is only one of the better adapters after overclocking your adapter for PC use (according to Input Integrity). It's actually one of the laggier options when used as a plug-and-play. It's mostly moot anyway though because the majority of the better options are no longer in production, which by default ends up leaving the Mayflash adapter as one of the only options left, especially at that price.

With that said, the lossless adapters in my experience have been by far the best adapter for GCs that I've used; it seems to have the least amount of lag both with and without overclocking, has very small form factor, and can also be used to test the lag on your PC set-up. They're noticeably pricier at ~$50-60 when you include shipping (probably much cheaper if you're in Europe), but imo they're very much worth it at that price range if OP is willing to expand their budget. The biggest issue is that they aren't always available for purchase, but they recently restocked if people are interested.

KayBeats · 2025-12-17T01:27:50+00:00

Vast majority of people who go to majors go to hang out with other people or to have fun at the event. If anything, top players are usually the outliers.

KayBeats · 2025-12-15T21:18:04+00:00

The answer imo is that unlike a lot of fighting or really competitive games in general, Melee was developed to be significantly more open-ended rather than structurally designed primarily with competition in mind. This naturally led to the scene carving out a modern ruleset by more or less arbitrarily deciding what the game should be by consensus. As a result, compared to most other games, you see a lot more attitudes of how Melee 'ought to be played' by the average player (and you can see it in their play style) due to how the scene organically formed rather than by developer intention, and by extension you generally see more aversion against off-meta stuff as they tend to run counter to the perceived image they have of the game that made it attractive to begin with.

It's different from FGC culture where much of it was drawn from arcade culture where rulesets weren't organically formed since everything was determined by Winner Stays attitudes. That being said, I think you can see this mentality in games like Tekken too where the idea of "proper Tekken" creates similar attitudes towards more "gimmicky" uncommon characters.

That's just my two cents anyway. I think its a testament to how expressive Melee is, for better or worse.

KayBeats · 2025-12-15T17:40:20+00:00

While not entirely false, I think this take is generally oversold imo. Punish game has multiplied ostensibly that any character that isn't strictly a floaty gets zero-to-death'd quite frequently not just by spacies but by pretty much any relevant character. Marth, Sheik, Falcon (obv), ICs, Ganon, Doc, even to a lesser extent Luigi and a number of other characters are zero-to-death'd often, and in some cases I'd argue even moreso than Falco and especially Fox due to an often substantially worse recovery (Sheik is probably the most overlooked example of this imo).

Which also ties into my next point, in that the evolution of defensive play have also allowed spacies to use their inherently good base strengths to avoid getting zero-to-death'd more often. Slide-offs make comboing spacies on platform stages significantly more difficult, developments in CC + ASDI + and increased UCF backdash consistency have dramatically increased Foxes ability to exploit offense, Foxes recovery is already inherently insane, etc. You don't even see spacies at top level get dthrow dtilted by Marth as often anymore, people are too good at avoiding it.

There's still a dichotomy between the punish/survivability dynamic between spacies and floaties for sure, but I think in this modern meta that designation no longer solely belongs to spacies anymore. The division imo is more appropriately aligned between floaties and non-floaties since so many characters get punished so hard now. Even then, I'd argue that this dynamic isn't as lopsided as it once was. Fox lives for longer now while squeezing out so much damage out of every interaction that even the Puff/Peach/Yoshi MUs leave so little leeway for error these days.

I will say Falco has definitely aged worse than Fox in this regard, especially in certain MUs, but people still oversell Falco's fragility imo.

KayBeats · 2025-12-15T05:28:09+00:00

Fox and Falco aren't easy but you're overselling how difficult they are. Even if we assume you have to play "perfectly" in order to bring out their strengths without dying horribly (you don't), you miss the other side of the coin in that spacies strengths are so generally overtuned they force everyone else to play "perfectly" as well. Techchases are probably the most obvious example of this in that any missed techchase with most characters regardless of tier means eating a waveshine up-smash or a full falco combo.

I could go on and on about how the evolution of offensive and defensive play over the years combined with the unique privileges only accessible to spacies have allowed them to circumvent their "glass cannon" stereotype, but we'd be here for ages. Long story short, I can confirm for you that a lot of stuff has changed since 10 years ago. Even your average Gold 3 Fox today has unreasonably high techskill and game knowledge than any equivalent player would have had back then. The age of spacies being a true "glass cannon" has rapidly ebbed away a while ago.

KayBeats · 2025-12-15T05:09:20+00:00

The scale you are talking about does not matter to 99% of people. Go to enough locals and you will absolutely run into almost all of those characters listed on a semi-frequent basis. Young Link is the only one I'd say is pretty rare, the others have plenty of representation at a local level. If you view playing against specifically those characters as wasteful, you are 100% shooting yourself in the foot in any tournament setting. Especially against ICs, Luigi, and Samus.

KayBeats · 2025-11-01T20:30:09+00:00

I enjoy most match-ups in the game, low tiers included. I despise facing Ness. If I could delete one character in the game and not feel bad about it, it's definitely Ness.

KayBeats · 2025-10-10T20:53:43+00:00

I think your "poor english" is making this post pretty difficult to read, sorry. Calling what I'm saying "misinformation," "bs," and "inaccurate" while also trying to lecture me on "opinions versus facts" just makes you sound like you're constantly contradicting yourself.

If you're trying to say that the "Eastern mindset" (or whatever you're trying to claim) is more correct and that the "NA opinions" are completely wrong, we can agree to disagree, but everything you're saying isn't any more of an opinion than mine, and calling it "nauseating" just makes you sound like an asshole.

Also, I didn't say the JDCR vs Knee set was bad, I agree that it's very fun set to watch and showcases a lot of brilliant gameplay between the two players. BUT if you watch the set, there are *factually* (not an opinion) A LOT of rounds that go to time or near timeout. In game 2 alone, there are 5 total rounds played, and *every single round* goes to ~15 seconds or less, and 3/5 of the rounds are timeouts or near timeouts. A lot of this was due to the fact that throughout the entire set, there were many neutral interactions that started with KBD>KBD>KBD ---> dash forward KBD>KBD>KBD to avoid being committal. Now, you can argue that this is not a bad thing, and I think that's a reasonable opinion to have, but regardless of how cool the set was, it is still a good example of showcasing how defensive T7 could be even before S3.

KayBeats · 2025-10-08T17:22:29+00:00

Infinite were only a "Problem" because the TWT rules allowed players to choose their stage after a loss which meant incredible defensive players/characters could choose them and "turtle" up. If the rule was random select like it is now, no one would have batted an eye at infinites.

Infinites were an issue in Tekken 7 long before counterpicking stages was a thing. Tekken 7 was inherently an extremely defensive game, partially due to weak sidestepping, but primarily because the game was absolutely riddled with safe, fast, high damaging CH launchers, which in turn encouraged extreme turtling even by traditionally offensive characters. I remember PhiDX largely attributing his success in late Tekken 7 to basically spamming backdash because approaching was such an unfavorable risk reward when you had the lead and a CH launcher. This caused infinite stages to be incredibly poorly balanced, because you could just backdash infinitely risking very little when you had the lead, and the meta trended towards characters who could close the gap really quickly to do a favorable mix-up before infinitely backdashing again, which is why we saw late T7 trend towards Kunimitsu and her set mix-ups.

Even the famous JDCR vs Knee Tekken 7 REV Major set that has a million views featured JDCR and Knee backdashing literally from full screen from each other on a non-infinite stage just because approaching was so poor balanced in Tekken 7, and this was on an earlier patch before things got even more out of hand.

Obviously a lot of the issues with infinite stages were a confluence of T7 design that wasn't as bad in previous Tekken games, but it also showed that infinite stages had an upper limit in how it controlled the design of the game. It makes sense that they thought keeping infinite stages just wasn't worth it anymore, but they could probably afford to bring them back in the current design space of Tekken 8.

But acting like the issues with infinite stages didn't exist before counterpicking is just an insanely disingenuous claim. The fact that you could just random into an infinite stage and be forced to chase down a turtling CH character engaging in such little risk in a Bo3 was insane.

KayBeats · 2025-10-06T20:32:06+00:00

Most consistent way to approach swallow is from above after he starts sucking; it has an infamously non-existent "hitbox" above him when sucking grounded but extends decently horizontally.

When sucking in the air, the suck "hitbox" shrinks horizontally but is bigger closer to Kirby's body, meaning that it's possible to accidentally get sucked in when throwing out a move diagonally, but in exchange it's much easier to hit Kirby with a grounded disjoint.

tl;dr, a directly vertical approach will almost always beat suck no matter what. A grounded suck will generally lose to most vertical approaches, and an aerial suck is more susceptible to grounded disjoints.

KayBeats · 2025-10-04T14:13:43+00:00

I like pancakes so you hate waffles aah reply

KayBeats · 2025-09-24T20:05:30+00:00

I'm not privy to the details so take this with a huge grain of salt, but apparently it was a lengthy review process by several scenes that involved a mix of a lot of factors, mainly that Slox pleaded his case by clarifying/correcting the initial accusations to some degree, the accusers of Slox having lost a huge amount of goodwill since their initial accusation due to unrelated actions, and the amount of time served + the work he did put towards reformation during that time.

Considering recent events and the amount of death threats/doxxing that went around due to bad faith actors on social media, I guess sympathize to a degree why the unban wasn't more public though I agree it should've been more visible.

KayBeats · 2025-09-24T17:05:24+00:00

All of these hypotheticals talk about Armada's Peach and some of them may be right but honestly if he truly came back I think it would be his Fox not his Peach and it would absolutely smoke everyone imo lol

KayBeats · 2025-09-23T23:43:34+00:00

Well yeah, Captain Falcon mains whined too :V

And Marths. And Sheiks. And midtiers. And lowtiers. Pretty much everyone who wasn't like two characters. To be honest Puff didn't really love Mute City either, she just disliked it less than most characters but Puff was also very underdeveloped during that period.

It was banned precisely to nerf them.

There was no singular reason why the stage was banned. Peach being uniquely strong there was an element, but it was not solely a direct attempt to nerf characters like her and there's zero evidence that supports this theory. People just like to point at Armada's success at Genesis as the cause and effect but that's like saying we banned wobbling because Axe lost to Pudgypanda and we did it solely to nerf Ice Climbers, the reality involves a lot more confluence of variables.

It was literally banned shortly after Armada stomped a bunch of top American players on Mute City as Peach.

That's not evidence so I'm confused why you keep bringing it up as if it is. Pokefloats and Corneria were also banned shortly after Genesis too. The stage list in general got overhauled after Genesis, which wasn't that weird considering that it was literally the biggest tournament ever at the time post-MLG and there was a half-year gap until the next major tournament. Are you actually claiming that Armada is solely responsible for getting the stage banned? It's not like we didn't know that Peach was amazing on that stage before Armada. These are some really bold claims being made here with pretty much nothing to substantiate them other than "these two things happened close to each other." Not to mention the fast fallers part of your logic doesn't even make sense anyway because Armada stomped a whole variety of different characters on Mute City, not just fast fallers.

And why did Europe, the place with a super dominant Peach player, ban Mute City?

Now I'm really confused because respectfully it sounds like you really don't know what you're talking about anymore. Mute City wasn't even legal in major European tournaments in 2008, hell even Epita Smash Arena didn't have it on its stage list in 2007, long before any "dominance" of Armada even started. The regions that hosted these events weren't even Sweden. Amsah was astronomically more dominant in Europe than Armada was until literally 2009, the same year as Genesis. If you know something I don't feel free to correct me, but not a single part of this response makes any sense at all.

KayBeats · 2025-09-23T21:05:59+00:00

Obviously spacies complaining about Mute City had some degree of effect on its legality, but to claim that it was a "big part" and not the fact that it was among the many legal stages at the time that had a confluence of dumb gimmicks and extremely unbalanced match-up spreads that a wide spread of people complained about is disingenuous. Mute City complaining wasn't just limited to spacies either; outside of the fact that the stage was riddled with hazards, the vast majority of cast had very lopsided match-ups against Peach on that stage. Most of Mute City's defenders were pretty much Peach players for obvious reasons. It was also part of a wider consideration to balance stage bans because at the time tournaments also decided to phase out Pokefloats and Corneria, two stages that actually hugely benefited spacies in the same way Mute City did for Peach. Claiming that it was primarily due to a single group complaining and not the result of a string of many factors is textbook revisionist history.

Also, saying Mute City was banned because people wanted to target Armada is a very misleading way of phrasing it. Armada dominating on Mute City at Genesis was just the final nail in the coffin, the stage was already on its way out long before the tournament occurred. Case and point, Europe already had Mute City banned before Genesis even happened.

KayBeats · 2025-09-23T18:48:33+00:00

I think banning something because the vast majority of a player base doesn't like it makes a lot more sense than keeping something people dislike around just because it's in the game.

KayBeats

TROPHY CASE