The Road to Pro: Practice makes perfect.

Remember a few posts ago I posted about the road to being a professional gamer? I’ve been a little side -racked on that road, you would think that running a video game site offered you a ton of time to actually play video games. It’s not actually the case. When it’s not a review, recording Krismas’ game play footage or getting yelled at by Bacondog, it’s battle planing for E3 and beyond. So I decided to do the unthinkable, I made myself an actual schedule. I’m such a sell out I know but it definitely ensures that I get the time in need in on some games.

Let me start of by saying the games that I am going to play. I figure I’ll play two fighters, Tekken 6 and Super Street Fighter IV. Then my racing game of choice is going to be Forza 3, Project Gotham Racing I can pick up and play so I don’t need too much time with it. My shooter is probably going to Halo Reach.Why not Call of Duty 2 MW? I haven’t seen too much of a tournament scene for it. With Halo Reach I’ve been trying to put together a team so I figured I’d play on it. It’d be Sol Lekz and I, then we can hold a tryout for the last two slots.

So how will I fit practice into my daily routine? I set aside one hour blocks for what I want to get better at. I have set aside a 1 hour block in the morning for me to play Street Fighter and actually sit down and practice one of the three characters I use (Cammy, C.Viper, or Hakan). No invites, no endless battles, and little to no distractions. However, I really hate the training stage music so I am forced to hook up my iPod to my Xbox every single time. I even had the chance to talk to Justin (Lemon) Wong about my new regimen and he said “lol that’s too much” but he did understand that I want to get better so he’ll be helping me with some stuff in the next couple of weeks and I’ll share that with you guys.

Just what do I practice? Well to be honest the basics for each character. It’s nothing too spectacular but it’s effective. I just focus on my input execution then practice the simple strings. As I progress I hopefully will spend less time working on my input and advance in my combo/damage dealing game. Something that you just can’t practice is experience. It sounds weird but hear me out. I can practice everything ’til I can do it with my eyes closed but what good is it if I don’t have experience fighting other people? I’ll fall for the simplest of set ups and absorb the stupidest losses. I’d be a paper tiger. So after I spend the hour practicing, I’ll take it online and play some matches to see how it all comes together. I’ve caught four of my matches today post training and I must say even I see an improvement from my regular Street fighter 4 Cammy.I don’t want to be mean but these guys aren’t that fantastic. They are nowhere near the top. To be honest they only have more points than me because I rarely play ranked matches. But matches like these are the ones I am supposed to win right?

This match vs Gen was very ugly in the first round. I kept eating whatever low attack that was and I couldn’t beat out his 100-hand slap/poke/slap chop/whatever. I also tried to hit him with a light attack to set up my throw on his wake up and I got an ultra for it. The other rounds I settled in and did what I had to do. I almost had a perfect on him in the last.

As Krismas would say, I turned the beat back on this Cody. The first round I was actually losing but I stayed calm and made the comeback. The second round I just made short work of him. I even hit the instant cannon strike (glowing dive kick thing for those who have no idea) into her ultra combo to finish the match. Not bad.

This match was awkward because of the game settings. Not much to say about it, he wasn’t that good. I have trouble playing people way worse than me because I have no idea of what they are going to do. In these situations I guess I have to take the things that most good players would do forget them and just do whatever I want. Lemon did tell me “until someone actually does something good, consider them a scrub and play with confidence.”

There aren’t too many things going there. I eat a bunch of things i should have just blocked. I really gambled throwing out that ultra. I really have to get out the habit of doing that.

Just how will I fit the other games into my schedule? I have no idea, but I think together we’re going to find out how this is going to work.