The BANNED Tier - Competitive History of NOOB SAIBOT

[Music] characters in the competitive timeline of mortal kombat have often had these crazy ups and downs across the titles noob cybot being one of those examples that fits the bill perfectly he's been broken beyond belief unviable as anything and sometimes somewhere right in the middle a classic character who started his journey within the secrets and hidden content of the arcades noob cybot became a fan favorite very quickly but mechanically actually has some very interesting stuff once you look past all the bands anyway welcome to a competitive history of one of mk's most notorious characters of the 90s noob cybot okay so usually i straight up do not cover non-playable appearances in this series but with noob cybot he had so many of them that i wouldn't do his humble beginnings justice by leaving this out i mentioned reigns first little tease in my very first episode of this series and noob cybot was no tease noob could be fought against noob cybot was the most hidden character in mortal kombat 2 with a story told by the one and only john tobias ed boon got in a bit of trouble with jon after secretly putting reptile in mk1 revision 3. he promised that there wouldn't be any more characters that only he knew about for future games and then in mortal kombat 2 with everyone on the team knowing about smoke and jade here comes this shadowy figure with the backwoods names of both ed boone and john tobias as a lighthearted joke to ed boone's still apparent cheeky nature ed was legitimately the only person on the mk team who knew about noob scibot in mk2 and the rest of the team found out about the character mid development of mortal kombat 3. how crazy is that in vanilla mk 3 noob cybot returned as a secret taking advantage of the pre-game combat codes that you can now punch in you could use the code 769 342 to fight against noob in one round he is just kano with an all silhouette palette he has no specials but a faster walk speed and kano's dialer combos in ultima mk3 noob cybot makes one of his more true appearances now the ninjas exist noob's cybot is remade basically a fellow ninja without specials once again but more health and fast walk speed not playable but at least a bit more standout than vanilla mk 3's version you can fight noob via the same combat code or as one of shao khan's treasures for beating the arcade said to be one of xiao khan's deadliest warriors now we've got the many secret fights out of the way it's time to actually cover his first playable appearance the 16-bit ports of ultimate mk3 would mark the very first playable versions of noob cybot and rain the crazy thing about noob scibot in not only this version but the following versions to come is that holy crap this character is broken there's many reasons as to why and it kind of changed from game to game as well at its basic level this is classic noob cybot as a fully realized character he has a teleport that launches the ticket to the giant damage this clone throw will launch the opponent another fantastic move however this is the big one this projectile right here will stop the opponent from blocking and being able to land damage on you basically hit this thing and you've won the round combo strings are generous his kick string is as easy as it gets by pressing low kick four times he has a string that launches too you're hard-pressed to find something he does that doesn't somehow land a combo into crazy good damage no matter what version of noob cybot that you have now you can look at the many many tall assisted noob cybot videos to see his hilariously crazy long combos and stuff but i'm going to keep it simple here clone toss recovers pretty much the second you throw it in the 16-bit versions meaning that clone toss into another move becomes a reliable combo linker you can use it in the corner for extra damage mid-screen as well but the real crazy stuff is just backing up a clone toss with an instant ghost ball they can't block as they stand up which means they're totally screwed the game doesn't have wake up attacks so the clone being man sized it's not like you can just get around it easily this is pretty much guaranteed basically this version of the character was unbelievably broken it broke the rules of the game and was banned whenever competitive 16-bit ultimate mk3 was played yes by the way it does get played mostly with emulation but it is big in south america now the version of noob cybot you're likely the most familiar with back in the day came from mortal kombat trilogy where he is still the only character outside of bosses that we've ever seen be banned from competition in trilogy this is no exception as his move list as a base is the exact same kind of thing in this game he's notoriously known for his infinites even outside of the ghost ball unblockable business the infinite involves his teleport slam and although across the n64 and playstation version you execute it a little bit differently the infinite as a function works the same here noob is still this outrageously broken character who once again tends to be banned outright the only time you could maybe play this character was via chameleon as some players believe that the limited morph time to be a bit more balanced it was always hard to think of chameleon here though because you never saw him in competitive play anyway i made a video about the chameleons if you want more info on that subject a key difference is that the instant straight clone toss recovery doesn't exist in trilogy so you're not going to have the same kind of combos but it doesn't matter everything will lead into teleport slam and teleport slam is a free easy infinite if you struggle to beat the game as a kid you probably use noob cybot because of his easy strings in ghostbull i know i did trilogy noob cybot was broken banned and doesn't have a place in the tier list because of it a fun fact before i start the next generation version of this character is that did you know for a very short time noob cybot was actually playable in the arcade version of mortal kombat 4 during the mk4 road tour across north america which was a promotional tour that i covered in depth during my mk meta of this game noob cyborg was actually a playable character here now this build was extremely bare bones and most characters didn't really have combos or anything but i gotta admit it's cool to see him in action on arcade although very brief he would be later replaced by raco and that's where his arcade journey ended it didn't end for him on consoles though as on console noob cybot was a secret unlock you could unlock him by either beating the game with reiko or using the hidden cheat menu you've got to put in a combat code to even start the cheap menu in this version but once you've done either of those things you can select hidden on character select hover over raikou hold start and block release block and press run playing hidden characters in old school mk was ah an experience in mk4 noob is pretty basic and you'd almost never see him played anyway there's no point covering his normals as in mortal kombat 4 the combo system is universal now when it comes to specials he has tanya's grounded and airfiable both of which are really good projectiles in this game to be fair an air throw by pressing block next to an airborne opponent and reiko's teleport it doesn't work so well for noob in this game though because reiko's flip kick really complements that attack which noob cybot doesn't have he has something quite unique to him in this game though which is a scythe weapon the best thing about the weapon is its reach by far it goes great distances and it bags super easy damage of a launch but really that's it for noob scibot he's quite standard in this game i'm really excited for this one i'm about to cover possibly the least known version of this character which is in mortal kombat gold noob cybot is a secret character once again with the cheap menu in gold unlocked slightly differently but the functions the same you haven't got to mess around with the combat codes this time so that's always a plus you may be wondering why i'm covering a character twice in the mk4 era in most cases i admit i actually wouldn't because the mk4 roster almost never changed from game to game here but noob cybot absolutely did he's much more of the noob that we remember and trust me when i say that's not a good thing here the character is really buggy the teleport and grounded fireball still exist but he doesn't have his air fireball anymore what he does have is the ghost ball otherwise known as the block orb in this game but at least in this revision of mk gold it is super broken and i'm not even talking mechanically if it hits an opponent in the air they can get suspended in the air until they jump to get grounded again as you might expect this results in some pretty hilarious situations when i said that the air fireball is gone he can still do something in the air the block orb now i'm not one to make theories but it kind of seems like when putting this character together the wrong fireball was used for the airborne stuff he's clearly not supposed to be able to do this one as it has the grounded animation so what the hell happened here even more broken still when mustard and i were playing this game two player last year and we picked both noob cybot we discovered that player 2 noob cybot's block orb applies the debuff to himself making the move completely unusable if your noob cyborg was player 2. mk gold is notoriously busted as a game in general and one that i do plan on covering in detail one day but noob was just so hilariously broken even outside of mechanics here that i had to cover this for the video the rule of thumb is that every new character in gold is utterly broken and basically in a tier of their own and noob does kind of fit into that too as his block orb is ridiculous but it's hard to even focus on potential competitive when the character in this revision is as buggy and hilarious as he is he kind of barely works to be honest but i had a good time okay mortal kombat deception saw the return of noob cybot but not as a stand-alone character in this case smoke and noob have teamed up and are actually a tag team taking up the slot of a single fighter they have one fighting style each and no weapon but that's alright because many believe noobs smoke to be a top three character in the game's meta why is this well this was the next game to release after deadly alliance d.a was generally seen as the most well-rounded and least janky 3d game because it didn't have all the broken stuff that future 3d titles would have in it deception added some new stuff that was not that intentional and i think definitely bugs but they would fit the game plan of noob smoke perfectly where the character can exploit all there is to be exploited in the game to great effect we'll focus primarily on the noob portion of the character for this video but we do have to mention smoke as well they'd come as a pair special move wise the two characters have their own moves noob cybot has a dash punch that uses smoke to do it and most notably for him an invisibility 3d mk invisibility is often very powerful so this is definitely a good tool his other effective move only happens when you're using smoke because noob will throw ninja stars they work really well after a juggle and allow for impressive damage on top of being pretty damn good on their own too universally the two of them have a dive kick that will swap character each time along with a standard teleport that does the same thing the meta of noob smoke comes down to specific tools that take the broken stuff in the game and puts it to really good use for starters deception introduced hitting people off the ground otg for short some moves that splat the opponent to the floor normally you can't continue you just get some kind of pressure or something but in deception you can still use certain attacks that will pick them back up and continue the combo it's broken it's one of the main reasons a character would be top tier in deception and in noob's case he can get a teleport mid screen if the throw lands and if it lands in the corner his standing four launcher goes so low to the ground it picks them up into almost a half-life combo another new feature in mkd was that throws are now unblockable but there's no tech either so if an attack is plus enough to hit guaranteed with the meaty throw this will be a free set of damage you put these two together and it's kind of ridiculous especially as in deception you can sidestep throw meaty which often works as a free grab as they stand up and against the wall this has the potential to loop one of the most notorious grabs in the entire game arguably was smokes as you can combo from it into something that gives you a free throw and loop this infinitely even without the loop you can use the combo damage to impressively convert anyway the two characters grab games are unbelievably powerful not because it's meant to be that way but because the bugs and the unintentional stuff in the game basically means they get more than they should when playing as noob smoke smoke tends to be the point character as noob specials with smoke act as great assists almost smoke has a gas cloud and a full combo teleport if you have noob out you can mix between grab and his standing 4 launcher while invisible but it is very unsafe generally smoke's the one that you use and noob is there to hit hard and be super annoying in a pinch the character used all of the new features of the game and basically took him to the bank the blood bank with the release of the next fully fledged 3d fighter mortal kombat armageddon had smoke and noob as separate characters where here noob gets a bit of an upgrade in some areas and in others he's a bit weaker mostly due to bugs being removed but truthfully i prefer him in this game because of the tools of noob smoke still somewhat work from here even if it's a different game first of all noob gets some new moves he gets his teleport grab back which to be honest isn't that impressive in this game but he also gains the ninja stars as his own projectile this time and interestingly the portal trap now this is hard to hit people with and it's not an amazing move by itself but it's cool to see it in the game considering this portal would be so important in his next appearance invisibility is still there as is his flip-faced throw now he gets an immediate change here where the otg no longer works so no half-life combo against the rule of a throw for you in other areas his hand to hand works basically exactly the same as it does in mk deception with all the same normals and strings the strings can transition very cleanly into his troll hammer though which is the weapon noob's been given in armageddon the hammer itself like other hammers is not very good it's slow sluggish massively unsafe not worth using on its own but it provides a high damage ender for the hand to hand combo strings that make the change into hammer worth it just to close out combos two one one is your general go to in hand to hand as you have two one one three two one one stance change but outside of that you still have your standing four launcher and a pretty decent low in down four characters are super simple in armageddon i've said it many times before and noob cybot is pretty good all things considered he gets decent combos the stars will extend his juggle damage just like an mkd invisibility is just as powerful in armageddon as it is in deception he's far from the most unsafe character in the game which is saying a lot far from the best character in the game as the top tiers in this game are actual gods but to be fair he's pretty good for the slightly newer generation of mortal kombat fans this version of noob might very well have been your first introduction to the character which if it's lore and design you want nice if it's gameplay not nice unfortunately noob cybot was a low-tier character competitively throughout the entire game's lifespan and then the release of prominent dlc characters totally invalidated him from the roster because they did his game plan better than he did noob cybop in mk9 was fun on a casual level and even against the mid-tier or other lower tier characters if you're just having fun but so many of the top tier characters utterly destroyed him if you use this character in a tournament you'd better have had other characters in your pocket because this character was almost never gonna win on his own special moves were really cool a lot of his old kit redone and looking fresh in this game however he was reworked to be a keep away character a strong zoning archetype straight clone is a good projectile by itself with the shadow slide acting as a low option during the game's patch days the tackle would be changed to be an overhead instead of a mid but honestly it didn't help him much enhance either of those to do more damage teleport is another pretty forgettable move it's good for air to wears but it's really unsafe doesn't do much damage and on enhance will simply do more damage the risk reward is not in your favor here things get more interesting with the rest of his specials up clone is a diagonal kick that's a great wake-up attack it's a fantastic combo tool in the corner with enhanced launching much higher listen this is your one and only combo tool so learn how to do those up kick corner combos and mid-screen converting into the enhanced one into a simple ender his other two moves are the ghost ball which prevents blocking on hit and will mix up their controls on enhanced and his final special is the portal which is the most notable new inclusion for a lot of people there's an unblockable trap here that you need to jump over and the enhanced version comes out a lot faster this was a huge knowledge check online or even sometimes in tournament because if they didn't know the match up the portal traps looked really broken unfortunately tech roll into a jump would always dodge the setup none of them were real noob's biggest issue was actually a lot of things first of all his damage outside the corner sucked most of his useful buttons didn't combo into anything so your best bet was string into teleport that's it sometimes you could use the enhanced upkick but the damage was still bad compared to everyone else his whiff recovery was horrendous most of his moves you'd want to use took ages to come out they're pretty slow and all my days the recovery was terrible you could hit someone with a move and if it connected at a weird time they'd just get up and punish you his zoning was okay but when he got knocked down the up kick was all he had to stop complete annihilation of rushdown and it could be made to whiff by knowledgeable opponents his ghost ball was to be fair very good in the corner but getting someone to the corner as noob almost never happened because his kit wasn't designed to do that finally we'd see the release of characters like kenshi and freddie into the downloadable roster cabal ended up being an incredible zoner so did reptile i mean noob was outclassed and dare i say competitively irrelevant there's no reason you would use this character unless you genuinely liked him which to be fair i did it's fair enough he's a cool character but not very good which is a shame the latest version of noob cybop belongs to mortal kombat 11. with a defensive archetype for him reigns the strongest he's had but due to the various versions the game's had across the years he does have some other tools as well some immediate drawbacks come down to things like poor movement where his dash is so slow that he's one of the few characters that really can't wave dash around the screen like everyone else but in other areas he can make up for it with high practical damage and very strong range noob was seen as a pretty average character on launch then his slide attack was buffed to be two hits on amplify which helped important things like crushing blow requirement and safety and range pushback all that good stuff but then he really came out to play with ultimate and the custom variations being tournament legal i think it's likely best that i go over some key variations one by one that players like to use and i'll just explain in real time how they fit the character and why we see them in tournament play noob cybot's a good character in this game so enjoy so doing all of this in real time i want to kind of go over each variation that we see competitive noob cyborg players use and a little bit of information as to why noob cyborg is a space control character as i mentioned his mobility is really poor if you want to try and do like a dash block for example a wave dash that's not good at all compared to other characters that are flying around the screen noob cybot does not have that same kind of luxury he makes up for it with decent range and a lot of good range on his specials and buttons and that really is what noob has been designed to do early on the game's life he was not considered particularly powerful however in the first proper patch of the game this special right here the shadow slide this used to be standalone it used to just have a slide and that's it however he was then given the ability to amplify it now the amplify on top of doing really good damage that on its own does almost 17 importantly the game has crushing blows now unfortunately i don't want to show them because obviously mk11 on youtube is quite difficult for creators however the crushing blow off his tackle does massive damage on its own and it requires 10 successful clones to land with the buff of this move that actually counts as two clones for the price of one so you've got damage range safety which is a very important but also one hit that crushing blow which can be quite a game changer actually becomes a lot more viable you were never getting it before but ever since that early patch now noob cybot players can get it quite regularly another popular move is the spirit ball again not always used but it's a fantastic standalone projectile it does good damage it has good plus frames in the corner and really the damage is fantastic for a single projectile by itself this does get used in conjunction with the slide because put the two of these moves together you can see you kind of command a decent amount of the screen and universally noob cyborg has an up clone so if you look at your specials with this kind of variation you cover the ground you cover that mid area and you can cover the air all in one go and two of those three specials will also contribute towards a tackle crushing blow so you love to have those together up next we'll talk about some launch potential noob cyborg has some of the largest and highest practical damage in the game part of it comes down to sickle snag this used to belong to a rather useless variation only a few key noob cyborg players out there would play pitch black specifically for this move now thanks to ultimate letting you use whatever move you want you can essentially use sickle slag with other better moves which ultimately no pun intended will just help nude cyborg out a great deal and it does in competitive play now i've swapped over to the opponent as i want to showcase the launching teleport this is the absolute ticket to where noob cybot's practical damage will come from now it's been a long time since i've done any of these combos but ultimately these kind of confirms bag massive damage and work on any kind of grounded confirm that you're doing the reason i mentioned that you will rarely see the sickle snag and the teleport together is that in a lot of cases it's not very necessary however in this kind of instance a lot of match-ups won't require one or the other in particular you know you'll just go with the launch that fits it best but if you have those higher level more optimal combos off those grounded confirms the damage you get from it is very very high indeed a variation that popped up to be popular almost immediately was essentially seeing double a regular pre-patch variation that involved the air slam and shadow slide so you could do the slam by itself in the air and then you can do the slide on top of it this was the variation really for the longest time you had the ghost ball which was a move that we saw from classic mortal kombat but in this game it's not good and it's not even worth bringing up the reason we would see post ultimate noob cyber players use the variation is that they would replace the spirit ball as you'll see i don't get anything coming out now with the air slam that really is the important thing because when i say air slam i'm saying shadow portals turning an air slam into a full combo means that arguably and i don't even think arguably noobs cybot's best pre-patch variation which was ghost ball shadow slide and regular air slam you take the one move that's rubbish and you replace it with a move that is much better essentially nothing but a stronger version of a variation that was already good this air slam when used instantly essentially would give noob cybot massive combos as a punish while at the same time keeping the utility of everything else so this variation works wonders and we do still to this day see noob cybop players use this variation because it's all about neutral control and then massive combos if the teleport lands very good variation now finally you would see some new cyborg players sometimes in tournament sometimes for a laugh we'll go for both launches together i had to kind of stop for a minute there because it has been a while since i've done these combos you put both of the launchers together this becomes a lot more prominent in the corner because if you land any kind of combo you can now turn it into double launches now obviously this is going to be far from optimal as you can see i haven't done these combos in quite some time but really what it means is noob cyborg is able to get massive combo damage regardless of the situation you're going to lose a significant amount of utility and this is going to be almost entirely focused on being up close because the only range you have will belong to shadow slide and one thing to keep in mind is that in these kind of situations we have the launch of sickle snag which is offensive bar the launching teleport another offensive bar and then to amplify the shadow slide again costs offensive bar so it's a very very meter hungry variation but it all uses the same meter so this one's a little bit more for fun we have seen some players use it i believe on kratos last year was able to use this variation of noob to great effect but it's not very popular but it is very cool noob went through some different stages throughout the competitive life of mortal kombat 11 but if we were to weigh in the current version of the character versus the original back in 2019 the noob cybot we have now is infinitely stronger and i think the introduction of custom variations is what really took this character and took him to the next level he's far from the best character in the game but he's certainly capable and we've seen plenty of noob cybot specialists do incredible things in tournament this character can absolutely get the job done all right all right let's address the elephant in the room i know it's been a hot minute since i did one of these videos but you know what hopefully this installment was worth the wait these episodes are requested all the time and i thought it was time to dust off the old script writing editing and jump back into what i love doing the most here on youtube thank you so much for watching and if you want to support further maybe consider supporting my patreon or something and i'll see you next time tell me what character you want next [Music] [Music] you

Channel: PNDK&M

Views: 541,350

Keywords: competitive, high, level, play, combos, combo, ketchup, mustard, pnd, K&M, meta, tournament, tournaments, grand, finals, tutorial, guide, umk3, armageddon, 2011, 2012, 1992, 1995, arcade, how, to, do, character, characters, episode, MK4, mame, variation, variations, trilogy, Documentary, gold, broken, reptile, top, tier, list, MKA, Gold, video, cyrax, reset, resets, klassic, classic, of, change, mk9, 10, year, years, shorts, MKX, MKXL, tremor, strongest, best, highest, analysis, history, all, MK, guest, rambo, noob, saibot, banned, snes, mkd

Id: KKLJABfcwTk

Length: 29min 38sec (1778 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022