• Meta-Game Developments
This is probably the first fighting game where I have seriously, consciously, and actively taken part in the advancement of any one character’s meta-game. I’ve always hopped on board a fighting game some time after certain rigors and standards have already been set by my predecessors, and that was true in Melee as well as I didn’t pick up the game competitively until sometime during 2004. For all of Brawl’s quirky constraints, supposed limitations on advanced game play and superficial sheen of lack of balance, it’s already shaping up to be something that’s both fun and competitive simultaneously. As a community, we have the opportunity to truly pioneer the meta-game of a character, and that is a pretty cool thing to be able to watch unfold from the very beginning.
That said, I had an extensive conversation with GameDragonX over AIM a few nights ago, and I think there’s sufficient evidence to believe that we’re approaching a fork in the road regarding Diddy’s meta-game: it is either going to be pushed to new, exciting, advanced and unprecedented levels of play, or it’s going to take a graceless swan-dive and collide into a brick wall. The Diddy forums have experienced an influx of curious and eager new users in the last several weeks, and you don’t have to take my word for it, but I firmly believe that it’s going to be these new players who are in the driver’s seat in determining what that new trajectory will be.
Unfortunately, the both of us lean on the latter as inevitability in large part because it will only be a matter of time now before one of Diddy’s greatest components to his quiet, left-field competitive success evaporates completely: his lack of notoriety. It has been more or less crucial in lending me that important element of surprise – the ability to just blindside and overwhelm with a character who has (arguably) the most versatile and sophisticated brand of item micromanagement in the entire franchise.
But for as solid as Diddy’s current peak level of game play is, let’s face the facts: even Diddy’s most talented, premiere representatives (GameDragonX, Nanerz, NinjaLink) haven’t been able to consistently clinch first-place finishes in tournaments. GDX has participated in a tournament literally every weekend since Brawl’s release, and he still hasn’t managed to get past Florida’s infestation of top-ranked Snake mains in the country to grab the gold.
My fear here is that people are going to be looking at this collection of dazzling videos we have and think that the banana rush is all that they are going to need to be victorious. I don’t particularly blame anyone for feeling this way; it is, after all, a very impressive thing to watch players get devastated by that sort of flashy, aggressive, hyper-kinetic banana salvo. The thing with this though is that it will only be a matter of (very short) time before everyone on the competitive scene firmly acclimates themselves to this basic, two-dimensional approach; and before they send these new Diddy mains kicking and screaming all the way back to the forums for quick fixes. From there, it’s also only a matter of time before accusations of overrated-ness start to flood in.
My only advice to new players is to not skip these critical steps of learning all the nuances of Diddy’s entire move set. It would be a very unfortunate thing for you guys to pass up on these necessary fundamentals and cut straight to being ***** in competitive play. People need a good ***-beating every once in awhile to put their strengths and weaknesses into perspective, but you’ll gain nothing from being obliterated if you don’t understand why you lost in the first place.
Bananas don’t always solve everything, and they are a far cry from the ultimate counter to either Snake or Meta Knight, especially if used improperly. Just bear that in mind.
• Move Set and Properties
After dealing with a slew of ROBs, MKs and Peaches (repped hard by Oklahoma’s most famous Melee export, KOS-MOS) who have a penchant for abusing high-priority aerial approaches, I’ve developed an overwhelming fondness for the peanut popgun. It’s a fairly recent acquisition as of the last month, and I wish I started using it sooner. There’s much to be valued in interrupting airborne opponents and then capitalizing on the opening with any number of follow-ups Diddy is capable of. It’s particularly useful against Peaches, since the trajectory of an uncharged peanut usually spells “game over” for a Peach who’s floating low enough to abuse the D-air tap-dance.
D-tilts and U-smashes are two moves I would like to see or hear about people making more frequent use of. D-tilts are decent for initial shield-pressuring, but subsequently yield greater results whenever you manage to make them drop their shield and bait the shield-grab when you start spamming it. More often than not, you’ll end up clapping them right in the nuts as it is faster than most grabs in the game. Running U-smash is now my primary spot-dodge punisher; it looks cool out of a cartwheel, but it’s even better when you’re able to rack up free 14-16% damage at a time after you successfully bait spot-dodges. F-smash and D-smash have worked for me in the past, although to significantly less reliable degrees. As we all know, F-smash has a bit of start-up and cool-down (making it an instant liability in this situation), and the sheer speed of the D-smash may move the hitboxes out of position too quickly before the opponent has actually rematerialized from their spot-dodge.
• General Strategies
Nothing ground-breaking here, other than the fact that there’s a certain smug satisfaction I get after I successfully bait a dash chase with retreating banana tosses into a Diddy kick in their direction.
• Discoveries
This may or may not be completely new depending on who you ask around here, but I believe I may have found out a couple of things about Diddy’s crawling capabilities that I don’t think have been posted anywhere. During one of my friendly Snake match-ups today, I thought I would try ducking and crawling underneath Snake’s barrage of grenades for the sake of trying an underused approach, and I learned that a properly-spaced D-tilt actually out-prioritizes the mortar slide/Snake dash. This in and of itself wasn’t too surprising, considering that the D-tilt also stops Meta Knight’s dash attack dead in its tracks with a clanging effect (leaving the surprised MK open for a follow-up).
What was even more interesting was my subsequent trip to training mode, where I played around with crawling a bit more. What I learned here was that you could not only crawl with bananas (duh), but you could also D-tilt with a banana in your hand. It’s relatively simple to execute: once you’re in crawling position with a banana in your hand, rotate the joystick slightly forward to initiate forward movement and then push the attack button. This either produce the effect of throwing the banana straight down (in which case you didn’t push forward enough), or a D-tilt with a banana still in your hand.
Additionally, if you rotate the joystick up closer to the forward position a little bit more, you can produce a low-angled F-tilt Yoga punch with the banana (I was also able to produced the normal F-tilt punch as well). This might also not be anything particularly earth-shattering, but the option to execute to reasonably quick attacks with a banana In your hand, combined with the fact that you can glide-toss out of a crawl can really open up some new approach and defense possibilities, as well as lead into some interesting setups. In the very least, I would argue that this has more merit than being able to F-smash with a banana in your hand. =)
EDIT: I lied. I just retested it, and you can't do a F-tilt or any of its angled variations out of a crawl with a banana in hand. Sorry for the false hopes. You can F-tilt out of a crawl alone, though. I kind of had my doubts about the utility of F-tilting with a banana in your hand over a D-tilt anyway, since it has more cool-down frames after activation.
Just FYI: Glide-tossing backwards out of a forward crawl takes a couple of tries initially, but it's pretty easy. Glide-tossing forward, on the other hand, is going to take lots of work.
And to (sort of) make up for my initial blunder, I did notice that you could implement downward-angled F-tilts into your edge-guarding game without running off the ledge if you simply just crawl all the way to the edge and hit the attack button. We all know a fresh F-tilt has killing capacity at certain percents, so I'm curious to test out what kind of gimping capacity a downward-angled F-tilt might have.
EDIT 2: I just tested crawling D-tilts while holding an item with all characters that apply: Sheik, Lucario, Zero Suit Samus, Squirtle, Pikachu, Yoshi, Ivysaur, Luigi, and Snake. It still seems that Diddy still benefits the most out of this because firstly, his D-tilt is the only spammable D-tilt; secondly, because he will probably always have an item in his hands; and lastly because he has the greatest utility for glide-tossing out of a crawling position. But who knows? - The only characters out of that list that I play extensively are Sheik and Lucario, and it's hard to say what kind of crazy **** people are liable to come up with these days.