Team:SLAPAHO
SLAPAHO | |
---|---|
Members | Aaron "Foghorn" Kirschner (Marth, Zelda) Alex "Ax" Schumacher (Zero Suit Samus, Pit) |
Former members | C.J. "Palm Tree" Palmer (Ness) Dustin "Callista" Quam (Fox) Nick "The Crazy Walrus" Cramer |
SLAPAHO is an Iowa City based crew, research team, tournament host, and Smash film-making organization.
History
SLAPAHO was founded in the fall of 2007 by Aaron "Foghorn" Kirschner and Alex "Ax" Schumacher. It was originally formed simply as a crew that focused primarily on doubles play, but quickly evolved into other roles.
They are mostly known for their research and tournament organizing. They have sponsored and played in a number of tournaments in the Iowa City area, generally posting good results. They hosted the first large tournament in the central Iowa area with the Last Hurrah Doubles tournament, which exceeded 40 participants and nearly as many observers.
They plan to continue their active role in the Smash community by encouraging the burgeoning tournament field in Iowa and researching in-depth all facets of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
They have been sanctioned as a student organization by the University of Iowa.
Tournaments
For complete information, see UISCS
SLAPAHO is dedicated to increasing the amount of tournaments in Iowa. They started with small tournaments at the University of Iowa, but have begun to spread into larger tournaments. Their most recent tournament was the Last Hurrah Doubles Tournament on the 23 of February. Foghorn Sm usually is the head organizer of the tournaments and officiates, while other members are known to compete.
They have also competed in tournaments in Iowa City, with Foghorn and Palmer closing out finals in their debut singles tournament. The team of Ax and Palmer placed third in the Last Hurrah Doubles Tournament.
SLAPAHO is currently planning a series of Brawl tournaments in Iowa City called the University of Iowa Smash Championship Series (UISCS). This series will consist of two preliminary tournaments (each player may only enter one of these).
SLAPAHO has recently expanded, with hopes for an Iowa Smash bi-weekly tournaments.
Play philosophy
While their focuses have greatly expanded, SLAPAHO is still a crew dedicated to the enjoyment of Super Smash Bros. As such, they tend to develop their own metagame, which is often quite different from the rest of the smash community. They also aim to develop the metagame of bottom tier characters. Almost all tactics used by the crew were developed through trial and error in intra-crew play. This has led to them being rather unpredictable in tournament play, as their maverick style often goes against what players expect. The crew utilizes many advanced edgeguarding techniques, including the turnip glitch.
The crew also stresses the importance of knowing how to play multiple characters. Entrance into the crew requires a display of proficiency with at least five non-clone characters (i.e. Fox and Falco count as one character in this test). At least one of these characters must be a bottom tier character and another must not be a top or high tier character. At the present, all members of SLAPAHO are proficient with at least 10 distinct characters.
SLAPAHO has also been credited in developing the metagame of Charizard.
SLAPAHO epics
The SLAPAHO crew is currently filming a series of short smash movies. These films are comedy bouts of smash, sometimes with commentary provided by Foghorn and Ax. All of these can be found on YouTube as they are aired, and links will be placed here.
- SLAPAHO Epic #1: Every Character gets Eaten by the Fish
- SLAPAHO Epic #2: How OGs do it: A Tribute to 187 Ride or Die
- SLAPAHO Epic #3: Raise the Roof featuring R.O.B
SLAPAHO also will release some material from their filming sessions that isn't worthy of true epic status. This can be either behind the scenes looks at the making of a SLAPAHO Epic, outtakes from epics, or failed projects that are so bad they're funny. These can be found here:
Trivia
- The name was taken from an opponents' flag football team.
- They record their videos via an uplink with video signal splitter hooked into an electric shaver charger and captured on mediocre video editing software.
- No members of SLAPAHO are allowed to choose their gamer tags; they are given generally in ridicule by other members or even passersby.
- The clan tag (a set of characters after the gamer tag which identifies the clan, crew, or association of a player such as the famous multi-game clan 'Meet Your Makers' "MYM]") is {~XTRM}~. For example, Ax's full tag would be {~XTRM}~Ax. As can be seen, sometimes the tags can have nothing to due with the actual crew name and more to do with what Johnny Xtreme says.