Melee's Stupid Advantages 

I love how the more Melee is analyzed, the more apparent it becomes that it's code is held together by duct tape.

It’s amazing that I have absolutely no intention of playing Melee at the level of involvement discussed in these videos, and yet I still find them so goddamn interesting

What if Luigi Cyclone wasn't actually nerfed in Ultimate and we just haven't found the right combination for it to fly yet?

Feels like port priority has become more of a psychological advantage than an actual one. Under the pressure of knowing your opponent has a slight unfair advantage it make sense to crack a little more than usual, especially when there’s something to blame it on. It’s like a handful of bad stories have lead to it being seen as a bigger advantage than it actually is.

No wonder Luigi isn't used by high-level players. To use him to his maximum potential, you need to memorize every combination of skin, character, and stage.

Bruh the Luigi cyclone charge broke me more than anything else in this

My man really spent 3 and a half minutes to expose Plup's Johns

Seriously a masterclass in editing.

Every time i think he’s made the best video possible, then he somehow makes an even better one

That luigi cyclone fact is one of the most obscure things I've ever heard about this game. And that's saying a lot

There some Port Priority oddities you missed: When a Sudden Death is initiated, if both players are KOd at the same time, the lowest port wins there. (that doesn't work on any of the 1P modes because it still results a Game Over in Regular Match or Failure in Event Match or Multi-man Melee). And when two characters attempt to pick the same item at the same time, the lowest port will grab it first. If two (or more) airborne characters attempt to land in the exact same place on the ground, the lowest port always get pushed to the left.

Port priority is almost certainly never designed with intent, as the start of the video suggests. It's a consequence in the order of operations of game states, so it usually manifests as a side-effect

you can consistently make the most technical topics entertaining without dumbing it down at all well played sir, amazing vid per usual

Personally, my cyclone gets charged whenever AsumSaus uploads a new video.

Luigi doing the "Luigi ladder" into grabbing the back of the T in the word "Weirdest" shown on screen is fucking insane, I love how above and beyond the editing goes for these videos

I'm surprised, I never actually knew that about the Luigi cyclone. That's crazy. It's honestly impressive to me that reading the cyclone charge doesn't cause more issues somehow since it's not reading an intended variable but random garbage data.

I have heard of port priority for years and now finally understand it. Thank you

That Luigi cyclone shit is insane. Please tell me that every iteration for legal stages has been gone thru and figured out.

There's another thing you didn't menction: higher ports spawns in the air while port 1 spawns grounded. That means you can't waveland or double jump at the begining of a match with port 1, but you can do it with certain characters in the other ports. Nice video!

Having them do rock paper scissors right before the game gives a pretty big psychological advantage in that regard, would almost be better not to know.

Bro your editing just gets better and better!

i want to believe that there is a luigi player who has memorised *every* match-up possible to always land himself a charged cyclone no matter the scenario

I think that theres also a mental factor to this, since plup knows that the combo is true because of port priority, he's probably trying slightly less to avoid it because he knows he'll get hit by it either way

The "cyclonecharged" thing specifically is uninitialized and would be referred to as undefined behavior in the context of C (and I believe C++ as well, but that has a different standard). It's uninitialized meaning the value was not set to zero. This is literally a single character difference: malloc (allocate only), and calloc (allocate, set zero). These are heap state management functions, so if the data is uninitialized, it is set to whatever the current value is after the memory was freed. Using uninitialized variables is not a good source of randomness assuming that was the intended design decision; however, a more reasonable explanation is that the programmer forgot to initialize the variable which is easy to do if the GameCube standard library doesn't have calloc, in which case you have to write "variable = 0;" at some point before it's use, and if it's an array of memory, you have to now iterate over all of that memory and set that to zero manually as well. It could also be due to a compiler bug.

8:00 wait can we talk about how Zain is apparently frame perfect out of grab basically half the time? The precision of top players is astounding.

As a programmer, I get the sense that port priority is more of an artifact of how machines work. For example, the CPU probably updates the state of each character one at a time and might not finish before rendering the next frame.

The sheer level of jank in Melee is insane, I love how this broken mess of toothpicks and duct tape became a competitive smash hit

I was not prepared for 3:13 when I came back from doing something else lmao

Luigi's cyclone variable is straight up unassigned? That's crazy. Earliest mistake new coders are warned about, can't imagine what kind of mess the development crunch was and the suffering involved for the developers.

"this SOB skipped a frame" had me rolling lmfao

the duck part for luigi's cylcone made me literally crack up this was an extremely well created video

Schrödinger's Charge: I don't know if Luigi's cyclone is charged or uncharged until I use his down B.

Luigi cyclone also looks at what stage you were hovering over when you started. If you picked battlefield, it may be charged, but if you *randomed* to battlefield, it may not be, with every other circumstance being exactly the same.

That Luigi one hurt my soul. Declaring a variable without even a temporary ANYTHING assigned to it is just asking for trouble. They're lucky it didn't crash the game, though if it did, then they might have noticed it.

Your visualizations are so wonderful. You do a great job of conveying complex/confusing things clearly.

Just the calm "This son of a bitch skipped a frame" still lives in my head to this day

He managed to make a 15 minute video feel like a 25 minute video in the best way. It's always good when he uploads.

When you think his editing can’t be better, he surpasses himself

This channel is partly why I know so much about melee and why I was excited to try it on slippi, and i finally installed it and started playing it yesterday. Has been extremely hard to put down since. Thanks Asum!

0:22 Dark Souls 2 hitboxes

AsumSaus has by far the greatest thumbnails and content on youtube

Jank and quirks like this are dumb, incredibly specific, and very much melee. Love it. Merry Christmas, AsumSaus! And thanks for the video!

I don't understand how a buggy game can be competitive

Cyclone charge being an intentional game mechanic with a dedicated variable and not some weird physics glitch is the most surprising revelation in this video

Finally, for so long, he has uploaded once more.

"frame-perfect" is very hard to improvise despite being possible to practice. Melee is so complicated because of the decision making in short amounts of time, and 1/60th of a second is rarely enough to decide between a ton of moves, only a few of which will even do anything

The skipped frame on throws and the ledge grab priority are almost certainly caused by the exact same thing. (And ledge grab priority is certainly not intentional.) Which is that the game doesn't process all of the character's actions at the same time. Instead running all of the code for port 1 first, then port 2, then 3, and finally 4. And things that are done on an earlier port, can effect what later ports can do. Lets take two characters grabbing ledge at the same time as an example. The character on an earlier port will check if it can grab the ledge, it can, so it grabs the ledge and marks the ledge as "already being grabbed." Then when the next character also checks if it can grab the same ledge on the same frame. It cannot because the ledge has "already" been grabbed by the character on the earlier port. Even though the two characters should have grabbed the ledge on the same frame. Same thing with characters grabbing each other on the same frame. The character on a port that is processed earlier will grab the other character, before that other character gets to process that it grabbed the first character. This "port order" as one could call it, is also responsible for the skipped frame on throws. If a character on a later port throws a character on an earlier port. Then on that frame, the earlier port will *not* update its stun timer as they haven't been thrown *yet*. And it is only once the later port gets to process the throw, that the earlier port's character actually is considered "thrown" But if the roles are reversed, with the earlier port character throwing the character on the later port. Then the throw will be processed BEFORE the thrown character gets processed. And so once the thrown character does get processed, they will read that they are being thrown and will update their stun timer *on the same frame that they got thrown on.*

3:08 Berdley when Noelle uses a spell she doesn’t know

y'know, it's subtle, but the players spawning in at different times isn't stupid in and of itself; that's exactly how it works in other smash games, after all, albeit far more noticeable thanks to those games calling attention to it with the greater delay between players, camera zooms, and unique intro animations what really makes it stupid is that players become actionable at _different times and apparently before the timer counts down why_

I really love the way you portrayed the frame count in this

I'm a programmer. The Luigi cyclone bit did mental damage.

Sounds like the real effect that port priority had on Plup was the mind game. If he’s still complaining about it after the match, you know he was wasting brain space on it during the match.

For the example on Plup to be more accurate, I don’t think you can argue that port priority only mattered 4 times and that Plup probably could not have acted in time anyway. If both are true, you should also consider cases where he had 1 actionable frame but got combo’d anyway. In those cases he might have escaped if he had 2 frames instead

Port priority is a huge personal gripe of mine on melee, so thanks for the extensive coverage! Little less significant but ledge grabs, and team combos are also affected by port priority, it can also come up for landing on Randall at the same time. Crazy stuff, great job on the video!

Your level of writing and editing has reached absotulety insane heights! It has been a pleasure to watch you improve. Congrats and thank you for the insightful entertainment 😁

Cheers to another amazingly edited and visually educational video! I can only imagine how easily understood the world would be if more people had your editing style and explanation!

I had no idea Luigi's cyclone charge was such a mess lmao

Luigi's cyclone charge= 🦆 Lol I actually think it perfectly fits Luigi's character design. He's supposed to be wacky, and unpredictable.

Just found this channel, gotta say I'm impressed with the editing. It's very helpful in explaining a pretty complex topic.

I heard a Paper Mario sound effect in there, a true sign taste if I've ever heard one. Seriously though, your editing is top tier and all of RU-vid should take fucking notes.

16 minutes of actually dense video, contentwise, based on a really specific aspect of the game and discussing all the possible implications of said aspect. I love this channel

Rejoice, mortals, for your one true saviour known as Melee has arrived to free you from your shackles of such things as 'sensible programming'

Never before has a game been more precise in it's actions and inputs while also being fundamentally broken and I love it

the animations are very well done and make it extremely easy to follow along. A+ video all around

If fighting games were dogs melee would be an old pug with several health complications and no teeth but with very loving owners

The content king is back! Merry Christmas AsumSaus :)

Besides the extensive research, great writing, and excellent game capture- your animations are just super lively, creative, and entertaining! They fit so perfectly alongside melee's art style that I could picture these videos as some bonus trivia mode within the game itself! It's what keeps me coming back to this channel with every new upload.

“Let’s examine, frame-by-frame…” *immediately pauses video* I do not have time right now

For the Zain-Plup analysis I think it's worth analyzing every time Zain throws, regardless of if he's frame perfect with his follow-up. Sure, that's not answering a question of "is the combo true," but it does more accurately answer the question of "did port priority influence the match," which is the more interesting question.

This game never ceases to amaze me with how broken it is

"I'm done talking about it now." Yeah right... "... You know what, I'm not done talking about it." Yusss, more tasty editing to consume with my eyes!

Great video editing and story telling. This subject could easily be very confusing but you made it crystal clear.

When the world needed him most... He Returned.

Same frame grab can be fixed by causing a recoil and same frame ledge grab can be fixed with ECB position comparison and denying both players the ledge if both players have identical ECB x positions. These mods exist on SmashBoards and I haven't heard a good reason why they shouldn't be implemented into the game since they are 100% neutral.

Amazing video man! I do not have the quick reflexes to play smash at a good level but I still found this so fascinating. Editing/visuals were superb!

I think the fact that so many of them were that close to the line for being true combos, the one frame difference impacted it in terms of how it feels when playing & other mental factors and can't be quantified in the way shown here.

2:44 these simple details really just make my day,good one asum,bird’s funny.

1:27 "Mom said it's my turn to win the interaction"

Love the hard work put into this video! Love the in-depth analysis! Go go go!

With your explanation of port priority it seems to me it's even more important than I previously thought. With zain being frame perfect actionable out of grab about half the time, then very likely hitting the opponent frame perfectly reduced by another half so say 25% or let's be liberal, 12.5%. Adding a whole new frame takes another half away, and should (on average) matter for at least 12.5% of the cases (on the low end) - and that's actually a lot. A 1-frame window becoming a 2-frame window is so strong, it's more or less made into a feature on the UCF (Universal Controller Fix) - fixing backdashing from being a 1-frame window to a 2-frame window to activate a backdash. All of a sudden, mostly everyone could do it consistently, instead of previously where it was hard to do. (That was also because of frame polling, which is another really weird issue). It's essentially twice as easy, and because of the frame polling issue, a lot of time it increases the time you have available by several hundred percent.

Your editing and thumbnail game has got to be the best in the whole community, I'm always just blown away. Also, super glad to see more people learning about port oddities. I find the reaction hilarious every time I tell non-Melee players that I play rock paper scissors before every single set so that I can use port 4.

Incredible video. Great narrative, oration, editing, calling-out human bias, information, everything. Loved it.

It’s so great to see you again. You’re videos are amazing as always :D

Your edits are S tier. Visualizing your points to the audience is a very effective way to teach the audience.

when he metioned luigi's cyclone and all the factors determining charged or not, I went " WHAT " outloud. followed directly by WHAT on screen. it was perfect

Melee has the advantage of getting us AsumSaus videos

this is insanely well made. love your work

Informative as always. Editing is so dope. Looking forward to more content!

You must storyboard your video with that level of coherent editing. Props! Great vid!

10:03 Can you imagine how salty the community would be if Hbox regularly hit rests out of up throw up air attempts?

One thing I'd like to mention about the +1 frame port priority throws; even if that extra frame doesn't make a combo true, it requires whatever option the victim can use to be one frame faster than otherwise, which limits options Of course that doesn't matter for Fox and Falco because of funny shine move

Very well edited I really like how it's crystal clear and to the point

Finally someone mentioned the spawn timing difference! Again the reward varies extremely based on the positions and matchup, but a character like Falco could start a laser and any rush down character could start running (also note that the "Go!" is on the screen at this time which can be used to hide your character)

The quality on this was amazing! You were able to make all the concepts easy to understand and visually interesting at the same time. Great work!

This video is so highly polished it’s ridiculous! Well crafted!

"port priority makes certain combos free" AsumSaus: *"and I took that personally"*

14:41 this is a literal bruh moment

The return of the king!!! Man this is gonna be great

This is why you gotta initialize your variables

This was incredibly done! Great work!