WannabePlayer
Apprentice
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tl;dr: I chose Smoke because it would force me to improve my game, and playing with him somewhat changed my definition of winning
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*Please keep in mind that I am not insulting Smoke as a character in any way, and that I actually like playing as him and encourage others to try him out for a while*
I decided to learn to play as Smoke before any other character when I didn't know much about the game. This was back when I was one of those players who only used special moves and uppercuts to play the game. I thought Smoke would be a good character to play as because of his Smoke cloud. "Woah, you just use it and they come near you for a free teleport? He must be pretty good!" Yikes...
After about three hours into practice mode I learned that Smoke didn't have too much going for him. I noticed that he only had two moves that can be used for chain combos and that they were really slow. Playing through some ladder matches I also learned he had to be a very defensive character, which I wasn't good at being. At this point, I decided to throw away my previous reasons for using Smoke and adopt new ones to justify still using him. I wanted to discipline myself. I figured that I shouldn't take the easy way out by choosing a higher tier character than him. I wanted to improve my overall game first, which was awful. Even though I'm still not done, I feel like I have succeeded in improving myself in aspects of the game I used to suck at, such as defense, by continuing to use Smoke.
At this point, I feel like I'm well versed with Smoke but I still have a long way to go. I got Gold Membership for my Xbox recently and took advantage of it by playing lots of MK online. The more I fought people online (and sometimes offline) with Smoke, the more I started to notice a change in my attitude about the game. The most obvious and most important example is that, even though I would lose quite a few matches, I would still consider those to be successes because of the character I was using. I started to hold myself to a different standard of success. I started feeling that just doing well in a match with Smoke (especially against characters like Kung Lao, Kabal, Freddy, etc) made me feel that I had won in a different way even though I didn't win the match.
I won my fair share of matches and I lost my fair share, but that didn't change the way I somewhat felt like a "winner" because of my "limitation." After exploring the TYM forums I noticed that I wasn't the only one. Like Wafflez put it:
tl;dr: I chose Smoke because it would force me to improve my game, and playing with him somewhat changed my definition of winning
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Please keep in mind that I am not insulting Smoke as a character in any way, and that I actually like playing as him and encourage others to try him out for a while*
I decided to learn to play as Smoke before any other character when I didn't know much about the game. This was back when I was one of those players who only used special moves and uppercuts to play the game. I thought Smoke would be a good character to play as because of his Smoke cloud. "Woah, you just use it and they come near you for a free teleport? He must be pretty good!" Yikes...
After about three hours into practice mode I learned that Smoke didn't have too much going for him. I noticed that he only had two moves that can be used for chain combos and that they were really slow. Playing through some ladder matches I also learned he had to be a very defensive character, which I wasn't good at being. At this point, I decided to throw away my previous reasons for using Smoke and adopt new ones to justify still using him. I wanted to discipline myself. I figured that I shouldn't take the easy way out by choosing a higher tier character than him. I wanted to improve my overall game first, which was awful. Even though I'm still not done, I feel like I have succeeded in improving myself in aspects of the game I used to suck at, such as defense, by continuing to use Smoke.
At this point, I feel like I'm well versed with Smoke but I still have a long way to go. I got Gold Membership for my Xbox recently and took advantage of it by playing lots of MK online. The more I fought people online (and sometimes offline) with Smoke, the more I started to notice a change in my attitude about the game. The most obvious and most important example is that, even though I would lose quite a few matches, I would still consider those to be successes because of the character I was using. I started to hold myself to a different standard of success. I started feeling that just doing well in a match with Smoke (especially against characters like Kung Lao, Kabal, Freddy, etc) made me feel that I had won in a different way even though I didn't win the match.
I won my fair share of matches and I lost my fair share, but that didn't change the way I somewhat felt like a "winner" because of my "limitation." After exploring the TYM forums I noticed that I wasn't the only one. Like Wafflez put it:
Playing with Smoke has had good and unexpected impacts on me as a MK player. It forced me to get good at aspects of the game I used to be terrible at and also got me to see the game in a different light without distorting my overall perception towards it. If anybody here has had a similar experience with another character, think it's very useful and educational to play with a specific character, or just want to comment/criticize anything about this post, please do so! Or you can completely ignore this post altogether. I don't mind, I just felt like I had to share this with the community.
