Thursday, November 2, 2017

Diddy Kong Training Mode Tips

Too often I hear people complain that they can't practice because they don't like Wi-Fi or they don't have friends around to play with. This a poor excuse for not practicing; there is a lot you can do by yourself in training mode alone to improve your game.

I myself have a routine that I try to do every day to make sure my inputs are all clean for when I show up to a tournament. This article will contain Diddy specific things that I practice, but if you play other characters you can use this as a reference for making your own training room routine.

Before diving into specifics I wanted to briefly talk about how often you should be practicing training mode things. A common mistake a lot of players make is that they practice some new tech until they get it, but then stop there. Then once the big tournament rolls around, they of course mess up the tech and potentially lose a game or set because of it. There is a big difference between being able to do something once against a stationary CPU and doing it in bracket against a human opponent under the pressure of a tournament. Before incorporating new tech into your play, you will want to practice it not just until you get it right, but until you never get it wrong. For me I repeat all of Diddy's tech over and over until I execute it successfully 20 times in a row. Not 20 times total, but in a row. I do this for all of Diddy's tech almost every day. You want to get to the point that it becomes so routine to perform that tech that you don't even need to think about it to do it correctly.

Jumping into my practice routine: the first thing I do is practice ledge trump into back air. I'll do it 10 times on the left side of the stage, then run to the right side and do it 10 more times. In general you want to practice all tech in both directions because the inputs are slightly different.

Next I do full hop fast monkey flip into b reverse popgun cancels. Diddy's monkey flip has both a normal, and a fast version. The fast version is slightly harder to input and is better in most situations, so I always make sure to be specifically doing that version of the flip. Combining two different tech like this to make a more complicated input will be helpful to make either input by itself a lot easier.

Practice recovering with barrels from many different angles. I specifically emphasize coming horizontally because that angle is easy to mess up and SD with. Learn the angles to go under the stage to the opposite ledge, and practice that on all the legal stages. Diddy's recovery is one of his most vulnerable positions, so you want to be comfortable using it to it's maximum potential to avoid getting gimped.

Run around the stage a bit, utilizing all different kinds of movement. Diddy has a lot of different ways to move about the stage, practice all of them. Do perfect pivots, extended dash dances, super crawl, and monkey flip cancels on platforms and edges. Turn around down tilt out of shield is another option that you must have down consistently to play Diddy at a high level. Being able to do this without failure will secure so many kills that you couldn't get without it.

Another important thing to practice consistently is kill confirms. You never want to lose a set because you messed up a simple input that would have killed the opponent and ended the game. In the training mode I put a second Diddy on the stage, and bump their percent up to 105% and set them to walk. This is the perfect percent to practice banana into down tilt forward smash confirms. With two Diddys on screen walking back and forth you can kill one off the left side, then immediate kill the other off the right side and repeat. When they are set to walk they will roll at the first possible frame after the banana trip, so you will know if you are too slow on your down tilt or not. Watch the combo meter to ensure you are doing it all correctly. Next set the percents up to 170, and add a third Diddy. Now you can practice down tilt into RAR back air.

Ledge trapping is hard to practice in training mode because the CPUs don't like to cooperate, but you can always practice timing punishing neutral get up with grab. Set the computer level to one and throw them offstage, and they will always do neutral get up from the ledge. Every character has a different animation and slightly different timings, so be sure to switch up which character you practice against. Doing this is training mode is how I learned to punish neutral get ups on reaction with grab and up smash.

Lastly, just practice basic bread and butter combos. Simple things like up throw up air, up throw into two back airs, forward throw forward air, falling nair into aerials, etc. Just throw a low level CPU on and work on your inputs so that you will never mess up simple combos in bracket.