I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. for decades. More than two and a half, if I recall correctly. I was not a terribly athletic child, so my hand-eye coordination wasn’t good and I wasn’t terribly skilled at video games because I just couldn’t get my brain to get past needing to think about which buttons to press and how to manipulate the joystick with everything I did. This meant I was pretty terrible at the game even though it was built on an incredibly simple if frequent combination of button presses and joystick manipulation. It was always a battle against myself to even be able to play it, let alone battle my more-skilled friends and elder sibling, and it was a battle I frequently lost with not just this game but ANY game that required even rudimentary simultaneously activation of buttons and a joystick. I just couldn’t get my brain and body to do two different things at the same time (I was never able to rub my stomach and pat my head at the same time, which was at least my childhood’s measurement of how coordinated you were compared to your friends). It was frustrating, to know what I needed to do to be able to compete and to be unable to do it, made even more so by the ease with which my brother beat me and the way he’d lord his superior skills over me because it was yet another thing he was better than me at. Not that I ever had much of a chance, mind you, given that I only ever got to practice while playing against him or some of our neighborhood friends thanks to how limited my video game time was.

Eventually, though, I got a couple years older, Super Smash Bros. Melee released, and I was able to work around my video game time restrictions (mostly by playing video games very early in the morning, before anyone woke up, because I rarely slept more than eight hours even as a child). Thanks to that, and my often unsupervised afternoons in the recently mostly-finished basement, I was finally able to start sneaking in some Smash practice. It took a while, but I eventually learned the skills required to do two separate motions at one time, got better than my elder brother (he stopped playing right as I started nearly winning, so that he wouldn’t lose to me) and even learned how to handle two joysticks and buttons not long after (Thanks, Halo). From then onward, I was the person to beat in the game. I could take on most of my friends, destroy my siblings, and even compete in local tournaments (I never won one of those, though, since I always played characters I liked over characters that were “good” according to the game’s meta). It was a great feeling, to be good at something; to have a skill that I’d accomplished through hard work (A.K.A. by fighting multiple level 9 CPUs, mostly in a free-for-all fight, but sometimes all of them teamed up against me).

This period of my life, this time spent training, laid the groundwork for all of my future skill at video games. To be clear, I’m not amazing or anything, but it taught me a degree of spatial awareness in video games that all of my current gaming skill is built on. I never really got the knack for most of the special moves and high-tier skills of any of the Smash games, but I knew exactly when to unleash each attack to make it land the way I wanted, I knew which moves would take priority over each other, and I could react quickly enough to at least try to counter almost any move my opponents would do. All of this has carried forward into the games I’m good at more recently. Aiming in shooting video games, accurately gauging distances and movement in platformers (or in jumping puzzles in other games), timing abilities and hitboxes in other games (like Overwatch back in the day, when I could headshot someone with Reinhardt’s Flame Strike ability at sniper-distances), or even just quickly gauging distances for AOEs and abilities in Final Fantasy XIV. All of that is built on the spatial reasoning I developed during the two years I spent training to get good in Super Smash Bros. Melee. And all the subsequent years I’ve spent playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, 4, and now Ultimate.

Lately, though, despite this being one of my favorite games series and the only fighting game I’m any good at, I haven’t been playing it much. It’s not that fun to play alone and I wound up in a difficult point where the friends who are good at the game are better than me (there’s been lag issues with GameCube controllers on Ultimate and they completely obliterated my ability to time things perfectly, which is what most of my skill at the game relied on) and everyone else either sees beating me as some mountain to climb or can’t put up enough of a fight for me to feel like anything other than a bully. I don’t mind playing and losing that much so long as I feel like I’m improving, but I never really felt like that during the bad lag years and now I just don’t really enjoy beating people up or having to deal with people getting way too intense about playing against me the rest of the time. It’s not fun to play when I don’t really have people at my skill level or who can just be chill about it to play with. What this long absence means is that I’m probably nowhere near as good as I used to be since it has been half a decade, at least, since I was playing it with any regularity (ie, every couple of months at most). Maybe longer. I don’t really remember anymore.

I just booted it up recently to play with my siblings while they were visiting and wound up playing it by myself a little bit recently. It was kind of nostalgic to get back into it, but it also wasn’t terribly fun on its own. It really is a game better played with other people. Especially because the only CPUs that challenge me are the Level 9 ones and those aren’t really fun to play against because of their perfect inputs and consistent attack patterns. I’m either getting completely whomped by them because they can perfect block every attack, catch every item, and nail every single counterattack or I’m completely destroying them because they keep doing the same things over and over again and I figured out how to perfectly counter it. There’s no other outcome. It’s annoying and boring since even my less-skilled friends manage to mix things up enough that it’s interesting. I kind of miss the days when it was a regular part of my life and only partly because that meant having people over and friends to hang out with in-person.