Unsurprisingly, he found a workaround to the LCD issue. “We were able to come up with a method to expedite the game visually which would counteract the fact that the LCD was slowing the game down visually. We basically negated the two things and got the LCDs to feel like they’re CRTs”

Hax is one of the most technologically savvy people I’ve spoken to in regards to SSBM. So, while I understood the desire to move to LCDs, I had to ask, “What is the methodology you actually used to expedite the game visually, was it a program, how did you do it?”

He chuckled before continuing, “What makes all of this even more ridiculous is that you can only do this to Melee. If I wanted to expedite any game by a frame, I would not be able to do that, but the reason you can do it to Melee is Melee has a glitch in it, believe it or not, that says that this entire time that we’ve been playing Melee the visuals have been pushed back by a frame.”

“Oh?”

“Meaning the game developers actually shipped the game with a glitch that delays the game’s visuals. So, you can go and fix this glitch, and that’s how you would do it.”

Apparently, this is not widespread information and something that I was entirely unaware of.

“This glitch first came to predominance when Netplay became good, like 3 years ago. Dolphin always had a Netplay function, but Dolphin felt slower, just like LCD felt slower.”

Faster Melee Dolphin, the modified version of Dolphin that elevated Netplay to its current popularity, became ‘faster’ by fixing the same glitch Hax worked around for his own tournament. However, Hax’s Nightclub doesn’t utilize internet connection to connect players, negating any other source of potential lag.

“I endorse this as the new standard,” he continued. “If a super major tournament was held on this, I would go.”

“I know that the main complaint on Netplay still is the lag that people experience, I assume you play off Netplay, is that generally the preference?” I asked.

“I quit netplay completely. I haven’t netplayed in seven months. Because it’s still not the same,” he explained, “Dolphin has all these little issues, for example, your frames per second can falter, on a console that can never happen. Then there are graphical issues with something called shaders (1 aspect of the game’s graphics might not run), literally just one thing, like if Fox’s boot didn’t show.”

“But I also live in a good location.” The privilege of city-dwelling Melee players with a good scene is a continued hot topic. While Netplay offers players in disparate areas the opportunity to complete, Hax explained, “we can spend $2.75 [on the subway] and be anywhere in the city and we just like, have a big community now where we all play together every night.”