The Secret Techniques of Offline Fighting Games 

without exaggeration, I've had an experience where I won the first round against a smelly opponent, and the guy took off his jacket and I genuinely could not focus on the second match. I ended up losing the second round and throwing the third round to get away from him. I can vouch that it works irl

This is why moment 37 is so cool, Justin was slapping those buttons and diago didnt drop

I'm so glad that more and more people are getting involved with the scene, but it's honestly so funny how often well established aspects of these games are regurgitated online like they're this "crazy new trick." I love it. Mashing buttons while your opponent combos you is like some day one offline tech. This whole concept of a fighting game is more about mind games and clocking/manipulating the emotions of your opponent than anything else. That's just how it is on the streets.

the crazy thing is like in CS or valorant offline, they now try to have counter measures, but sometimes if you look at the other team, while a flashbang is thrown because the flashes are so bright, you can see the lighting change as it hits someone's face in real time and you know that they are exactly where you threw the flash.

I was at a local a while ago and my opponent mashed wake up super so hard, I could hear it over the sounds of the venue. Another old head will just mash an empty button during every combo. Offline play man. Love it, it’s such a good time

Masking at offline events has made me immune to the stank strat

i don't remember who exactly, but i vividly recall a tournament set during the 00's that someone lost because their opponent literally pulled the "you are now breathing manually" on them

I used to beat so many people once I knew how certain inputs by sound alone can even works online in calls

i get by with just yelling out my characters' special move names to distract my opponent

Reminds me of Aris shitting on hitbox players "typing up a storm" to do giant swings lmao

An excerpt from one of my favorite Magic the gathering articles that I can only find translated from Japanese for some reason: “When Mike Turian, Hall of Fame player, renowned bluffing expert, and current Wizards of the Coast employee, was once asked if he had ever played a perfect game of Magic, he was quick to reply, "All it takes is blinking at the wrong time to disqualify you from a perfect game.” Everything is the game.

When I think of offline strats, I think about that mike haze clip. Smash brawl, the character he’s against has an infinite grab and to mess up the other player, as soon as he got grabbed he would scream as loud as he could to distract them. It’s on RU-vid if you’re interested, horrible audio, be sure to turn down your volume.

When your opponent comes to play with homegrown chemical warfare, it’s truly a miserable experience.

As an 09'er gief player who went to locals, I learned VERY quickly to leave one of my buttons on my TE disconnected so I can do the 720 bait. So fun

This reminds me of when the Japanese players were playing the SF6 demo vs each other. Bonchan blocked Daigo’s wakeup DP and Daigo was confused because he made the DP input really quiet. But Bonchan said he knew because his stick was too quiet lol.

EDIT: Remember that scene from Rush Hour 1, where Detective Carter and Inspector Lee meet up with Detective Johnson while she's in training to disarm a bomb. Suddenly! Carter purposely Slams the glass door, and yells out "JOHNSON! Detective Johnson loses her concentration, and the bomb blows up. she fails the Bomb training. Johnson tells the Trainer, "I was Distracted, sir." And her Trainer replies, "Distractions will be there on the battlefield." Yeah, that was a good movie, and sorry this has nothing to do with "Secret Techniques of offline FGC. My bad and have a good day.

It’s part of the magic, dog. You can’t reasonably litigate something as subconscious as where someone is looking, and you can’t un-hear your opponent mashing on the stick. A lot of the most memorable FGC moments come precisely _because_ the players are playing in person, side by side with a crowd just a couple feet behind them. “What are you standing up for?!?!?” loses a lot of the impact when it’s someone popping off in their home office with the hentai poster in the background.

And there's cheerleaders behind the person trying to tilt you.

I refuse to believe that Apologyman is sorry for anything he has done in a fighting game.

Weaponizing the opponent’s muscle memory … this is Baki the Grappler level play.

I once looked at my opponent's hands to check when they hit a M/H air slasher, so that my SA2 wouldn't get baited. Hand tech is real as fuck.

Sajam got hit by poison irl in a tournament

Frigging Randal in the thumbnail MISS FINSTER MISS FINSTER

bring your s.o. to the local to cheer you on for the aura boost. the gary technique

The FGC equivalent to screen peaking

gotta have those unbound buttons to mash on to throw off your opponents

You would never be able to guess what inputs I'm doing. In first place, my button mapping is really different than normal. In second place, I'm just mashing every button all the time.

Pressing dead buttons is a nice deterrent to people listening to your buttons. They'll be reacting to something they hear and they commit to the counterplay, but they won't see it because the button doesn't do anything. There's also pressing more buttons than necessary for the commands you're doing, as well as silent buttons. You can listen and react to what's happening, but like in martial arts with feints, you can also be faked out for relying too heavily on these things too.

Hearing about fake bursts and fake dps make me want to fake a dp with the dp motion while playing a flash kick character

One time apologyman did item super input but instead of finishing it he dumped an actual box of donuts on the table in front of us He won the set

Used to be a player in my local Project M scene that would grab and pummel until he heard you mashing to break grab, then he would watch your stick for DI before the throw to always guess right. It was as nefarious as it was effective.

cant wait to use my durian scented perfume at locals

I used to fake wavedash right before the round call on Tekken so I give the impression of an offensive round start, but my favorite has always been to input DP before the buffer timming on wake-up. Now a day because I’m on hitbox I have my friend that just DP on reaction to bouton press when I’m just pressing movement bouton, opening them for free

This is what I miss most now that everything is online. So many things feel like they were balanced around your opponent at the very least being on a head to head Versus City style cab where you'd still feel the vibrations of them churning butter.

Wolfkrone can play on both stick and pad back in prime SSF4 but he played all of his tournaments on pad cause the opponent can't hear his inputs.

It's so wild to see this stuff pop up and younger folks are buggin coz like... if you're old enough... you grew up with this stuff in the arcades and it's part of the experience and environment.

Had a dude who jacked p1 from me in T7 at evo and refused to RPS for it. Got so heated that instead of doing the reasonable thing to let the judge know I let it rock. He was so locked in and sat so close to the monitor that I just watched for his obvious tells and reacted accordingly. Won 2-0. Offline is great.

This first happen to me against punk when I realized he could hear me mashing reversals

My leverless buttons are pretty quiet. I've also used membrane keyboards my entire life so I don't have the habit of pressing keys or buttons very hard. However, you CAN purposefully mash hard enough so that they make a very noticeable sound. One of the buttons also makes a very specific spring sound but only if you press it in a certain way (some lube would probably get rid of it, but I pretty much never press it like this by accident so I didn't bother). I legitimately consider this a huge huge HUGE advantage in offline tourneys.

the controller I use to compete in Fighting Games is the same controller I use to compete in Platfighters, and as a result it has waaayyy more buttons than necessary for trad fighters. This means at any point while playing Guilty Gear I have about 6 completely blank buttons that all make slightly different sounds that I can mash if I think the opponent is paying attention to me instead of the game they're supposed to be playing.

my first round at evo I played against a Kazuya and every time he went to hellsweep I heard it and reacted I felt like the smartest man ever

I remember playing MvC2 at the arcade and having a friend or a complete stranger mashing on the corner of my eye and it never crossed my mind that they were mashing at the time. I completely ignored it. Fastforward 10 to 15 years later, it STILL never crossed my mind. (Even in competitive play)

I haven’t really noticed it with sticks, but some leverless controllers are super loud. I definitely didn’t get how impactful it was until I went to an offline event. Friendly reminder to support your locals if you have them. It’s a great place to shoot the shit with like-minded people and it’s a nice change of pace from grinding ranked.

There are mind games on head to head setups as well. If it's an arcade cabinet, some people mash so hard that they shake the whole cabinet, I've beaten people with that knowledge before (never had someone fake-shake the cabinet though, usually if they're mashing that hard, they mean it lol).

I put a fake button on my box that's right next to my RA button for Tekken. Catch sooo many people slipping by mashing it loud AF then going for a low or throw 😂

Recently, I RAed in a Tekken tournament because I heard my opponent press a button. They were using a hitbox and just moved. It got blocked and punished :(

I will mash reversal super loud as shit to scare my opponent and then not press the attack button pretty regularly. Everyone I play with knows I do this. At least one person I play with has stolen this tech.

This reminds me SO much of screenpeeking back in the day. 00s and and earlier kids know what I'm talking about. :)

Actually been thinking about building a stick with speakers in it so I can blast my favorite music mid set. I listen to Speedcore BTW, if you don’t know what that is think loud, distorted, fast(obviously) and potentially disruptive.

When I was playing soul Calibur 6, I would look straight at my opponents controller whenever either of us got hit by reversal edge.never got the chance to do it in tournament because it's a bum ass mechanic but it definitely got a rise out of the people around me lol

The secret technique that gets me hard is my opponent having a commentator right over my shoulder. Hearing “ooohhhh, they better get ready to anti-air/block this!” every interaction in reference to me gives me some kind of gross social conformity anxiety. Like I’m wondering what do they know about the next setup that I don’t. And then my opponent runs up and grabs me. Or hearing “oh my god he’s so dead if he jumps” when a neutral jump would’ve been so clutch makes me want to untangle the headphones mid-round.

Pad player supremacy. I remember the complaints some players had that pad players could react to them but they couldn't react to pads.

Front to Front should be the standard The same thing is constantly done in sports like baseball where I hear/see (out of the corner of my eye) the catcher moving closer or farther from my batting stance...that sucks as a catcher myself 😅

The counter against smelly opponents is you just gotta lose the nose bro

This isn't as big of a problem in Smash, but there was one moment where someone (I think it was HBox?) looked down at their opponent's controller and saw which way they were teching.

sometimes i'll see if i can win just by making jokes and cause the other person to laugh too hard to focus. i'll absolutely only do it in casual games of course, but as my personality is that of a little shitgremlin, i find it very funny to do

I remember when aris did the video about dead buttons.

just put a divider smh. school's been doing this since time

If you play on pad wouldn't that prevent people from hearing your buttons?

Damm he’s first

how can it be not 'fair' to play side by side? anything your opponent is allowed to do to you, you can do to them too.

This just gives me even more reason to never want to participate in an offline event ever...

third

First

There's an easy fix. Have a camera set up and a referee watching it. Any eye movement away from the monitor and towards the opponent's stick results in a loss, headphones are enforced.