Smasher:Aldwyn

Aldwyn McCloud
Character info
Melee main	Falco
Other Melee characters	Fox, Captain Falcon
Personal and other info
Real name	Andrea
Birth date	December 4, 1989
Location	Perugia
Miscellaneous info
Skill	Top professional

Aldwyn McCloud, mostly known as Aldwyn, is an Italian smasher and is hailed to be the best regionally. Although he is mostly known for his Falco, he plays Fox as a main character too. Many people claimed his Fox is actually better, but Aldwyn usually sticks to Falco during big events as he says playing Fox requires a higher level of concentration which might more easily result in a loss of focus. He also likes to play as Captain Falcon, Sheik, and Marth.

Background

He began playing the game during 2005, well after the majority of the players in the area had been playing, therefore he had to develop a solid understanding of the advanced game in order to even compete.

He received the first introduction to the professional aspects of the game when he met the French players Joanna Dark and Doraki, along with Helios from Sweden at the EoM tournament, which took place in Italy in December 2005. From then on, Aldwyn would train seriously in order to compete on the smash scene.

Aldwyn won the 2 biggest Italian tournaments to date: ST2 (June 2006) and EoM2 (September 2006). He proved to be a dangerous opponent on the wider European scene by placing 5th at JST5 in Holland (December 2006) and 2nd at RoS4 (July 2007).

Best Italian smasher?

There is some debate amongst the regional community as to whether or not Aldwyn is a better overall smasher than his local rival Seretur. Often considered a moot point (especially amongst the players themselves), Aldwyn's recent tournament results generally place him at the top.Seretur on the other hand won all of the most important Italian tournaments that took place prior to ST2 and placed 7th at RoS3 in Sweden (July 2006), another very big tournament in Europe.

Things have been changing since AoM1 (April 2007) where both tournament and friendlies results show a little tendency of Aldwyn winning over Seretur.

Ranking Aldwyn on the world smash scene still remains pretty difficult as he never traveled outside Europe and only joined 3 European big tournaments. However his placements at JST5 in Holland and RoS4 in Sweden had him being considered a high level smasher throughout Europe. Outside of Europe he is less known, primarily due to a lack of videos featuring his gameplay.

After RoS4, probably his best performance, he began a slow decline caused both by the improvement of his European rivals and his inactivity which eventually lead to a full year of pause from smash (2008).

He started playing again in the beginning of 2009, not taking the game as seriously as before, but still playing every now and then.

While Aldwyn himself no longer considers himself to be European top5 worth (or at least claiming it is debatable), pretty much everyone in the Italian community considers his regional supremacy to be unaffected by his period of inactivity (with the exception of his main rival Seretur, with the claim that too much time has passed since the last time the two of them played). On the European scene, he is still feared by most people as a dangerous opponent, opinion supported by Aldwyn's constant 1st placing in pools and top seeding.

In the 18 months arc between half 2006 and fall 2007, Aldwyn has been widely acknowledged as the best Falco in Europe. Nowadays, although the majority of Europe considers CalleW from Sweden to be the best Falco in Europe, some people still claim Aldwyn deserves the title (though CalleW won a set from Aldwyn 3-0 in the beginning of 2008). Aldwyn himself remained neutral in the debate, on one hand recognizing his last defeat in tournament against the Swedish player, on the other hand claiming that he still understands and exploits the strenghts of his character better than his Swedish rival.

Style

Aldwyn used to train with Tosxychor, another Italian SSBM player who happened to be Aldwyn's best friend. However, he soon began to think the time he spent on SSBM wasn't enough and he therefore decided to train using CPUs. After his period of pause, he strongly reduced the time spent on smash, limiting his activity to tournaments (mostly in Italy) and random smashfests also due to Tosxychor's complete retirement from the scene after Brawl's relase.

Aldwyn used to almost always team with Tosxychor in Italian tournaments. Since Chor's retirement, he doesn't have a fix team mate anymore. During European events, he instead often changed team mate usually trying to build as much balanced and well working teams as possible using the available Italians of the event. This resulted in him getting 7th place at RoS3 (July 2006, with Seretur), 5th place at JST5 (December 2006, with Chor), 5th place at SMACK (March 2009, with Dax) still going nowhere near winning any big team tournament in Europe. On the Italian scene he instead usually dominates teams as well, sometimes even teaming with level 9 computer DK for fun during friendlies.

For those who have been able to play him, Aldwyn is considered to be a smart player, however several players and Aldwyn himself claim that his real strength resides in his technical speed. Aldwyn's gameplay is a balance between technical devices and strategical skills. The claim of the Italian player is that Falco and Fox are characters that unlike others necessarily require extreme speed to be played competitively, therefore demanding high technical skills from the player. However, focusing too much on being fast will often result in acting too recklessy which, still according to aldwyn's opinion, is the main mistake that backfires on most of Fox/Falco mains both in USA and Europe. In order to prevent himself from becoming too reckless and unaccurate he therefore started studying, during his early days, the Japanese style of playing (only one, according to Aldwyn, unaffected by the lack of accuracy that instead featured the other regions). Even nowadays Aldwyn claims that the Japanese style is the lifeblood of his gameplay as it gives him the accuracy to fully exploit Fox and Falco's moveset, therefore enhanching his technical skills while helping him to keep his focus and being calm at the same time. Apart from this, he no longer follows any player as a model although he recently claimed to have been impressed by Zhu's and Mango's performances as Falco as well as PC Chris's and Jman's as Fox.

Throughout his career, Aldwyn's biggest weak point (widely recognized by all the communities he has been part of as well as by Aldwyn's himself) has been tournament stress and loss of focus. This penalized him both in his early days (since as a newcomer he'd screw up more easily during big events) and in his latest days (as the current metagame requires an amount of focus and concentration way superior to the past). This always made him prefer friendlies over tournament sets, caring more about an overall view of the skills of all the players rather than of tournament results, however he has also been known in the past for disliking losing. Aldwyn's opinion is that his skills might actually be superior to the ones belonging to many people who beat him both in the present and his past times by taking advantage of his concentration flaws, however he also recognizes that concentration during big events is a skill as well therefore usually avoiding making such claims which might end up being disrespectful to people who beat him as well as being mere johns.

Humour

Aldwyn has a unique sense of humour. He recently became famous for playing on the other top european players attending Berlin Calling (March 2010) a prank he named after himself on video.

The Italian community strongly despises his very bad sense of humour (jokes such as "Randall the cloud saved the McCloud" are commonly heard by him). In 2010 an Italian player named Overlord, taking into account Aldwyn's dominance in Italy along with his jokes concluded Aldwyn must have made a deal with the Devil in which he traded a fine sense of humour in exchange of smash skills.

Notable tournament placings

Super Smash Bros. Melee

Tournament	Date	1v1 placement	2v2 placement	Partner
The Renaissance of Smash 4	July 3rd-6th, 2007	2nd	9th	Seretur
Epita Smash Arena 2	February 23rd-24th, 2008	17th	9th	Chor
B.E.A.S.T II	August 11th-14th, 2011	5th	7th	Dax
Smashers' Reunion: Melee Grande	July 13th-15th, 2012	7th	7th	Dax

Trivia

• Aldwyn never plays for money, claiming that the fun of playing is supposed to be the real and only objective. However, he recently considered the possibility of playing small money matches in order to get himself used to tournament stress and lack of concentration.
• Unlike a lot of SSBM players who care more about the tier list position rather than the character itself, Aldwyn's main, Falco, is his favorite Nintendo character, along with Meta Knight. He is also a fan of the Zelda series characters (especially Ganondorf), Mario and Luigi, Donkey Kong and Captain Falcon. He also seems to dislike Peach, asserting (like many other players) that Peach is an anagram for "cheap".
• Aldwyn's first friend out of Italy was Joanna Dark. These two, with Seretur, share the use of Falco and have significantly contributed to the development of the playstyle of the others. During his career, he progressively extended his friendship to almost everyone in Europe. Many people in Europe claim to respect him for his kindness, let alone his smash skills, as Aldwyn has always stayed neutral during arguments and has always done his best not to hurt anyone's feelings or opinions. Things are different in Italy though, as more than once Aldwyn has been involved in pretty vivid arguments with his fellows although in present times most of the community seems to have forgiven him for it.
• Aldwyn doesn't play Brawl competitively, and after playing it for the first time, hated the game so much he gave his Brawl copy to his young cousins. However, he recently started playing in local Brawl tournaments in order to increase the number of attendants, with still no intention of taking the game seriously.