Right, so I've come to the conclusion that fighting CPU characters in SSBM is no longer improving my skill at the game. I've always known CPU characters are no substitute for human players, but I thought I'd at least be able to keep sharpening my comboing skills and whatnot against them, even if they didn't act like human players.
I mean, it was like that with the original SSB; I could fight CPU characters, develop combos, improve my reflexes and move timing, and then have that practice pay off when I fought other people. That was how I became a baddass at the game, even though I didn't get to fight many humans later on when I started getting really good. Even if I couldn't predict peoples' moves like I could with the CPU characters (and it's not even funny how good I got at predicting the CPU characters in the original SSB), my timing was still good enough to hit with any part of an attack I wanted, so as to control what direction my opponent would be knocked, which I would use in setting up combos. Everything I got good at while fighting CPUs, short of the move prediction, I could apply directly to my fights with human opponents. That gave me a real edge over a lot of people, considering how much I played the game -- I don't think I've ever played a single other game, not even SSBM, as much as I did SSB.
But with SSBM, that doesn't work. Because not only do CPU characters act differently than humans, they also play differently. They bend the rules of the game, in order to make the difficulty higher. What this has done is widen even farther the gap between fighting humans and fighting CPUs. Now you can't even practice timing and combos against CPUs, because a lot of combos and whatnot that are good against other humans simply don't work against CPUs. Their speed and/or recovery time is just too good, beyond that which is possible for a human. (Case in point is when I can hit a CPU with a smash attack so that they're hit into the ground, bounce slightly into the air from the force of the attack, and while in mid-air, they pull off an attack to hit me before the next move in my combo can connect. Not once have I been able to do that, nor have I ever seen anyone else able to do that.) And because of that, a lot of things that work against human players simply aren't possible against CPUs, meaning you have to drastically alter your playing style every time you switch between human and CPU opponents.
And you know what? I'm finally sick of it. I played SSBM for a while just now and practiced wavedashing. In training mode, doing it back and forth across Final Destination, I started to get good enough at it that I could see some applications for it in battle. And what's the logical progression of that train of thought? Yes, I quit training mode and actually tried to use it in battle. But it turns out, CPUs don't really care about wavedashing; not to say I'm perfect at it or anything, but even when I did manage to pull off good wavedashes, they weren't any more effective than a dodge roll. CPUs are fast enough that the extra bit of speed and unpredictability gained from wavedashing just doesn't make much difference.
Now, the reason this pisses me off is that it makes it pretty much impossible to actually get good at wavedashing through using it against CPUs. Because if it's not any better against them than a dodge roll is, how will I know when it would be more effective against a human? Sure, I may get better at the actual act of wavedashing -- the timing of the jump and air dodge -- but I still won't be any better at applying it to combat. And at that point I might as just continue playing training mode, wavedashing back and forth across Final Destination, which I'm not about to do unless it's going to influence my effectiveness against human players.
I'm already good enough at beating CPUs; I don't need more practice for that, and I don't think I'm going to get much better at it than I am right now anyway. With not being able to continue to improve, the game loses a lot of the fun that keeps me fighting those CPU characters when I don't have anyone else around to fight. It stagnates, becomes overly repetitive, and I stop playing altogether, until I get so rusty that I can't even hold my own during the times when other humans are around to fight me. That's certainly not something I want to happen, since I really do love playing SSBM with a group of friends and having a decently even fight.
So I've decided I'm going to make more of an effort to try and get people together for multiplayer gaming. For playing SSBM, and whatever the heck else people want to play. I'm tired of being confined to the single player modes of my GCN games, and it's about time I did something about it.
