In the not too distant past, Injustice: Gods Among Us was on sale for about $8 on PSN, so I bought it. Now I am writing about it. End preamble.

Despite liking the last Mortal Kombat game quite a lot, I missed out on this game during its initial release. I also skipped out on the PS4 re-release with all the DLC at first, though that ended up being the version that I played. Not really any reason why, it just never really captured my interest. Not enough to pay more than eight dollars, at least. As much as I love Batman (and I really do), I don't really care about any other parts of the DC universe. Which is not to say that I am inherently disinterested in DC universe stuff (except Superman, he's boring), it's just not a big draw for me. At least not in the same way that the Marvel part of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was.

Here's something I should get out of the way right now: I'm not great at fighting games. I like them, and I've spent many hours of my life playing them. But I'm not good at them. And a fair amount of this is just going to be me comparing this game to other fighting games. Okay? Good, now let me move on.

Injustice is a good game. I might even be inclined to call it great if I wanted to take the time to really learn a character and get good at it. But I don't. For whatever reason, despite being perfectly competent in every way, this game just hasn't grabbed me like games like MK or MvC3 did. Which is a little weird, because this game is pretty similar to MK in a lot of ways. But that might be the problem though. It's too similar in some ways, and not similar enough in other ways.

Like blocking. MK has a block button, which is what I prefer, rather than back to block. Now, I actually got into a lengthy discussion on Twitter with someone who knows much more about fighting games than I do on this, and he seemed to think that block buttons are terrible and completely ruin games, whereas back to block is perfect. Or something like that, clearly I'm exaggerating (not that it matters, he isn't going to read this, he's boycotting GB for some stupid reason). Anyway, the point is that while I will sometimes actually block in games where there is a block button, I don't in games where it's back to block. The only times I ever tried to block in Injustice were when I knew my opponent was using a super, and I was trying to prevent it from hitting me (which worked some of the time).

Conversely, there's a lot about Injustice that is really similar. Things like how special moves are done. Rather than quarter circle forwards (something that I never seem to be able to do with a d-pad because I'm a scrub), it's down forwards. Which I prefer a lot, because I can do those consistently with a d-pad. And no, I don't know why I don't seem to be able to do quarter circle forwards consistently with a d-pad. I can with control sticks.

There's other differences, too, like what the face buttons do. Rather than two punches and two kicks in MK, it's a light, medium, heavy, and character specific button. I almost never used the character specific button. It's usually dumb stuff like Batman summoning little bat-bots, or Superman getting a damage buff. I mean, if you want to get good at the game, I bet that stuff is important. But I didn't really care. The other buttons are fine, and there's some crossover from MK, with things like uppercuts and sweep kicks that are done the same way as in MK. No Toasties, though.

That may actually be the thing that is the reason why Injustice didn't get me like MK did. It's not goofy. I mean, there's some humor in there, and it's certainly ridiculous. But it's not the right kind of ridiculous. It's hard to find the right way to word it. I mean, both take themselves seriously in the fiction, which I appreciate, but MK acknowledges how absurd everything is in the fringes. That's it. Injustice doesn't. Or if it does, I haven't found it. It's things like Toasties, and Kombat Kodes, and all the little wink and nods around the periphery that Injustice lacks. It makes it feel like a game that was made with a very serious set of mandates from men in suits that would be attached to something base on licensed characters (well, that's not really accurate given that WB owns both NetherRealm Studios and DC comics, but you get what I mean).

Get over here!

And I'm also a little baffled by how that DC name is used. On the one hand, it's definitely one of the best uses of it, in terms of portrayal of the characters, and the story. The story has a lot of comic bookiness to it, which is appropriate, but by fight game standards, it's still pretty fantastic. It's the same as MK, in that it's a pretty lengthy thing with full on cut-scenes, and it flows really well. The voice acting is pretty good across the bar. Kevin Conroy is Batman, which I like. Troy Baker was in there somewhere (Nightwing, I think), but the game's Joker just felt like a pale imitation of Mark Hamil. Not terrible, but it felt like they got someone to try to copy that, rather than doing a different take on the Joker. Anyway, it doesn't really matter, because it was fine overall.

The story mode did feel a bit shorter, and was definitely easier than MK's. I'm not sure if it actually was shorter though, it's been three years since I played that game's story mode, I could be completely wrong. Maybe it's just faster paced, I dunno. It's definitely bigger in terms of scale, at least in the cut-scenes. On the other hand, the cut-scenes aren't running in real time, and they look noticeably worse than the in-engine stuff. Artifacting, I think is what it's called. And there's a lot of repeat locations in the story mode. I understand why, but it gets a little silly by the eighth time people are fighting in front of the same strip club in Gotham.

I also really have to question the choices in characters for this game. There's a lot of them (especially including the DLC), and I've heard of most of them, but not all. Like, who's Raven? And Killer Frost? And seriously, there's a DC comics character named CYBORG? They couldn't come up with anything better than CYBORG? And why was Martian Manhunter DLC? Not only that, but he doesn't have any STAR Missions (more on that later). And where's Darkseid? They put in Zatanna (whoever she is), but not Darkseid? Also, who is Shazam? And Black Adam? And why'd they go with Hal Jordan instead of the way cooler Green Lantern, John Stewart? You know, the black one from that one DC comics cartoon I watched as a kid that wasn't Batman. And also the comic books, I guess.

I dunno, I'm not one to criticize, I'm sure someone will respond to this about some dumb thing Cyborg was in and not understand how I don't know who he is. And probably Shazam too? I mean, the weirdest nerd moment I had in the game was when I realized Deathstroke was voiced by the guy who played General Martok in Deep Space 9. Apparently he was also Ares, which I didn't realize until I looked him up online. Also, given that I don't bat an eyelash at all the Norse characters in Marvel, I shouldn't find it weird that there's a character just named Ares in DC, but I find it weird that there's a character just named Areas in DC. And he's the god of war.

Ugh, comic books. This is why I tend to stick to stuff that's just Batman. Even when that stuff crosses over into the supernatural, it's still WAY more grounded than the literal god of war. Which, thinking about the subtitle of this game now (Gods Among Us), I should be expecting nonsense like that, but I didn't! Mainly because that subtitle is so bad I tried to forget it.

I've gotten off track, though. Back to the game. Like Mortal Kombat, Injustice has a challenges type mode called S.T.A.R. Missions. And while the S.T.A.R. name just makes me think of STARS from Resident Evil (especially because I don't think the game explains what STAR stands for), it's really more like the challenge tower from MK, just with all the challenges unlocked. Which is nice on the one hand, because I could just pick and choose what ones I wanted to do. On the other hand, I ended up just not doing most of them because I didn't care. I felt compelled to try to get through the MK Tower (which I ended up having to burn in game points or something to clear some, because they were so hard and I wanted to unlock that stupid Mileena costume where she's nude except for that weird white tape thing around her which was hilariously stupid). I didn't feel compelled to do anything of the sort here.

They're mostly fine challenges, from what I gathered. Some are stupid little minigames, and there's some that were DLC in the non-PS4 version, like ones for the DLC characters, and some Soviet Superman stuff that I remember seeing a "pre-order this game now" commercial for a long time ago (like last year). But there aren't missions for all of the DLC characters, which seems weird to me. Why don't Zatanna and Martian Manhunter get them? Why wasn't Martian Manhunter in the story? Was he too busy hunting men on Mars? Also, is that manhunter in the sense of literal hunting, or more like he goes to gay bars and tries to pick up men? Is that a bad joke? Probably. I thought about cutting that, but I didn't.

Some of the STAR Missions have little bits of story attached to them, but for what's there, there might as well not be. There's only like two lines of dialog per mission, and it's not voice acted. I dunno, I mean, I don't think any of the voice actors in this game were big enough to warrant not taking the time to record that stuff, but I don't know. Maybe that stuff was added in after all the voice sessions were done, or maybe they didn't think it was worth the extra time and money (it probably wouldn't have been). That said, it just seems cheap and bad when there's so much (good) voice acting in the main story.

There's a mode that is functionally similar to a traditional "arcade" mode, where you just fight a bunch of random enemies. But there's no end of arcade mode story like you get in something like MK, or even MvC3. That stuff was never super great, and it was clearly all non-canon since there was stuff for every character, but aside from maybe doing it with a couple of the characters I like best, I feel zero reason to do it here. What's my reward? More XP for a leveling thing I don't care about? Pfft. There are at least a bunch of variants in this mode (some of which have to be unlocked), but I didn't have any initial interest, so whatever.

So, I'm kinda torn on this game. It's a sound game, and if I had someone to play with (no way I'm touching the online at this point, I'll get destroyed), I could probably get many hours of fun out of it. And the story mode, by fighting game standards, is fantastic. And it's pretty great by comic book game standards too. There's a couple characters that I really liked playing as (Batman and Deathstroke come to mind). But I don't really feel any reason to keep playing it. Which isn't terrible, I only paid $8 for it, and I feel like I got my money's worth. I dunno, maybe I'll try it a little more, try to get a little better with Batman. But probably not. I've got other games to play.

Before I bring this blog to a close, I want to add a few things about some of the Wii U games I wrote about last time.

I finished New Super Luigi U, and my thoughts on that remain pretty much the same. Which is to say that I enjoyed it quite a bit, and think it's a lot better than New Super Mario Bros U. There were a couple of frustrating spots, but overall, it's good.

Mario Kart 8 is the other one I want to add to. The first is something I wanted to mention last time, but forgot. Which is the character selection. There's thirty in total, which is a lot, especially considering that the max player count for a race is twelve. But the problem is that most of them are terrible. There's five baby characters. FIVE BABIES when there should be ZERO babies. And there's SEVEN Koopa Kids when there should be ZERO Koopa Kids. And there's Metal Mario? WHY? Pink Gold Peach? What the hell is a Pink Gold Peach? And Toadette? Why not just make that a color swap for Toad? I mean, I'm not going to say there shouldn't be lady Toads. But really, the biggest crime commits is that Birdo isn't in it.

Where's Birdo, Nintendo? HM? Actually, I'm not really that big a fan of Birdo (though I do like the weird noises Birdo makes and the absurdity of Birdo's design), but I think Birdo is a way better choice than any of those characters that I just complained about. But none of that really matters because I always play Luigi with the same dumb purple car.

Which brings me to a legitimate and game play relevant complaint. All the vehicle customization is cool in theory, but it's also time consuming, at least a lot more than just picking a racer, or at most a racer and a car like in the older ones. As a result, when you're doing things like playing online, you're locked into a specific kart until you exit the lobby, whether you're playing public games with random people, or private games. And I get why, it's to keep it moving (something I appreciate in a racing game), but it also goes a long way to stop me from experimenting with different vehicles. And the last week of me playing online mostly resulted in me getting wrecked by other people, whether it was the random people online, or an internet friend of mine who will not be mentioned by name because he was banned on GB and I can't be seen associating with him.

I'm not bad at the game, I've done well before, I just think I may have gotten myself into a situation where the other people are using better vehicles. Or maybe I'm wrong and I'm just terrible! I don't know! But there's no easy way to really test this stuff. It'd be nice if the game had a test mode where I could just pause and switch to a different kart or something. Sure, it wouldn't be seamless, still have to load stuff, but it'd be better than having to load out of a race, go back and select another kart, and load back into a race. But Nintendo's not going to read this and implement these changes in Mario Kart 9, so I dunno why I'm even bothering.

Oh, and then there's PT. You know, the Playable Teaser for Silent Hills, the new Silent Hill game from Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro. It's a really interesting little teaser. On its own, it's definitely way more obtuse than it should be, but Kojima even admitted that's to make it harder for people to get to the reveal at the end. I think it looks great graphically, and I'm interested in it. More so than I have for any other Silent Hill game, at least. I'll be keeping my eyes on it.

I think that's enough for now. I have some other stuff I could write about, but I like this weekly blog thing I've had going for the last few weeks, so I'd like to keep that going for as long as I can. And now that I've said that it probably won't go much longer, but I have enough stuff for next week at least, so there's that! If I was smart, I would probably read over this for things like typos and stuff I forgot to add, so I wouldn't have to do addendums like I just did with Mario Kart 8, but where would the fun in that be? Of course, then as I go to copy and paste this into GB, I notice a glaring typo in the very first sentence! Which I corrected, but who knows what other mistakes lie within the text you just read?! Not I!

I'm declaring that starting now, it is the Year of Birdo.