User:VinLAURiA

VinLAURiA
Character info
Smash 64 main	Kirby
Melee main	Kirby
Brawl mains	Luigi, Pit
Other Brawl characters	Kirby, Snake
Personal and other info
Real name	Vincent Lauria
Birth date	March 1, 1992
Location	New Jersey
Miscellaneous info
Skill	Amateur

Call me Vin. I'm a self-proclaimed video game anthropologist, freelance graphic designer, and lifetime Nintendo fan.

Vin the Fanboy

I've been with Smash Bros. since the beginning and Nintendo itself for pretty much my entire life. I've had every system, played most of the big stuff aside from Zelda (which doesn't interest me), and I know practically the entire Mario franchise like the back of my hand. I'm also big on VALVe and have dabbled in Sony stuff, having owned PlayStation systems and being an avid PlanetSide 2 player. In general, platformers and first-person shooters are my favorite genres.

As for Smash, I've never missed a beat. I read the Game Informer spread on the original, saw the Don LaFontaine commercial on TV, voted in the "Peach or Bowser for Smash 2?" poll on the old Smash site, salivated at the Melee screenshots with the answer to that (both!), watched the legendary Snake reveal in Brawl’s '06 trailer, caught every page on the DOJO!! as it happened, and have seen every Nintendo Direct and Pic of the Day for Smash 4 so far. And I damn well played every single one to practically 100% completion - bar a trophy or two - and you bet I'll be there when Smash 4 drops (both times.)

Vin the Editor

While I'm a relatively new member on SmashWiki, I've done editing laps on other wikis in the past, most notably the Team Fortress Wiki, though I've also done some work on TVTropes, other NIWA wikis, and Wikipedia itself. I also have some history in web design, and in any case know my way around MediaWiki coding.

As an editor, I'm more of a back-end guy. I like dealing with the filing systems and organization, and the info I'll be working on will be more about theming: game universes, UI elements, character art, pretty much everything except the technical data around the gameplay itself; I'll leave that to the more competitive-minded players to fuss over. I'm also pretty big on tropes; you'll be seeing me reference TVTropes a lot in talk pages.

Vin the Player

As a Smash player, I played Kirby pretty much exclusively in the first two, though as of Brawl I've branched out to other characters and have been experimenting with practically everyone. I like playing with a lot of throwing items and explosives to set up traps and control the field; I was a beast with MSBs back in the Melee days and characters like Snake are really fun for me. Personally, I've preferred each game over the last; yeah, Melee was great, but I love all the new content Brawl added - such as the Stage Builder - and its physics are much more my style. I also play vanilla; no mods for me.

Playstyle-wise, I'm pretty much as far from competitive as you can get. I've been to exactly one tournament, and that was the GameStop one at the Brawl launch as I was picking up my copy; I lost the first round on a technicality. That's not to say I'm unskilled; there are certain other games that I'm good at, even really hard ones like Bit.Trip or Super Hexagon. Even in Smash I can hold my own and I know a good bit about the game, but a minor motor impairment pretty much prohibits me from pulling off the advanced moves needed to play seriously. The main thing is I'm not a fan of competitive gaming in general: even games where I could probably contend professionally if I tried (such as TF2), I just consider the whole deal a waste of time. I've clashed with competitive players philosophically in the past; in general, I'm a stalwart opponent of Sirlinism and despise competitive-heavy genres like MOBAs and traditional fighting games. When it comes to multiplayer, I prefer playing cooperatively with people rather than against them (at least in any serious capacity) and prefer my challenges to come from the game itself in things like single-player.

Still, I can tolerate competitive players if they don't try to start something with me and I know they're the ones who are gonna be doing all the gameplay data grunt-work here, so I appreciate that. My goal is to make my mark on SmashWiki through the info pertaining to Super Smash Bros. as the big Nintendo crossover rather than Super Smash Bros. as the fighting game.

This user is Vin.