- Game Versions
- Smash 3DS, Smash Wii U
Now. Before you read this, unless you have put in a ridiculous amount of effort into Little Mac, main Little Mac, have no life, or are Zero (In which case holy ****), read this first: http://smashboards.com/guides/little-mac-the-bruiser-from-the-bronx.759/ It may not be the greatest of things out there, but hell, showing off what I've done earlier and how far I've pushed myself recently might be a good idea. That link gives a basic explanation and probably will cover some of the things I'll state here, but I plan on making each individual point clear here.
Without anymore stalling of pointless added text like this sentence is right now, let's get on with this, shall we?
Mindgames: Dashdancing, Extended Foxtrot, and the patented 'Autisim Mode.' Unless that's already patented.
Little Mac excels at one thing and one thing only, for the most part: His ground offense game. And a problem arises once you start to get predictable and opponents begin to capitalize on every single mistake that you do. As such, players need to know three strategies, although the first two are SIGNIFICANTLY more useful and likely to succeed than the final one.
Dashdancing is the process of dashing back and forth in a sort of 'dancing' fashion. You will know if you are able to do this by the fact you are kicking dust in both directions faster than my dad's car possibly could in the middle of the desert, as well as Little Mac or any other character changing directions within milliseconds of each previous switch. In order to do this, you must flick the control stick or D-Pad back and forth within something similar to a tenth of a second of each flick, which even after playing since August I've only managed to get down within the past week. This is pretty useful in reality despite having less applications than it probably did in Melee, as opponents will attempt to react by throwing out an attack most likely and you can dash OUT of a Dashdance and proceed to pivot FTilt or FSmash if the situation calls for it.
Extended Foxtrot is similar, but it involves you abusing Little Mac's very good initial dash distance. The method into doing this is much simpler than Dashdancing: You dash forwards, and after the initial dash distance is over, input another dash in the same direction then instantly input a dash in the other direction, similarly to how you did for Dash Dancing. This will make a larger window for Mac to move around and works almost identically to Dash Dancing, and can be used together to cause a gigantic mind**** all the way across the stage instead of just in one place. Otherwise, its just seriously the same thing but with distance to it.
And the 'Autisim Mode', familiar to anyone who watched How to King Dedede (Not Alpharad's, but someone else named Weegee Plays. Watch for a good laugh, if you want.), involves acting like a FG player for a short amount of time, and doing what you probably SHOULDN'T ever do as Little Mac just to mindgame them, then Dashdance and pivot grab and anything else that you expect to do as a GOOD Little Mac. While not a very good idea since this involves either spamming Smash Attacks and using Side B like it's Sheik's FAir, I've actually done this against a few of my respectable friends and it works quite well despite the fact I do it every time.
Stage Control & Why FD Actually Isn't As Good As You Think
Little Mac excels on the stage and is awful offstage, correct? Then the obvious thing to do is to keep that center of the stage to yourself like that last Xbox One that you've been wanting for a year and it's goddamn Black Friday.
Focusing yourself on the center of the stage keeps yourself at the least amount of risk from getting gimped, as well as reduces the risk of attacks such as Captain Falcon, Mario, and Ness's Back Throws and Bowser/Cloud's Forward Throws, merely as examples. It also gives you the most amount of room to run around and do your Little Mac strategies on both sides of you, and gives you more defensive options than hanging out near the ledge.
As an example of how this can be applied, I've developed four situations which demonstrate what can happen comparing two scenarios, where you focus either on your ledge game or your center stage game.
SITUATION 1: Your opponent approaches you quickly as a Fox or Sheik. When standing near the ledge, you have to use either Jab, Down Tilt, Forward Tilt, or Jolt Haymaker in order to attempt to keep opponents on the edge and keep them out. When at the center of the stage, the only thing they CAN do is Approach, and you don't have to worry about throws.
SITUATION 2: Your opponent is projectile camping you from one of the ledges. When you are at the other edge as your opponent, you have to run at them, and hope to god your powershielding skills are good to block their hits (or its a Fox.) When at center stage, the opponent probably won't be doing this unless they rely on projectile camping you due to there being less distance between you and the opponent such as against a Duck Hunt, Link, or Toon Link. If you are on the same ledge as them, how the hell are you getting projectile camped?!
SITUATION 3: Your opponent is playing very defensively and constantly retreating with characters such as Marth, who enjoy spacing. When playing a ledge game, you are forced to leave what you consider the comfort zone to chase after them. When you focus on center stage, you will have a much better chance against them as most of the stage is your ally and you can force them into approaching since you rely on hitting them hard during their approaches. (Maybe not the best of examples, eh?)
SITUATION 4: You're in a Little Mac ditto. No matter how you play, someone's getting Forward Smashed. Probably the only situation where an Edge Game is key.
Not saying here that having a good Edge Game should be a low priority, hell no. But having a good neutral game is always a good scenario, as if you have a good advantage game but a **** neutral how will you get to that advantageous state?
And Final Destination is definitely the best pick for this, right? Since its completely flat, gives maximum running distance, and has no campable platforms. Right?
NO.
You actually are better off picking one of two stages imo: Town and City, or Omega variants of stages such as Palutena's Temple, Gaur Plains, or the home field advantage of Boxing Ring. Those Omega stages offer a Walljump, giving Mac much better upwards recovery than before. And Town and City merely is a stage that I've grown fond with over the very few times I've played it. Stages are mostly up to how you feel, but the best definitely are those Omega stages due to how much assistance a Walljump and flat stages gives.
Extra Tips & Stuff
Spare Tips, you say? But I'm not a Marth main!
Bad jokes aside, Mac has a bunch of little tricks and things I've learned while playing that, while many players might know, some may have no idea about and you might be interested in knowing.
- Down tilted Forward Smash, if they miss a tech, can be followed up by a dashing Up Smash. Which actually is ridiculously powerful.
- Straight Lunge has armor up to 8%, which makes characters like Sheik and Zero Suit cry. Which is a good thing.
- Jab 1 has amazing priority and clashes with a wide variety of projectiles.
- Down Tilt can instantly destroy Diddy Kong's Banannas, and if you have the Bananna Diddy suddenly has a 4-6 or worse matchup against you. Forcing a Trip into one of the strongest Up Smashes around is scary af.
- Don't use Jolt Haymaker until that one last second where your opponent forgets it even exists, then bust it out right before you get hit. It will probably catch them offguard and can net KOs around 120% if you are lucky enough.
- Mac's Armor can't be broken. At least, with his Smashes. As such, challenge strong attacks such as Ganon's Warlock Punch if you're feeling gutsy and your opponent has balls of goddamn steel with your smashes. But don't do this always, otherwise your ass WILL get scrambled harder than some of the eggs I had this morning.
Hopefully this helps out some players, experienced or inexperienced, and hopefully my garbage humour might have made some of you laugh a bit. If you are reading this, please put up a review over this as well as my other guide if possible so I can see what I can improve involving my guides and things. And if anyone wishes to get some tips/fight me/just chat, I've got a Skype and take open challenges almost every day, so send me a message and we can chat on up!
Without anymore stalling of pointless added text like this sentence is right now, let's get on with this, shall we?
Mindgames: Dashdancing, Extended Foxtrot, and the patented 'Autisim Mode.' Unless that's already patented.
Little Mac excels at one thing and one thing only, for the most part: His ground offense game. And a problem arises once you start to get predictable and opponents begin to capitalize on every single mistake that you do. As such, players need to know three strategies, although the first two are SIGNIFICANTLY more useful and likely to succeed than the final one.
Dashdancing is the process of dashing back and forth in a sort of 'dancing' fashion. You will know if you are able to do this by the fact you are kicking dust in both directions faster than my dad's car possibly could in the middle of the desert, as well as Little Mac or any other character changing directions within milliseconds of each previous switch. In order to do this, you must flick the control stick or D-Pad back and forth within something similar to a tenth of a second of each flick, which even after playing since August I've only managed to get down within the past week. This is pretty useful in reality despite having less applications than it probably did in Melee, as opponents will attempt to react by throwing out an attack most likely and you can dash OUT of a Dashdance and proceed to pivot FTilt or FSmash if the situation calls for it.
Extended Foxtrot is similar, but it involves you abusing Little Mac's very good initial dash distance. The method into doing this is much simpler than Dashdancing: You dash forwards, and after the initial dash distance is over, input another dash in the same direction then instantly input a dash in the other direction, similarly to how you did for Dash Dancing. This will make a larger window for Mac to move around and works almost identically to Dash Dancing, and can be used together to cause a gigantic mind**** all the way across the stage instead of just in one place. Otherwise, its just seriously the same thing but with distance to it.
And the 'Autisim Mode', familiar to anyone who watched How to King Dedede (Not Alpharad's, but someone else named Weegee Plays. Watch for a good laugh, if you want.), involves acting like a FG player for a short amount of time, and doing what you probably SHOULDN'T ever do as Little Mac just to mindgame them, then Dashdance and pivot grab and anything else that you expect to do as a GOOD Little Mac. While not a very good idea since this involves either spamming Smash Attacks and using Side B like it's Sheik's FAir, I've actually done this against a few of my respectable friends and it works quite well despite the fact I do it every time.
Stage Control & Why FD Actually Isn't As Good As You Think
Little Mac excels on the stage and is awful offstage, correct? Then the obvious thing to do is to keep that center of the stage to yourself like that last Xbox One that you've been wanting for a year and it's goddamn Black Friday.
Focusing yourself on the center of the stage keeps yourself at the least amount of risk from getting gimped, as well as reduces the risk of attacks such as Captain Falcon, Mario, and Ness's Back Throws and Bowser/Cloud's Forward Throws, merely as examples. It also gives you the most amount of room to run around and do your Little Mac strategies on both sides of you, and gives you more defensive options than hanging out near the ledge.
As an example of how this can be applied, I've developed four situations which demonstrate what can happen comparing two scenarios, where you focus either on your ledge game or your center stage game.
SITUATION 1: Your opponent approaches you quickly as a Fox or Sheik. When standing near the ledge, you have to use either Jab, Down Tilt, Forward Tilt, or Jolt Haymaker in order to attempt to keep opponents on the edge and keep them out. When at the center of the stage, the only thing they CAN do is Approach, and you don't have to worry about throws.
SITUATION 2: Your opponent is projectile camping you from one of the ledges. When you are at the other edge as your opponent, you have to run at them, and hope to god your powershielding skills are good to block their hits (or its a Fox.) When at center stage, the opponent probably won't be doing this unless they rely on projectile camping you due to there being less distance between you and the opponent such as against a Duck Hunt, Link, or Toon Link. If you are on the same ledge as them, how the hell are you getting projectile camped?!
SITUATION 3: Your opponent is playing very defensively and constantly retreating with characters such as Marth, who enjoy spacing. When playing a ledge game, you are forced to leave what you consider the comfort zone to chase after them. When you focus on center stage, you will have a much better chance against them as most of the stage is your ally and you can force them into approaching since you rely on hitting them hard during their approaches. (Maybe not the best of examples, eh?)
SITUATION 4: You're in a Little Mac ditto. No matter how you play, someone's getting Forward Smashed. Probably the only situation where an Edge Game is key.
Not saying here that having a good Edge Game should be a low priority, hell no. But having a good neutral game is always a good scenario, as if you have a good advantage game but a **** neutral how will you get to that advantageous state?
And Final Destination is definitely the best pick for this, right? Since its completely flat, gives maximum running distance, and has no campable platforms. Right?
NO.
You actually are better off picking one of two stages imo: Town and City, or Omega variants of stages such as Palutena's Temple, Gaur Plains, or the home field advantage of Boxing Ring. Those Omega stages offer a Walljump, giving Mac much better upwards recovery than before. And Town and City merely is a stage that I've grown fond with over the very few times I've played it. Stages are mostly up to how you feel, but the best definitely are those Omega stages due to how much assistance a Walljump and flat stages gives.
Extra Tips & Stuff
Spare Tips, you say? But I'm not a Marth main!
Bad jokes aside, Mac has a bunch of little tricks and things I've learned while playing that, while many players might know, some may have no idea about and you might be interested in knowing.
- Down tilted Forward Smash, if they miss a tech, can be followed up by a dashing Up Smash. Which actually is ridiculously powerful.
- Straight Lunge has armor up to 8%, which makes characters like Sheik and Zero Suit cry. Which is a good thing.
- Jab 1 has amazing priority and clashes with a wide variety of projectiles.
- Down Tilt can instantly destroy Diddy Kong's Banannas, and if you have the Bananna Diddy suddenly has a 4-6 or worse matchup against you. Forcing a Trip into one of the strongest Up Smashes around is scary af.
- Don't use Jolt Haymaker until that one last second where your opponent forgets it even exists, then bust it out right before you get hit. It will probably catch them offguard and can net KOs around 120% if you are lucky enough.
- Mac's Armor can't be broken. At least, with his Smashes. As such, challenge strong attacks such as Ganon's Warlock Punch if you're feeling gutsy and your opponent has balls of goddamn steel with your smashes. But don't do this always, otherwise your ass WILL get scrambled harder than some of the eggs I had this morning.
Hopefully this helps out some players, experienced or inexperienced, and hopefully my garbage humour might have made some of you laugh a bit. If you are reading this, please put up a review over this as well as my other guide if possible so I can see what I can improve involving my guides and things. And if anyone wishes to get some tips/fight me/just chat, I've got a Skype and take open challenges almost every day, so send me a message and we can chat on up!
