Click click clack! Click click clack! Click click clack!
This is the sound that my fightstick makes as I practice Decapre’s crouching medium kick into heavy Rapid Slash combo. It’s only two moves long, and one of those moves can be triggered by simply mashing a single button, yet I’m weeks into my practice and can only land it about 50% of the time against a stationary dummy. What makes this two move combo so difficult?
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Though I don’t talk about it much on this blog, I am no slouch in the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 series. Having invested hundreds of hours into it, I wreak havoc online and it’s generally the game I do best at in tournaments. Say what I will about having the #1 ranked Rose in Canada on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, my best tournament placing to-date across any game is 25th in MvC 3 at T12; a point that arguably holds more weight in my fighting game resume.
Having said that, I have a glaring hole in my skill-set that keeps me from ascending to the upper echelon of players: my inability to land the biggest combos.
When it comes to fighting games, your ability to input the right buttons at the right time is critical to success. If you’re an amateur fighting another amateur, the person who can more consistently pull off their special moves is going to have the edge. As you get better, the importance of execution continues to be a factor, as your opponent’s ability to hit you with a big combo in a crucial situation (or any situation for that matter) could put you in a really bad spot.
With that said, I think that execution is generally considered the most boring and tedious aspect of your skill-set to practice and improve upon. Because of how monotonous it may seem, it’s easy to just stick with what you’ve got and never make an honest effort to improve your execution. In this post, we talk about what execution is, different types of execution ‘concepts’ and a few different ways to approach improving your execution without boring yourself to tears.
One of the players I admire most in the Street Fighter IV scene is Sako. He’s notorious for rarely ever leaving his house to play in tournaments, but he’s built quite a buzz for himself through God’s Garden online tournaments, his appearance at SoCal Regionals and from all of the YouTube exposure he gets from fans who upload all of his public matches. Why the buzz? Because he has the most amazing execution the world has ever seen in the Street Fighter IV series. He’s able to do combos that no one else in the world can do, and he can pull them off every time, in live matches, without breaking a sweat. The above combo video is an example of some of the stuff that only he can do.
Watching Sako play as Cammy inspired me to hop into training mode and give her a shot. I was hoping to at least master one Sako-like combo before moving onto something else. I didn’t even come close.
In Third Person 