Perfect Control

One scene from Perfect Control (1:19-1:24), with Mario using his various recovery options to recover on Fountain of Dreams.

Perfect Control is a famous Machinima released in 2005 featuring the game Super Smash Bros. Melee being played with the assistance of an Action Replay. Recorded and compiled by the collective work of the Smashers SuperDoodleMan and Omnigamer, Perfect Control was intended to show how Melee could be played if players could play the game on a frame-by-frame level.

Overview

Perfect Control has a running time of about four minutes, including its opening and ending credits; in the actual video, the viewer is shown a multitude of displays of tech skill that would be impossible to perform under ordinary gameplay conditions, much less do so consistently. The idea is stated in its opening:

“	Even the fastest player is limited by the speed of his fingers, or his mind's ability to control them... ...but what if someone could act and react instantaneously... ...and thereby have total mastery of this game... don't blink.	”
—Perfect Control's opening credits

Some demonstrations feature only one character performing by him or herself, such as the animation at the top of the page showing Mario perfectly recovering on Fountain of Dreams. In addition, a number of sequences involve the repeated use of Samus's super wavedash technique, as well as extreme, repeated abuse of techniques such as wavedashing and L-cancelling. Outside of this, some demonstrations feature four characters all rapidly jumping, attacking, and re-grabbing onto a single ledge, while others feature actual battles with characters performing zero-to-death combos, extensively using powershielding techniques, almost unnoticeable SHFFLing, and similar tactics. Other demonstrations demonstrate abuse of frames by either making characters survive OHKO attacks or by constantly and repeatedly preventing attacks with large hitboxes from even glancing opponents.

Production

In order to create Perfect Control, Action Replay was used to slow the game down to only a few frames per second, thus allowing the players to input commands at a frame-by-frame level; some of this footage is shown in the ending credits. After performing and recording this footage, the result was then sped up back to Melee's ordinary frame speed of 60 frames per second. As a side effect of being recorded with Action Replay, white text showcasing inputs and other data can sometimes be seen at the top of the screen, a result of running Melee's debug mode.

The background music of the video is a techno remix of Mystic Cave Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

Sequels

A sequel to Perfect Control was later released by the same team; called Perfect Control 2, the video acts as an addendum to the first video in the series by showcasing more examples of how Melee could be played if players could control it at a frame-by-frame level. To date, Perfect Control 2 remains the last video in the series.

A similar video called Perfect Dark was also later made; this video, however, did not feature the work of either SuperDoodleMan or Omnigamer, and it instead has full focus on Fox.

External links

• Perfect Control on YouTube (reupload)
• Perfect Control 2 on YouTube
• A SmashBoards thread explaining Perfect Control 2