E-sports have become a huge deal. People all across the world make their living playing the games the rest of us enjoy on our off time. What we make leisure, they make profitable by virtue of one very important difference in how they play.
They are really damn good at these games.
Being close friends with one of the primary fighting game tournament organizers in my area and several people who are close to going professional in League of Legends, I have more than my fair share of exposure to the world of professional gaming. I’ve never been good enough to really compete with any of the fascinating people I meet as a result.
Whether or not I seriously could be good enough if I dedicated the sort of time to learning and practicing such skill requires has always been a question I have pondered. With the release of Injustice: Gods Among Us, I am looking to answer that question.
Injustice is already fairly familiar to me. I never got competitively good at Mortal Kombat, but I did play enough to be familiar with the way it works and Injustice has some definite similarities. Most of the people I have spoken to about getting competitive at a fighting game have suggested I start by picking a character I like, but one that also isn’t notably weaker than others.
Picking my character is actually easy. Injustice, from what I have seen and heard over professionally-run tournament streams, does not appear to have any characters who are weak enough to not be competitive. In addition, the game has one of my all-time favorite comic book characters in Black Adam, whose unique combination of ruthlessness and aloofness from the rest of the DC cast has always appealed to me. His ready stance floating just off the ground with arms cross impatiently is awesome, and his two basic costumes looking great doesn’t hurt.
He is, in fact, a bad enough dude.
Having picked my character, the next step is to learn them. Understanding his special moves is simple enough, but the real meat of any character’s move set in a fighter is in the combos they can create by combining those special moves and regular attacks to string together longer and stronger combinations. As of now, I can fairly reliably get off combos reaching between 30% and 40% of my opponent’s health, which seems like a good starting point.
Now I just need to practice practice practice until I can do those combos in my sleep… then I can try them out against another person and see how well I’ve learned.
