Getting Competitive in Injustice: Application and Old Habits

Welcome to week three of my journey to become a competitively-skilled player of Injustice: Gods Among Us!

Over the past couple of weeks I have been mostly practicing my combos and learning the ranges and more creative uses for Black Adam’s abilities.  Breaking 30% with my combos has gotten to be a regular occurrence, meaning I only need to catch an enemy off-guard (or make them off-guard) about three times to win, even if I don’t hit with any of my ranged abilities or dive kicks.  That isn’t the end-goal, I am going to want to able to drop someone with two combos and one or two lightning bolts ideally, but it seems like a decent enough start to add to my training by practicing against my non-online console’s only available opponent: the AI.

I leave the difficulty on the medium setting, as I am more concerned with landing the combos in an actual fight setting than in seriously challenging myself as yet.  The first few fights went smoothly enough, but shortly after my foes started giving me actual resistance I started to notice a few problems.

The first problem was my tendency to rely overmuch on Black Adam’s moves.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, his moves are solid and actually do decent damage.  Where it becomes a problem is the reliance on these moves superseding my attempts to actually get a combo started, meaning the battle takes much longer with more chances to go sour.

It is an old habit of mine from other 2-D fighters, going all the way back to Mortal Kombat II.  Once I learned the special moves, I tended to focus more on them as a slightly more reliable way to win.  Now, however, the special moves are not the be-all end-all of fighting games, so breaking that habit will take work.

I am also noticing the characters I tend to have difficulty with.  Green Lantern vexes me because of how difficult he is to approach and his ability to grab me out of my dive kick.  Grundy’s grapples cause me confusion, but the main friend I have to play with mains Grundy, so I will get plenty of practice against him.  The main other character who causes me issue right now is Nightwing, as I am still trying to figure out Black Adam’s anti-pressure tools.

Practice will continue!  The goal now is to get in a few games against my actual friends who play to see what I can do against an actual person and to see if I have picked up any more bad habits from beating on the AI.