
How many of you spider man mains originated from FGC communities?
Im 27 now, but about 10 years ago I was really involved in competitive melee (smash bros melee). I used to main Falco and Fox when I played and they’re the only characters in gaming that I could compare to the level of high skill floor/high skill ceiling that spider man has in Rivals.
If I’m being honest Fox Mcloud has an even higher skill ceiling than spider man, to the point that players that mained him were developing carpel tunnel syndrome regularly lol and you had to use a tournament legal game cube controller which was pretty unoptimized for performing his tech skill.
I was addicted to grinding those characters for years because their combos were fluid and satisfying, and falco/fox players would get a lot of spidy type hate but were also loved because they were so entertaining to watch.
Falco and fox also were the two most combo-able characters so you would get stomped so hard if you were not equal or above the skill level of your opponent. And the mind games you developed from fighting games really does transfer to rivals too which I love so much. And another similarity to spider man is that if you screw up any of your tech you would just get instantly punished and die for it, so they were glass cannons in the same sense.
Anyway I love spider man and daredevil in rivals and he really makes me feel like I’m playing a fighting game within a shooter genre, and I haven’t had the desire to improve at a hero as much since I played melee.
I seen this tournament highlight video a couple days ago from over ten years ago and it got me reminiscing lol so I’ll drop that here too. I remember watching this tournament live and it was awesome, the crowd energy was insane.
https://youtu.be/KzXEopEXx58?si=ALWxz-Ev8b2i_NhQ
Also for added context on this tournament, the “five melee gods” (mango, armada, mew2king, hungrybox and PPMD) were the 5 most dominant players in competitive melee for over ten years iirc. The community started calling them the 5 gods because over this period of time, they were the only players to win major tournaments, they would only lose to each other and nobody came close to beating any of them. Leffen was dubbed the “godslayer” because he was the first player to win a set against all of them. This tournament was hype af because it was his first time beating armada, and other upsets in the tournament led to one of the hype at top 8s in melee history.