Living in Mississippi, there is hardly any E-Sports unless it's maybe Super Smash Brothers Melee or Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. I started playing Super Smash Brothers Melee competitively back roughly in 2016. My brother had gotten me into competitive melee after I had walked in his room and saw him playing Super Smash Brothers Melee (SSBM). After taking curiosity, I sat down and he put me against the CPU in the 20XX hack set at level 5 because I was a causal Smash 4 player at the time and thought, "this should be pretty easy." Being that it was the 20XX CPUs that were modified to play more like competitive human players, I was destroyed and my brother was just laughing hysterically almost because I was not aware of what the CPU was doing. From that day on, I'd go to learn the competitive techniques, go through about 6 different mains, and play until 2019. I started playing UMK3 competitively in 2018. I would start as a Classic Sub-Zero main. At the time, the online scene was going pretty decently. The online scene was eventually killed, due to drama that occurred that I was never really aware of because I was only 12 years old at the time. Online matches would be severely scarce unless it was NWO or Shapeshifter which I enjoyed playing on the times I would randomly hop on Kaillera and they would be there. I would then go through a few mains to end up gaining Human Smoke which most people put him roughly at #2 on the tier list. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the online scene picked up a lot. I got to play a lot of teams with players such as Shapeshifter, NWO, Tehdrewsus, Cienfuegos, HERO_COMBO, Black Blade, etc. Also, Fightcade had picked up giving me more opportunities to play people like Shock and summoning.
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Hey RC00, thanks for joining and sharing your story. It was a fun read. As someone that resides in MS I can relate to your situation. While I wouldn't have considered myself a competitive Smash player at any point in my life, I do have many fond memories of playing Melee and discovering the fun that is playing as Luigi. My brother wanted to take Smash seriously at one point, so I acted as his training partner and familiarized myself with some competitive techniques for Melee and 64. They're interesting games for sure, but I figure that'll be the extent of play for me. I actually played MK3 and Trilogy in the olden-times (roughly 2001 or so), long before I experienced UMK3. However, me jumping around the roster trying to beat my dad at the masterful age of 5 isn't all-too-interesting I figure (Despite learning the all-too-important lesson of accepting a loss, and basic special move inputs). I was still pretty young when I got into the DS version of UMK3, and the first TYM player I ever played was a cool dude named MikeMetroid. He battered me silly with his Stryker. If you want an idea of my "online gaming intellect" at that point, I didn't even know what "GGs" meant.
My natural instinct was to main Scorpion since he was my favorite character at that age, but seeing as Human Smoke is just "Good Scorpion" those dreams of winning tourneys with Boon's favorite suffered a nasty Fatality. I found Classic Sub-Zero to be most alluring after that. He was a secret character (the same trait that contributed to me liking Luigi so much), had a launcher that didn't use his uppercut sprite, the ground freeze was a very unique move and lastly nobody seemed to care about him at all competitively. I haven't really looked back since, because I am stubborn I guess. Thankfully N64 Trilogy lets me have my childhood favorites Cage and Scorpion in a team with my big boy choice Sub-Zero, so it all works out in the end I suppose. As you stated, COVID-19 has transformed the online scene for many games including classic MK. There's a lot of great players that you listed that I've also gotten to play, and they're great examples of skilled players. I had the pleasure of meeting folks like Shapeshifter and Tehdrewsus in person prior to the pandemic; I can attest to their good character and Kombat ability. Of course you've gotta love folks like Summ0ning and Shock, their contributions to the NA Classic MK scene are basically unsurpassed. I wish you luck in continuing to develop your skills, and am looking forward to hearing more from you.