Banned Controllers for Melee (Legal Ones too)

what's going on it's uh been a minute hasn't it but hey i've got some good news i am officially a youtube superstar and to cement my place in the youtuber pantheon i have purchased the single most important piece of equipment in a youtuber's arsenal a camera this opens up a lot of opportunities for me for instance i can finally show you guys my favorite slinky my slowly growing collection of lapel pins my favorite indie film my copy of my favorite super smash brothers game and my favorite game on the nintendo gamecube it also allows me to show off something i'm sure many of you are familiar with controllers which in turn lets me talk a bit about their place and legality and competitive melee tournaments this is an original gamecube controller original buttons original shell parts original internals classic and perfectly legal this on the other hand is a shitty gamestop controller i got it like eight or nine years ago and it was the only gamecube controller i had until i got interested in melee in 2016 or so it has well the full off-brand package the face buttons feel cheap and gritty the triggers are gummy and raised too high which makes it hard to tell when you're fully pressing them the z button straight up just doesn't work the d-pad takes an ungodly amount of pressure to register and the a and y button squeak even though the analog stick ironically happens to be better calibrated to the gates than any official controller i've ever used you would not want to use this to play melee or any game really but it does have one extra feature which offers a slight advantage over the original controllers a turbo button which means despite all of its flaws you are not permitted to use this in a competitive setting this particular turbo button works by first holding it down pressing any of the face or shoulder buttons once then releasing the turbo button now you've got a button that matches for you in place of a continual hold indicated by the flashing light on the front this means instead of pounding your controller you can just hold the button you turboed fittingly enough though even this turbo function kinda sucks ass it seems like this turbo button holds and releases any given button for somewhere between a frame and two frames and because this holding and releasing isn't synchronized with the frames in game you often get situations where your button that's turboed is held for two consecutive frames or is released for two consecutive frames in other words not frame perfect if you want an idea of how this affects its mashing ability i can reach higher mashing on my own with mario's downbeat than this controller can with its turbo function because this turbo button sucks so much you're not really getting much competitive advantage by using this controller in fact it'd probably be more of a hindrance than anything but given a turbo controller worth a shit one that actually does frame perfect mashing you would be able to do humanly impossible actions for instance achieve max height on mario dock and luigi's down specials frame perfect pikachu jabs and nest down tilts insane amounts of smash di inputs and mashing out of grabs as fast as possible and with these possibilities i'd say a ban is warranted well now that we've looked at a piece of garbage witness a work of art this is my controller you see it has my name on it jp white shell custom transparent salmon buttons and c stick pink paracord and it lights up in case you know it gets dark or something okay it's a bit flamboyant but there are a lot of practical modifications in this thing too shield drop and firefox notches a snapback capacitor a tactile z button and shortened springs in both triggers this was 400 fucking dollars why do you need all this well gamecube controllers are notoriously inconsistent in finicky and melee notoriously precise and also finicky when being manufactured controllers tend to end up subtly different from one another even ones that look the same superficially handle at least somewhat differently one might have little to no snapback while another will have unbearable snapback making players prone to miss inputs one might be able to travel further into either horizontal direction than most others allowing characters to literally move more quickly in game one might have tense springs in the triggers while others will be lighter affecting the force required to fully depress them and all controllers will have slight differences in how analog values are calibrated along the gate of the analog stick changing what position of the stick is needed to do things like shield drop and fully angle the stick without hitting melee's dead zones and this is also the reason some of your factory notches cause you to drift slightly on the character select screen rather than just go in a straight line their calibration is just a bit off most controller modifications seek to make controllers a bit better and this game a bit more bearable by targeting some of these inconsistencies adjusting them to be more in line with what's desirable in a controller for melee all that being said let's discuss what mods i got these are firefox notches they're designed to easily allow the player to access extremely steep angles on fox and falco's up special without risk of hitting melee's dead zones which would instead result in fox or falco traveling in a straight line these lower notches also double as wave dash notches giving easily accessible near minimum and near maximum wave dash lengths which are affected by the same dead zones by the way see how nice these notches are well take a look at what shitty ones look like attached to the motherboard inside is what's called a snapback capacitor which eliminates inputs caused by the analog stick snapping back in the direction opposite the direction you flicked this prevents accidental jumping from vertical snapback and getting the incorrect direction on aerial neutral bees in the case of horizontal snapback both of which are extremely troublesome if not fixed take this pretty common situation for example here i back air the neutral falco off stage and wave dash backwards to grab ledge fast falling by flicking down on the analog stick so i can grab ledge before he can it works and he falls to his death however in this clip when i fast fall my controller flicks back in the opposite direction causing me to waste my double jump which allows my opponent to grab ledge first and i contemplate quitting melee a tactile z button is exactly what it sounds like it gives the z button a nice click instead of how it normally feels that is without much tactile sensation at all reduced trigger springs achieved by literally cutting the springs and the trigger shorter make the triggers easier to press which is good for hand health and fatigue and given melee players press the triggers to l cancel nearly every aerial on top of wave dash tech and shield this was a no brainer for me to someone unfamiliar with melee these mods might seem like a bit much but believe me this is just scratching the surface of controller modifications there are loads more out there that i just didn't get and in any case mods are rad but unfortunately nothing lasts forever notches will wear down and have to be redone either by refurbishing your current ones or replacing an old notched shell with a new one which of course requires you or preferably someone with expertise to carve new notches sticks commonly develop issues after heavy use like progressive loosening drifting or reduced pivoting consistency capacitors need to be adjusted in strength as your controller's internals degrade c-sticks will start inputting incorrect aerials button pads wear out over time it's just a mess and all of this requires spending even more money to fix even if you take the time to learn how to do it yourself needless to say if you play competitive melee there's a decent chance you'll be shelling out some serious cash at one point or another due to controllers alone and you might have guessed given the price people are willing to pay for these that controllers like this are fine to use in tournament some of you might ask though what's the difference between a controller mashing for you and a controller with mods like these that sort of guide you into certain analog values what makes one okay and the other not okay well the difference lies in that with controllers like mine everything you do is still you doing them just with some guidance conversely a turbo button isn't you mashing it's you holding down a button and the controller mashing for you potentially in a way that's not even possible for a human to put it simply while mashing a button 30 times in one second isn't humanly feasible for most people achieving a close to maximum or close to minimum wave dash or extremely steep up b angle or performing a shield drop is humanly feasible just inconsistent and thus the community at large has decided that modifications such as these are perfectly fine to use in tournament this is the box an alternative to the traditional gamecube controller and if you look at it for a second you'll notice that it's a teensy bit different than the other controllers i've shown off for one it's an arcade stick controller without a stick meaning all of melee's normally analog inputs with the analog and c-stick are handled digitally and let me tell you it's a strange almost surreal sensation controlling a game like melee where analog inputs are so prevalent and important via button presses but before we go too in depth on the controller itself just who is this thing made for i mean why would you give up this what many of us have been playing smash on for years for this well it all started a few years ago when one of the best fox players in the world hax blew up the tendons in his wrist and developed arthritis in his thumb in his early 20s and i did like the fastest wave shine in the history of this planet but it was so frame perfect and i had bad form i felt i felt an explosion i felt like literally an explosion in my hand with your hand where the bones rub against each other they took an mri my bone had no cartilage the doctor had never seen some shit like this like he was like you did this from playing a video game these past few months it was unbearable i couldn't play this game for more than like 10 games in 10 games in a row and uh my hand was done did it hurt in general too like if you were just chilling like yeah no sometimes i'd be playing league of legends and that would be enough to do it for me and that game's not even like not even technical like that yeah that's the surgery there that's the surgery dude despite numerous surgeries hax's hand pains from playing melee persisted unable to play let alone compete in melee due to ongoing pain from his injuries he was recruited as a tester by a team developing the smashbox a then soon to be released product which they claim to be an ergonomic that is designed to be as safe and comfortable to use as possible alternative to the gamecube controller one that would allow him and others like him to compete again pain-free it wasn't take a look at this image of someone multi-shining on the smashbox reveal video this is an extremely unergonomic posture considering i was led to believe this was an ergonomic controller i actually began to think i had arthritis in these joints as well and that was what was responsible for the strain hacks in the smashbox team worked together for a while but after weeks of refusing hacks as many many suggestions to adjust the controller's design to make it even the slightest bit of what they claimed it was dead set on releasing what hacks considered a scam to the market they were on the verge of selling a product so poorly made that consumers would have felt scammed within minutes of using it and having a smashbox representative threatened to physically assault him hax and the smashbox team parted ways shortly before leaving the smashbox team however hax would secretly assemble his own alternative controller team and a couple years later re-emerge with what he called the box complete with his own designs prioritizing ergonomic integrity allowing those with similarly destroyed hands to enjoy melee again without hand pains or just as a comfortable alternative to the gamecube controller and years later the smashbox remains a competitor equipped with a new design a design i feel looks familiar somehow but i digress let's talk about the box itself to start it doesn't come with an embedded cable it comes with both the usb-c to gamecube cable for console use and a usbc to usb cable for use on a computer it also comes with this port on top so you can plug in a wii nunchuck to restore fully analog capabilities at least in regards to the analog stick its face panel is glossy acrylic and it really really likes attracting dust and fingerprints its build feels solid and it's got a quality weightiness to it but it's not heavy enough that it'd be uncomfortable to carry around like i said before the box is incredibly strange to play with for someone who's not only never played smash with anything but a gamecube controller but for someone that's never touched an arcade stick not in a bad way but more of a holy shit i have to relearn everything kind of way i mean just look at the size of this manual and fuck it while we're showing off extremely lengthy documents about video game controllers here's hax's 149 page manifesto on the box detailing its intentionally nerfed inputs to put it more on the level of gamecube controllers its history advantages and disadvantages and its inability to wank di back to the box though i'm sure there are a number of things you're curious about for instance you might be wondering given its dedicated dash buttons how you walk on this thing well there are no dedicated walk buttons instead they're what are called modifiers these modifier buttons serve to change the innate digital values at given button inputs if you hold the x modifier while pressing either the left or right button for example the 1.0 x value they normally have is decreased to 0.6 allowing the player to walk even without the ability to tilt an analog stick they're also used for other things which normally require more fine analog control such as tilts and slight di additionally these modifiers in combination with the c-stick buttons allow for a more full range of directions the box is able to point in such as for d-eyeing and angling fox and falco's upbeat which is incredibly difficult for me to wrap my head around i've gotta applaud some of the box's more ingenious button placements though take these buttons for example these two buttons both pressed with your right hand's middle finger are bound to x and y two jump inputs while these two buttons to the left of them are bound to b and r this means for fox and falco players shine out of shield and wave dash out of shield use the same fingers the same movement and the exact same timing [Music] awesome shield dropping is similarly intuitive it's handled like the axe method and that you shield while holding left or right when you land on a platform but in place of sliding your analog stick down the gate to drop through you simply press down which is great and more importantly 100 percent consistent which is another advantage of controllers like the box their consistency unlike gamecube controllers which are prone to coming out of the factory with or developing issues with their analog controls you don't have to worry about it with these controllers due to the lack of analog control you'll never miss a dashback you'll never experience snapback you'll never light shield a hit instead of hard shield and you'll never miss a shield drop let alone after buying new shield drop notches it's liberating but i'm a bit of a masochist as far as the aforementioned ergonomics go i'm fortunate enough to have never developed chronic or even minor hand pains from playing melee myself so i can't personally vouch for it on that front however tons of people will vouch for it easing or completely relieving stress on the hands and even though i'm lucky to not have hand pains it generally is a pretty comfortable controller however the big question is are you allowed to use it in tournament well not only are you allowed to but with enough dedication and hard work you can excel with it bobby where is he where is he finding these ideas hacks is number 19 in the world with this thing and many others who have switched over are climbing the ranks as well i'd recommend this thing if you're worried about destroying your hands or have already destroyed them though i'll stress again that no matter how experienced you are with more traditional controllers you're pretty much starting from scratch with this and it is going to take some commitment to get back to your controller skill level let's cap this off with something special a sort of combination of the controllers i've shown off sort of this monstrosity is the ascii keyboard controller made exclusively for fantasy star online an rpg you could play online right on your gamecube pretty cool shipped to me straight from some japanese guy on ebay japan being the only country this thing was sold in i got this bad boy for the low low cost of 183 us dollars regarding the standard controller part of it it feels good pretty much like an original controller excluding you know the length and at the very least way better of a third party controller than that one from gamestop it does have some minor snapback issues but that's alright i don't really plan on using this much anyway but let's be honest who gives a fuck about the controller the star of the show and what you guys really want to know about is the keyboard it's surprisingly not terrible first off it is obviously cramped which is an understandable shortcoming given its very clear size limitation the keys have light feedback being fully depressed but it does start feeling a bit iffy typing a lot at one time with it and it's got some sort of misprint with the lowercase letters they just look like a bunch of squiggly lines none of this is anything unforgivable given how neat it is as a novelty though a 183 dollar novelty as you might have guessed none of the keys do anything for melee but i don't really mind at least it works as a regular keyboard [Music] right [Music] actually it doesn't at least not with this first party controller adapter what we need is this a dual gamecube controller to usb adapter i ordered online advertised to allow the keyboard on one of these controllers to work now we just plug it in install its drivers plug in both the keyboard and the controller install the raftnet adapter manager open it change the adapter mode from dual gamecube controller mode to gamestick and keyboard and there it is though unfortunately while we can't play fantasy star online episodes one and two with it we can play something kind of similar [Music] man this was a lot more fun when i was a kid we can also map inputs to the keyboard within dolphin to use it as a controller for melee but it's insanely uncomfortable i suppose there is a silver lining to the keyboard only being functional on a pc though there's really no reason for it to not be tournament legal i mean without this adapter it's really just a long controller with a bunch of extra buttons that don't do anything though i suppose on a computer you could macro this thing up like a regular keyboard macro meaning make one key do a series of inputs which is a pretty common cheating technique in games and in melee can be as tame as a wave dash button as useless as dash dance spam as crazy as an sdi aid or as showy as a multi-shine button which i couldn't get to work all that well however using macros like this is of course not tournament legal the justification being the same as a turbo functions in that it's not you performing the actions your macros input which is something i just don't get about people who use macros or turbo functions against other players i mean why would you take a game like melee with so much beauty and its control and freedom even in spite of its sometimes faulty accompanying hardware and take control away from yourself by having a computer do actions for you plus come on do you really want to be that guy now if you'll excuse me i've got some things to do [Music] big thank you to dubs rewatcher garlic gr smash john o josiah b lrc napkin momo nerd pierce h piggy tones soleil suryong the big bino and turn down for walt

Channel: AsumSaus

Views: 950,492

Rating: 4.9344673 out of 5

Keywords: smash bros, ssbm, super smash bros melee, smash melee, melee, smash bros melee, asumsaus, controllers, cheating, hacks, macros, turbo, turbo controller, melee cheating, melee hacking, melee macros, melee cheaters, ssbm cheating, ssbm cheaters, ssbm hacks, smash melee cheaters

Id: Lw1tcqbFwN4

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/magkliarn]

Yo some ridiculous production quality in this one

[u/BackAlleySurgeon]

Asumsaus makes the best content

[u/irishsaltytuna]

New AsumSaus vid? lesgooo

[u/Qwexe]

Alright, I gotta speak up for the GameStop controller featured at 3:17 that he calls a "piece of garbage". I used this same controller for years and had a collection of about a dozen of them, and he's just using it wrong. The default turbo setting gets you a mash equivalent to a score of 77 in Mario Party 4 Domination, but you can change this by holding the turbo button and pressing start. There are 4 levels and the default is level 3, pressing once to get to level 4 gets you a score of about 155 in domination which is actually really fucking good for something you can get on demand in a real match just by holding a button.

But the rollie is a piece of garbage it has the most insane vertical snapback known to man and the c-stick and triggers never work

[u/abcder733]

babe wake up, new asumsaus video

[u/backfire97]

I'm surprised the frame 1 hitbox wasn't mentioned. I remember hearing Leffen comparing the frame 1 hitbox to the boxx and sorta recommending the hitbox but I never really knew why and was hopeing Saus could shed some light on it

[u/GOATSmash1]

Am I allowed to play Melee with a Guitar Hero guitar, or is that cheating?

[u/Shwika]

The return of the king!

[u/Mahou-Shoujo-No-Koe]

13:45 Nothing quite like Smashbox threatening to physically assault somebody for not blindly loving their controller, and then later making a bad rip off of the controller made by the very same person they threatened and ignored suggestions from.
They so obviously just wanted a puppet to help them advertise and sell their stuff, and didn't actually care about anything other then fattening their wallets and egos.

Edit: I really kind of wish he mentioned the Frame1 and Keyboard setups since Leffen put a good spotlight on them.
For the Frame1 I can kind of see why he wouldn't mention it if he doesn't have it, but I wish he tried out the keyboard even if it's just his laptop keyboard or something.
Also just to put it here, I think this is Crane's review that Leffen mentioned that shows off both Frame1s, the B0XX, and his custom built controllers.