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Rokinlobster

Nightwolf of the galaxy
So there seems to have been a fairly large surge in new members around here, and I keep seeing several questions asked many times. I will address them here. Note that these examples will mostly be NRS specific, but I will try to address their meanings and use in other fighters.

DID MY CONTROLS CHANGE OR AM I CRAZY!?
http://www.testyourmight.com/index.php?threads/30665/

you are probably still crazy though ;)

CAN I JUST GET A VIDEO OF SOME BASICS?
their youtube channel has a few character specific guides for mk and injustice.

What CONTROLLER SHOULD I USE?
Simple question, simple answer. The one you like the best. The only recomendation that I feel the competetive community completely aggrees on is to learn to use the directional pad and not the joysticks if you are using a playstation/xbox controller.

Pad: AKA Controller (Don't know why we don't just call them controllers tbh), be it a playstation, xbox, or NES. These are controllers you hold with your hands that come with your console.

Stick: These are emulations of a real arcade machine, for use at home. most have 6 buttons you use with your right hand controling your attacks, and a vertical stick for movement with your left hand.

Hitbox: This means a lot of things.
1. The size and shape of your characters body, where it is vulnerable to attacks.
2. The size and shape of your characters attacks, where they will hit opponents.
3. A unique controller that looks like a Stick, but instead of the vertical stick for movements, you have 4 arcade buttons.

Converter: A nifty device that allows you to use your pad, stick, or hitbox on its non native console, I use a playstation 1 controller on an Xbox 360 using one of these.

What do ALL OF THOSE NUMBERS MEAN?
Simple, since most figting games are played on several consoles, controllers, and sticks we use a number/letter scheme to write out combos easier.

INJUSTICE NOTATION AS IT STANDS NOW (Subject to Change)
1:Light attack (X on Xbox, Square on Playstation)
2: Medium Attack (Y on xbox, Triangle on Playstation)
3: Heavy Attack (A on Xbox, X on Playstation)
4: Trait (B on Xbox, Circle on Playstation) (note that there does not seem to be a consistant notation being used for this)

D: Down
U: Up
B:Back
F:Forward
MB: Meter Burn (Right trigger on xbox, R2 on Playstation)

People notate in many different ways. Some people use strictly directional and input notations, which gives the most accurate representation of the conbo, but looks much more confusing. Many, my self included use words to describe certain actions. For example, a jump. It can be represented as "U" or "Jump". Hopefully soon we will reach a consensus and have a consistent notation for Injustice. These are symbols I use, but there are plenty of variations.

, (Comma) I use these to split up different parts of a combo.
B3, 332. This would be a Back 3 launcher followed by a three hit string done by pressing 332 quickly in succession.

~ (Tilde) This means you cancel a special from a string. Take batmans for example, you could do 22~Straight grapple. This is done by pressing 22 down forward 1. ALSO "xx" IS USED COMMONLY.


So, lets write out my batman bnb from the demo, step by step.

22~Df1, MB This is batmans meter burnt straight grapple. It allows you to start a combo, as it immobilizes the opponent for a small time.
B3. Back and 3. This is a universal launching attack (Every character has this move as a launcher, though they may look different)
Forward Jumping 3. You jump and do a kick.
B23. Back 2 follwed by 3 pressed in succession.

So at the end of that we get is this.

22~straight grapple, MB,B3, Forward Jumping 3, B23.

Once again, notation is something that is pretty inconsistently written and seems to be tough to learn, but once you do learn it even with the inconsistencies it is very easy to read.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND SOME OF THE WORDS YOU GUYS USE
There are some essential fighting game terms that you should know. There are a lot of them and I guarantee I will miss some here. Here is a link to a site that has about every one, and Ill also write some important ones here.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_fighting_games
http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2007/oct/21/street-fighter-terminology-acronyms-lexicon-and-glossary-guide/


What is NEGATIVE EDGE?
Negative edge is a system used in most fighting games. It's main goal is to make things easier for newer players, but It can be essential in high level execution. There are 2 main parts to negative edge.
1. Release Check (This is the option you have to turn off in Inustice) This allows the release of a button to be counted as a press of a button, but only for special moves.
Example: Pick batman, hit 2 (Triangle/Y/medium attack) hold it for a few seconds and release it. He does not do another standing 2. Now, hit 2 again, hold it for a few seconds, then hit back forward RELEASE 2, now he should throw his batarang.

2. Allowance of incorrect inputs. This is almost exactly as it sounds. you are able to hit directional inputs that are not part of the required inputs for a special move and it will still work. There are some moves that allow this with incorrect attack inputs, but this seems to be pretty rare, and I do not know of anything in injustice that allows this.
Example: Pick Batman, hit back down forward+1 and a batarang will still throw. Even on MK inputs with a stick you should be able to do a half circle forward motion and it will work.

Third Strike tutorial on negative edge.

How DO I GET BETTER?
This is a terrible answer, but it is THE ONLY correct one.
Practice. There is no guide, no person, no drug that can make you better. It is ALL UP TO YOU. you can read tips and tricks, but it is UP TO YOU to implement them into your game.
There are however a few things you can do that may help you get better faster.
1. Play people for more than 1 game straight. A huge part of fighting games is being able to pick up on your opponents habits. you cant do this very well with just 1 game.
2.Play good people. Sure ranked matches are cool, but remember that the best of the best in THE WORLD post here. Private message people, the large majority of players here not only will, but will enjoy helping you get better. This will allow you to get instant, direct crituqes about your gameplay, and help with doing # 1.
3. Ask for Help, ask questions. People will help (Note to make sure you ask your questions in an appropriate place. I designate this thread as a safe place to ask ANY fighting game related question about any character for any game. How ever, if you go to the Test your might Music thread and start asking about Blaze frame data you will be, and deserve to be blown up for it)
4. Play the AI. When I started MK9, it took me literally hours to beat the Expert Ladder. Now I beat it in like 8 minutes. The AI will not teach you how to play real people well. It will teach you to move well, to block well, to punish well, and to mount an offense well. It is also good practice for combos, meter usage and match pacing. Remember though that you will get to the point where playing the AI will become detrimental to your progress, but at that point you will be an above average player.

http://www.testyourmight.com/index.php?threads/3674/
Here is a great thread by Juggs on getting better, great read.

What IS FRAME DATA?
First I will answer 'What is a FRAME?" A frame is a picture. Movies and games are displayed to you as a very very fast slide show of pictures. You may be old enough to remember "Flip books" that is, A small book with a sequence of pictures that you would use your thumb to flip through the pages quickly and you would see some basic animation.

Now, most modern games run at 60 FPS (Frames Per Second) That means that every second you play a game you are actually just looking at 60 picutres all thrown past you very fast.

Frame Data is information about the game, using frames as the unit of measurement. There are many guides about the specifics of this, so I HIGHLY suggest checking them out.

http://testyourmight.com/threads/general-mk9-frame-data-info.15988/

http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2009/feb/17/how-read-frame-data-street-fighter-4/

http://tekkennation.com/frames_data_for_dummies.htm

WHAT IS THAT STUPID SLANG I DON'T UNDERSTAND for the lols.
LBSH: Let's be serious here.
VSM: Valley Stream Monsters, arguably the best group of MK9 players
GGA:Galloping Ghost Arcade, an Arcade in Chicago that is home to many good players
LBSH: Lets be serious here.
Blown up. 1. To be beaten badly "Lbsh VSM Blew up GGA"
2. Getting yelled at over the internet, some times for being an idiot, sometimes for no reason at all.
Bodied- Getting owned, pwned, blown up, or generally doing very badly in a match.
Casuals- Matches not played in a tournament where winning matters a lot but losing is null and void.
Salty- being mad because lbsh you got bodied by some one who you blew up last night in casuals.
Runback- the opportunity to play an opponent who has beaten you before.
"LBSH, GGA will never get their salty runback on VSM because they got blown up so hard that even after playing hours of casuals they will get bodied"

Hope I helped some one with this, please ask any other questions you may have!
 

Gurpwnder

Saikyo Student
I usually separate the 3 Hitbox definitions as follows.

Hit Box - The unique arcade stick-like controller where buttons control movement.
http://www.hitboxarcade.com/

Hitbox - The area that represents your attack's range.

Hurtbox - The areas of your body that can be damaged.
 

Rokinlobster

Nightwolf of the galaxy
i think its "cancel into" but i could be wrong
Correct


my question is what does "xx" mean in combos? For example, from the cyborg forums:

B1, 2, 3 xx DB1, MB, J2, B1 2 3 xx DB1 --- 44%

thanks
you want to hit 3 down back 1 really fast. The correct term is cancel, but i feel that term is counterintuitive, I think of it like chain, you are chaining his special move together with his normal standing 3.

In the notation I like to use "~"is the same as "XX" and I will update the op with that info.
 

Gh0stbusttTyler

Professional Scrublord
You don't need any of it to win. You just need practice. It helps though. Haha. :16Bit
I knew a bunch of this stuff before reading up on it. It's just really the frames stuff that kinda fries my mind. I've done quite a bit of practicing and I still can't quite get long combos down, however I've tried to practice more on shorter combos that do slightly more damage.

The three people I have played online have instantly comboed me into un-escapeable strings that really just frustrate the hell outta me. I someone managed to win a game against one of them, but then they just annihilate me the rest of the games I played against them. Stuff like that really just discourages me from playing against other people.
 
I knew a bunch of this stuff before reading up on it. It's just really the frames stuff that kinda fries my mind. I've done quite a bit of practicing and I still can't quite get long combos down, however I've tried to practice more on shorter combos that do slightly more damage.

The three people I have played online have instantly comboed me into un-escapeable strings that really just frustrate the hell outta me. I someone managed to win a game against one of them, but then they just annihilate me the rest of the games I played against them. Stuff like that really just discourages me from playing against other people.
The combo problem could be because of the online input lag. I can pull off a lot of long combos offline but online there is a slight lag in my button presses which throws off the timing of my combos. Obviously practicing online will fix that problem.

To your next paragraph do you play in the beginner lobbies? There are a lot of "beginners" in those lobbies so start with the people that haven't played very many matches to see how you stack up and then start challenging people with an equal amount of w/l or experience.

It won't help you if you play bad players forever so I always try to play people that are a little better than me but not so good that I lose confidence like you are. Its nice to win a couple, even if I always lose twice as much it gets me motivated to get better and I keep playing better players. Also don't just play 1 or 2 matches and leave, you want to play your opponents enough that you start noticing their habits and learn to punish them. You will learn to read people better and improve your mental game not just your execution.
 

KVv995

Noob
Hi, I would like to ask a couple of very direct questions that are specific to the MK/DC style fighting games, keeping in mind my background is Capcom and Guilty Gear:
1) How do you "adapt" to MK's style of comboing? There are two things about the MK style that seem to have existed since the first MK game which are that the special cancel window (2 xx b, f +2 or something) seems to be tighter. Do people typically negative edge it? The second aspect of the engine seems to be that there is significantly less emphasis on links. Admittedly, links are typically more advanced so a beginner like me wouldn't encounter them often anyway, but it seems like most combos are from cancels. The cancel window also seems tighter, but more importantly, it seems like for normal move cancels you can input the next button before the first one connects, resulting in a sort of "pre-emptive chain". What this ultimately results in for me is that I do not hit confirm because I'd rather leave myself at a huge frame disadvantage and go through the whole combo, blocked, than miss a combo (see below for another reason I'd rather complete the combo). Is this typical? Is hitconfirming less of a thing in MK/DC because there are more built-in high/low mixups?
2) This one is harder to explain. It seems that the MK/DC style fighting games have more "breaks" in the pace of the fighting games when a combo is missed. To illustrate: let's say that your character is player 1 and has a combo of 2, b + 2. If for some reason you hit 2 and miss the b + 2, one of two things will happen: player 1 hits player 2 in the face, then pauses for a noticeable (probably ~10 frame recovery animation) while player 2 is reeling and then goes back to neutral state (again, probably ~10 frames), OR, player 1 hits player 2 in the face, pauses, your input was so late that after player 2 recovers player 1 then does b + 2 more than ~10 frames later. For me I am just starting so I miss combos a lot and I'm playing against other players who miss combos a lot so it seems that every 3 or 4 seconds the game stops for 10 frames while our characters get their stuff together again. Does anyone else have a similar experience? Is this an intentional feature to encourage players to not whiff random moves?
 

Rokinlobster

Nightwolf of the galaxy
What do wiff and Ji mean also I see that ALOT on these forums and I cant figure it out
Wiff means miss, and Ji means jump in. So like ji2 means you jump at them and hit 2 while you are still in the air.


Hi, I would like to ask a couple of very direct questions that are specific to the MK/DC style fighting games, keeping in mind my background is Capcom and Guilty Gear:
1) How do you "adapt" to MK's style of comboing? There are two things about the MK style that seem to have existed since the first MK game which are that the special cancel window (2 xx b, f +2 or something) seems to be tighter. Do people typically negative edge it? The second aspect of the engine seems to be that there is significantly less emphasis on links. Admittedly, links are typically more advanced so a beginner like me wouldn't encounter them often anyway, but it seems like most combos are from cancels. The cancel window also seems tighter, but more importantly, it seems like for normal move cancels you can input the next button before the first one connects, resulting in a sort of "pre-emptive chain". What this ultimately results in for me is that I do not hit confirm because I'd rather leave myself at a huge frame disadvantage and go through the whole combo, blocked, than miss a combo (see below for another reason I'd rather complete the combo). Is this typical? Is hitconfirming less of a thing in MK/DC because there are more built-in high/low mixups?
2) This one is harder to explain. It seems that the MK/DC style fighting games have more "breaks" in the pace of the fighting games when a combo is missed. To illustrate: let's say that your character is player 1 and has a combo of 2, b + 2. If for some reason you hit 2 and miss the b + 2, one of two things will happen: player 1 hits player 2 in the face, then pauses for a noticeable (probably ~10 frame recovery animation) while player 2 is reeling and then goes back to neutral state (again, probably ~10 frames), OR, player 1 hits player 2 in the face, pauses, your input was so late that after player 2 recovers player 1 then does b + 2 more than ~10 frames later. For me I am just starting so I miss combos a lot and I'm playing against other players who miss combos a lot so it seems that every 3 or 4 seconds the game stops for 10 frames while our characters get their stuff together again. Does anyone else have a similar experience? Is this an intentional feature to encourage players to not whiff random moves?
Mortal Kombat and Injustice have markedly different combo systems. And yes, it does seem like the cancel window is smaller in injustice. I do not know of any links in injustice, but MK9 has one or two so you really don't have to worry about that. The main difference between MK and Injustice combos is movement. In MK since you can cancel a dash with normals many combos are like 1, dash, 1, dash, 1, dash, 1 stuff. In injustice it is a lot more about timing. Most combos have a basic structure of "launching string, back 3, air to air attack, string~special move".


I don't quite understand "The Breaks" you are talking about but they are probably really noticeable to you coming from capcom where there are such low frame moves that recover really fast, you can do like 5 light attacks in AE before you can do a single attack in injustice. So your conclusion is right, don't miss moves because a lot of them have pretty large recovery frames especially on wiff.
 

Rokinlobster

Nightwolf of the galaxy
I knew a bunch of this stuff before reading up on it. It's just really the frames stuff that kinda fries my mind. I've done quite a bit of practicing and I still can't quite get long combos down, however I've tried to practice more on shorter combos that do slightly more damage.

The three people I have played online have instantly comboed me into un-escapeable strings that really just frustrate the hell outta me. I someone managed to win a game against one of them, but then they just annihilate me the rest of the games I played against them. Stuff like that really just discourages me from playing against other people.
Don't play random people online, ask around here for some one to help you. I have only played about 100 games of MK online ever, online is a very unfuffilling experience. The lag screws up everything. Don't feel compelled to play online, the AI is pretty hard in injustice and the practice mode is good. Stick to those 2 for a while then try online again.
 

Xolace

Element of Sweetness
As someone who has never taken fighting games seriously I thoroughly enjoyed this post. This fighting game is the first one I've ever purchased (Aside from Skullgirls.) that has actually made me want to learn how to properly play. I don't aspire to become a pro, I would just like to be good enough to at least knock off one health bar haha. I've been getting smashed online but I'm enjoying myself regardless. Thanks for the thread, it definitely answered some questions.
 

KVv995

Noob
*snip*
So your conclusion is right, don't miss moves because a lot of them have pretty large recovery frames especially on wiff.
Thanks for your explanation. Does this mean that there is no equivalent concept of meaties in this game? Or do they just manifest in a different way? (For reference, in a Capcom fighter after a knockdown I might choose to time an attack on the opponent waking up such that I hit on the last active frame of a normally unsafe move to make it safe and force a block or reversal.)

As you can see, I'm still struggling to think about the game system in a non-Capcom centric view :p