Dave is terrible at fighting games. Even simple fundamentals present in most fighting games he either doesn’t know or gets wrong. I.E.) Footsies, Dave had once told his chat, “Its when you kick opponents playing footsies”. Another example, when a dent gave him sound advice to use delay tech in SF6 with his bulging Gief…dude outright had no literal clue what that was.
I just for the life of me do not understand how one can play fighting games for 37 years (aprox.) of their pitiful life and not somehow not even accidentally learn something from playing🤣 Just watching him play today ayuund enjoying deep dives into the FGC forums Alt does has shown me why they used to call him a walking ATM. Dave comes across in my opinion as that one autistic kid that thinks in their own head they are good at everything they do, but just fails at every damn thing incredibly.
Similiar train of thought here - Phil constantly says that his opponents are total fucking scrubs, just mashing idiots doing the same, simple thing over and over. And yet, he can’t figure out how to beat it. He says that it’s literally unbeatable.
If your opponent is not good at the game, and they’re only using one cheese tactic over and over, how the fuck can you not overcome that? Especially if you’re an FGC veteran. I don’t think he realizes how unskilled it makes him look when he says shit like that.
Yes Mirror Matches should be like perfect time to flex character knowledge. Or learn if you don’t know tech, but Phil is an EVO winner so he falls in with the former. Naturally. Like you should know what moves mean what youtr opponent is attempting to do. Hell you should know exactly how many hits you can give up. But alas SF6 is made by mouth drooling idiot morons. So it has 70-30 mirror match ups. Always against Phil too.
Short answer? No. Long answer? He got lucky and whatever skills he has, they’re LONG gone.
Phil was an above average player at Street Fighter 2 Super Turbo and got lucky at local tournaments, along with winning a first place tournament at his favorite mall he used to frequent he also used to work at before he graduated from college - referring to the FYE trophy he won at Tekken 3 - however, he thought that he could just cruise in neutral to the West Coast and Midwest fighting tournaments, along with being the FGC’s ATM. Winning those local tournaments gave him the false confidence that he could be considered the best of the best, with the likes of Justin Wong, Mike Watson, etc…
It’s been noted before that Phil is a pattern player. He notices patterns and exploits those weaknesses, however, what he doesn’t know is that even decent players pick up patterns through practice and patch those patterns, as they face other players and experiment. Phil doesn’t do this. His lack of experimentation and his constant stagnation to change is what harms him in his play. He thinks moves and strategies from 20 years ago still apply to this day, even though those strategies are dead, much like his credit score.
Phil picks a play style he is comfortable with and will FORCE that into the ground. There are SO many examples of this and one of my favorites is the Devil May Cry playthrough where he takes a hack and slash game and turns into a 3rd person shooter by using the shotgun through most of the game, until he reaches the final boss, and going “Uh, what! The game didn’t tell me I was supposed to use orbs, spells, and other weapons.”
Again, there are COUNTLESS examples of him finding a playstyle he is comfortable with and driving that into the ground, while the game is basically screaming at him to “try other things.”
Here are a few basics to help you understand why Phil sucks. You have 3 general modes of play in a fighting game. Neutral, which is where neither player is actively attacking or defending. They might go back and forth, throwing out low frame moves (jabs) to poke at the opponent and try to create and opening for something a little more damaging, safely.
Once this stalemate is broken, then one is the attacker, the other is on defense. These are your other 2 modes of play. Phil ONLY priority is attacking. He has no interest in neutral and he never once considers defense. This is why Phil either crushes his opponent, or he gets clapped. If you really look close, you’ll end up noticing he has no really tight back and forth matches with tight finishe., It’s the reason his favorite excuse is “nothing I could do!” or “I’m stuck in the corner, I have no reversal!” because his only 2 options he has in mind are either panic mashing a level 1 or 2 super, or panic mashing a drive impact.
ANY time he plays a Souls Borne/ Souls Like comes to mind. He figures out some easily done move that completely destroys a boss once and by God as Phil’s witness, that means it has universal application and he will go back to it like his gin bottle at 2am. Even though it really only works 25% of the time, cause for those times it’s a breeze. And for the other 75% we get delicious salt.
I would say he’s competent at them, but even that can be argued. So he’s certainly in some weird limbo between incompetent and competent. For me, he is not good for several reasons.
His spacing is shit. See all the whiffed SPDs with Gief. In a game this offensive, good players will punish even smaller whiffed actions.
He focuses too much on how to do something (ex. combo into Level 3) while neglecting WHY you should do X over Y.
He doesn’t care about frame data. So many of those “WHY DID THAT BEAT MY (insert random move)” stems from him pressing when it is not “his turn”.
He cannot apply knowledge from one character to another. This also ties into the frame data point as say you learn you can punish X with Y when playing a character. When you switch to a new character, you can still punish X with Y with that new character as long as the frame data lines up.
Phil can copy what he sees that’s why he got so good following Tee. Phil watches these top pro combo videos X copies it, then gets bodies by players who download him or start switching it up on him.
thats the thing, he sees or is told something then he just does that. He doesn’t have the understanding how to apply what learned.
He learns a combo then just unga bunga’s it until he gets it. Like when Daiphone (or what ever his name is) reviewed his footage and said he needs to parry more. So what does phil do? Parry on wake up. 9 times out of 10 he will parry on wake up. Which is why neutral jumping gets him every time. He was parrying why doesn’t it work!?! stupid game!!
He does this in every fighting game, then resorts to tick throwing or the DSP BNB, 2 low quick hits into special or throw…
every.
fucking.
game.
Whats fascinating about watching him play is trying to figure out what he’s seeing because there’s times when he claims something happened that CLEARLY didn’t or he’ll try to throw from WAY outside throw range. Or he was blocking but CLEARLY he’s jumping or walking forward.
This isn’t just fighting games, in crab souls he very clearly walked off the middle of a platform then went “OMG look look at that, I clipped through the ground”
I know he’s going further off the deep end and he’s a delusional mental patient but I sometimes wonder if he’s having actual delusional hallucinations as some automatic response to protect his own ego that’s THAT fragile.
Oh and I don’t know if anyone else caught it, like 2 weeks ago on stream after a good SF6 stream he claimed he was never good at super turbo, he only played when people were moving on to something else and he was only good because no one else played WHICH matches his FF6 fake fan babble timeline. BUT he’s so good at SF6.
late stream he was always good at ST but he’s not that good at SF6, he’s getting better but he’ll never be as good as he was in his prime.
Next stream (or even same stream) he was great at ST and is back in his prime in SF6, he has 4 characters in master rank that’s how good he is.
My favorite is he’s firmly convinced the character tutorial anti air is universally viable. Proceeds to wonder why a shallow jump in isn’t caught by his vertical uppercut that goes straight up, or his panic mashed front flip kick he does 3 weeks too early completely wiffs “tHe gAMe Is reWoRDiNg emPTy uNSaFe mOoF!” when it’s really him gifting them a free combo on a silver platter.
VERY interesting. I did not catch that, but I never watch him without a detractor filter. And even then, I’m usually working with stuff in the background so I miss a lot of stuff like this. Thanks for pointing that out.
This is my favorite. I do think it’s mostly automatic on his part - it’s just so ingrained within him to deny reality at this point. He has absolutely no clue what he’s saying half the time, and the contradictions with what he said before are hourly, now. But… there is some level of awareness there, because he constantly refuses to show his inputs because he knows it would expose him. Anything to keep up the facade.
Yeah, lol. That was quite the mask slip. No idea why he’d say that after years of claiming to be hot shit at Super Turbo.
He had the ability to memorize patterns long ago and he can still beat level 1 scrubs. But he was never good to begin with when looking at videos from his FGC days.
Phil’s biggest problem in gaming has always been his inability to adapt on the fly. You see this with every game when something is random. He has to memorize a pattern in order to play. But regular people don’t play like that
Phail’s main game was MvC2, he only very suddenly became a robust Super Turbo expert after that fluke 4th place finish on the shitty PS1 port, he rebranded himself from a Mahvel to an ST main literally overnight.
He’d still complain even if he played offline. Hell he does it in Elden Ring. Just replace “it’s the lag” and “it’s the netcode” with “whaaa it dropped my move” or “yo it ate my input, I did it and it didn’t come out”. There are accounts of him doing this in his old pro fgc days. People often say they want to see him play offline, but the sad truth is we pretty much already know what would happen.
My take is THUS: Phil grinded the shit out of MvC2 and Super Turbo (I suspect he might have specifically done so on the broken port) so he got some muscle memory and knowledge in those games BACK IN THE DAY. Whatever skill he had a decade ago completely atrophied by now. Like many people pointed out, you can pick up whatever fighting game DSP plays, practice it semi seriously for 2-3 months and you’re good to go, you can now beat DSP.
Just want to highlight @PieceOfPeace 's match against Phil, tonight. That ending was slick as fuck.
Phil criticizes PoP for keeping his distance against Zangief, as if he shouldn’t care about spacing against the giant grappling character, under the notion that Zangief is a bad character. He’s screaming at his TV about how his opponent doesn’t understand the game, because his opponent won’t blindly run in and get grabbed.
I would like to also point out Dirge Gaming and their replays from Phil’s matches. They’re not current, think the last is mid-ish April, but you get to see Dave mashing inputs. I wonder if we’ll see him throw out those level threes outta no where.
The Guy always has an excuse, even arcades. He’d bitch about the board, the version, the connection to the TV. It’s just that rollback netcode is such an easy target for his gin marinated mind. It’s the mental gymnast in his brain protecting his frail ego.
No wonders he thinks the netcode is eating his moves! Inside that lag he manages to do 10 different inputs and the poor game has to figure out which one to give him.
Exactly. He’d use many other excuses but “bad netcode” is the perfect scapegoat for him because it’s hard to test and verify live so usually you kinda have to take someone’s word for it. Now Phil overuses this excuse and you can tell he’s bullshiting but it’s the cheapest, easiest, LAZIEST lie to pull.