The sneering, sniveling Smash elitists are terrible, I agree, but let’s take a real look at why people compete in Smash with items off, shall we?
When playing a fighting game–or any game, really–competitively, it’s a test of skill. Yours against your opponent’s; who’s better? Who’s got better reflexes, better technical control, better strategy? It’s a clash people train hard for, and competitive fighting tournaments in almost any game are a spectacle of skill and control.
You know what absolutely shits on people’s skill? What tears that competition apart and puts its outcome in the hands of the gods rather than the hands of those actually competing, what invalidates all that training?
Random events in a match like this are unpredictable, and, more importantly, unfair. Unfairly weighted–I’ve had games where good items dropped exclusively on one player’s head and garbage on the other’s. Unfairly random–you have no control out of what comes out of that pokeball, even if both players get exactly the same items thrown their way, let alone any of the other randomly spawning items with random outcomes. The sheer chaos of a party-play Smash match is a delight for casual fun but if you’re trying to prove who’s actually better at a game it’s an absolute nightmare.
Should we just take the condescension from sneering Melee elitists without objection? Hell no, those people are assholes and deserve to be called out, and Melee competition needs to die in favor of a better and better-balanced game. But they play the way they do for a very good reason, and there’s a lot more of them that do than just the loud, obnoxious douchebags! Not to mention, as a friend of mine said while we were discussing this post:
You’re better than them if you’re not an asshole, not because of the way you play.
(Also, you’re better at a game if you’re playing on a control surface you’re familiar with. I’m better at guitar hero if I play on the particular guitar controller I got deep into the game with–I’m used to its weight, size, and layout, and while it’s not a huge dip, my performance noticeably suffers if I use different controllers. It’s the same for traditional controllers; people who use Playstation controllers have a harder time on Xbox controllers, and vice versa; people who use traditional controllers have a hard time with fight sticks, and also vice versa, amusingly. It doesn’t help that the Wii controller was asstastic for traditional gameplay; there’s a reason Team Ninja were so flabbergasted when Yoshio Sakamoto insisted the three-dimensional Metroid: Other-M control entirely by holding a wiimote sideways, with occasional awkward switches to waving it at the scanner bar to aim missiles. I haven’t played with a switch controller myself yet, but Nintendo doesn’t have a terribly great track record for controllers, so let people use the ones they like.)
