ST: One Year to Kill God (A Mundane Approach)

[Special World]

One Year to Kill God
(A Mundane Approach)

Where I'm Shmupping From

I've been playing shmups on-and-off for 20+ years, and yet my skills are meager. At the start of this year, my highest clears were Futari Black Label Original, Deathsmiles 1/2/3/ALL, Eschatos Normal, and Mushihimesama v1.0 Original. I'm proud of those clears! But at the same time, I felt like there was a majority of excellent shmups that were outside my skill level.

I know myself, and I know that the "grind until you die" mentality wouldn't work for me. I'm a dad--even if I wanted to go hard, I would struggle to find the time, and I can never aspire to be a top player.

And yet.

Even given these facts about myself, I wanted to see what I could accomplish by diligently setting aside some of the time I did have. How far could I go with one year of modest training? I formed a plan which, one year later, I'm sharing with you. I hope it can be useful to everyone who's struggling to get clears, everyone who thinks they just don't have what it takes, everyone who thinks they just need to want it enough.

Because it turned out the key was to hold myself back, and not want it at all.

Origins

My "Year of Shmups" started forming as a result of a talk with SMC. He was describing in-depth the scoring of Futari Black Label Original, and reamked that the most important thing was to reach a 100K overall counter, after which the scoring skyrockets.

Well, he said, you should be able to get it pretty easily if you can No Miss No Bomb up through stage 4.

NMNB up through stage 4! I practiced a bit, but there was no way. In order to get that good, I may as well just be playing harder games. It would probably make more sense to work my way up the modes and then circle back once my overall survival skills had improved.

Around this time, I was reading a book called Peak Performance. To sum it up in short, this book's thesis was that breaks are actually the key to high level training and performance.

With all this in mind, I got started.

Establishing Baseline

First, I wanted to define what success would look like for me. There's such a vast range of skill in this genre that it doesn't make sense to apply anyone's rubric but my own. Sine I love Mushihimesama Futari, I decided to make that game the measure of my skill. Given that I've owned Futari for 13 years and have only beaten the easiest arcade mode, Black Label Original, I decided to grade myself (at the end of the year) on which arcade modes I had been able to 1CC:

1.5 Original - OKAY
Black Label Maniac - GOOD
1.5 Maniac - GREAT
God - UNBELIEVABLE
Ultra - IMPOSSIBLE

When I say beating 1.5 Original would have been a fine result with me after a year of playing, I mean it. Skilled players may scoff and say I was setting my sights low. I don't agree. I've owned this game for 13 years and honestly never expected to get around to beating that mode, or anything higher.

I considered also giving myself a ranking based on how many 1CCs I achieved over the year, but I decided against it. I wanted the freedom to choose shmups that were at or above my current skill level. I felt that putting a tally on it would just encourage seeking out the easiest games, rather than ones I was truly interested in playing.

Main Games and Alternate Games

There are benefits to playing deeply, and benefits to playing widely. With fidelity to one game, you can appreciate skill gain over a long period of time, and make progress through certain levels or learning. By playing the field, you can enjoy variety as well as make up for blind spots that would develop through maining one game. No game as it all, but neith can all the games in the world equal one beloved game.

To that end, and to the end of inserting more breaks into my practice, I decided to play on a weekly schedule of main game vs. alternate games, with Mushi Futari as my main, like so:

WEEK 1: Futari
WEEK 2: Alt shmup
Week 3: Futari
Week 4: Alt shmup

And repeat. This way I'd have the freedom to play any new games that excited me, while also returning to my main game regularly for deep learning.

I chose Futari for my main because I consider it a game of sublime excellence. The Xbox 360 port contains a wide variety of modes, and it's the sort of game I could play seemingly forever and never fully conquer.

On alternate weeks I would pick any shmup I wanted to play, and play that game through the entire week. So, no flip flopping. I knew that it I played a new game every day, I'd get nowhere fast. If I got the clear, I'd decide whether to stick or switch. Some games have a lot more depth than the clear, and other games are pretty much one and done. If I didn't clear a game on the first week, I wasn't bound to it on the next alternate week. Alternate weeks were essentially cheat weeks. I could play whatever I wanted, but I stuck with it for a week at least.

It ended up being a non-issue. I ended up clearing every single alternate game I played this year. Partly that was due to reasonable goals. I knew that if I chose a shmup like Ikaruga or Under Defeat, I'd get bogged down for months. And that would be like having two mains. Which is fine, but not what I wanted for this project. So it did help me to have an idea of how hard or easy certain games were, and I thank anyone who answered my endless questions about relative difficulty.

The Just Right Challenge

I'm fairly agnostic about what difficulty everyone else should play. But I do suspect a lot of people play games that are harder than they're ready for. In my experience and in my clinical training, the best learning occurs with challenges just a bit above one's current skill level. Just a baby step. I was always looking for that just right challenge to keep me moving, achieving, and seeing progress. I made sure to clear Star Parodier before Blazing Lazers, and Gradius 1 PCE before Gradius II PCE. If a game's too easy, then no worries--I'd clear it and be on my way.

Limiting Playtime
Here's the part where some of you will think I'm a nut. See, it's absolutely true that you're not going to get anywhere if you don't play the game. You can watch runs, examine boss strats, analyze superplayer eye movement--to death. And it won't get you any better at the game unless you're actually consistently playing the game. So I decided that I'd play every single day except my break day. Makes sense, if you want to gain skill.

But I suspect that the biggest enemy of any player is burnout. We tend to think it's that they "don't want it enough," or something, but that's pretty ephemeral. Let's say you want a cheeseburger. Can you want it so hard that it materializes? Nah. You gotta get out of your seat and drive to Rally's and pay the man at the window.

Burnout is the biggest enemy. Newer players try to go hard and they fall flat on their face. I've seen it time and time again, and I've done it time and time again. You try to play four hours in one day, and four hours the next day, and you don't actually get anywhere.

Suddenly you just hate the game.

So instead I decided to do just about the least amount of playing each day where I could still expect to see solid improvement. For me, that looks like 25-60 minutes. I've had people fight me on this--"25 minutes is nothing. You won't get anywhere on 25 minutes." Well, alright. So I suppose if you started with Dodonpachi in 1997 and played a full run every single day (except Sunday!) for the last... 26 years, you'd just still be ass at the game? You mean to tell me that this person would not be an absolute Dodonpachi legend by now?

So that's for the lower limit. Throw on top of that the "Pomodoro method," which is based on the idea that 23 minutes is the amount of time it takes to overcome resistance and start enjoying something. So that 25 minutes will get you over the hump of nonenjoyment on glum days, and you may just start cruising and enjoying yourself.

As for the upper limit, I've been asked: Why? Why put an upper limit? There are so many reasons I don't even know where to begin. But I'd say the most straightforward is that, as a new or intermediate player, you do not have the mental endurance to make work of a longer day of gaming. Four hours of gaming will not be four times the gains of one hour of gaming. What it will do, is create in you that expectation that you've done four times the work. And it'll tire you out and make you sloppy the next day. And you'll get sick of the game, and your expectations will be dashed, and you'll drop back into your "I can never get anywhere" hole.

Smartphone games know that if they limit you with a timer bar and say "nope, that's it for today," that will be a powerful incentive for you to come back the next day. That's part of why they're habit forming. They stop you when you're enjoying the game and say nah, that's it, come back tomorrow. Do that for yourself. Cut yourself off after an hour at maximum. When you're feeling involved, turn off the monitor.

It's the same thing with your day off, by the way. You'll be saying to yourself "man, gotta figure out what to do with myself. Wish I was playing shmups!" Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You are manufacturing desire.

I occasionally missed days, and I occasionally went over for the day. A lot of times I preferred to do 20 minutes 3x a day, or two blocks of 25 minutes. But in summary:

Play 25-60 minutes of shmups, six days a week. Pick your Sunday and honor it.

---This topic is a work in progress. I apologize for the piecemeal approach to this post. But by taking it a little bit at a time, I hope to provide a practical guide for those who are struggling to break through. Thank you for your patience.---

[Special World]

Reserved in case I go long :p

[Nahar]

I'm eager to read the rest of your journey. Not in the same spot as you in family matters (no kids yet) but getting into shmups seriously after years of just playing till the end with creditfeed and watching 1CC's from the fence.

[Special World]

Thank you Nahar. I thought to myself, "what's even the point of posting this, nobody's gonna read it anyhow."

But I decided to keep on adding to it, at least for now. So thanks

[Nahar]

Keep it up, then!

[dojo_b]

Just to chime in and say I enjoyed reading this! A nicely-timed discovery during my own slow but steady grind to upgrade a Futari BL 1CC to the 1.5 Original. Gorgeous game.

One thing I didn't avail myself of much, but that might well be useful for others' quests, is the counter-adjustment option on the xb360 training mode (stage and overall). The instructions are in Japanese, so one will want a hint that the trigger buttons make larger adjustments.

Playing patterns extra-fast can be a nice hint to your brain to start processing more efficiently. Extra-slow can help too, of course, but there's less that the training mode offers in that regard.

[mirkvid]

Great thread so far, I'm looking forward to the rest! I'm doing something similar with DoDonPachi. After many years of playing casually I decided to see it through, but time is so limited. 30-60 minute sessions two or three times a week are about the best I can do, but I believe that the 1cc is within reach.

[eksratu]

I just stumbled across this post, and I kind of love it. I hope you were able to ultimately kill God.

As someone currently where you were in 2022 with Futari, I might try something similar to level up my clears. We'll see how long I can keep it up, though.