Lemnear wrote: ↑Sun Aug 04, 2024 10:21 pmThe problem is, however, that whatever i get, it's too big a jump in difficulty, and i often find myself having to lower the difficulty//use more credits than i would like, or use save-state...
Save states undeniably make learning arcade games easier, by isolating trouble spots, but they won't magically make you better at them. People would be knocking over the hardest stuff left and right for easy cred, if that was true. And they most definitely won't reduce the pressure of full runs. You will consistently see the minority of players who can clear historic brutalisers like Gradius III, Same3, and Raiden II remark how tough they are even with the expedience of savestates. This doesn't even get into scoring, where 1CC competence is a prerequisite.
I know that back in the day, at the cabs, attaining 1CC competence would've been a far rockier road than nowadays via M2/Hamster. It'd involve a great deal more endurance, playing doomed credits over and over to learn lategame hurdles by piecemeal, likely with in-person communal support. Savestates do eliminate that aspect. I could well imagine some shunning them on principle, as with autofire.
OTOH, I don't have that kind of time anymore. Even if I did, it'd be neutralised by the sheer tonnage of M2 and Hamster's PS4 backlog alone. And I always thought Stage Practice was a good idea for arcade ports, ever since the PS1 Raystorm days. So I don't think they're harmful. These games always come down to iterative mastery, and the ideal of busting out killer runs on demand. The former is secondary to the latter, imo.
Credits are another practice tool, and an unequivocally legitimate one, unlike savestates added decades after the fact. The only time you should worry about credit-feeding is if you're not gradually going further on less of them; ie, you're not learning. Not all games allow credit feeding, ofc.
And some become unrecognisably easier due to Rank reduction, or other player service. You should factor that in.
I wouldn't reduce the difficulty, personally. In my experience, that can cause you to develop bad habits and a false sense of competence, which the defaults will slap out of you regardless. OTOH, maybe seeing stages and bosses at a lower intensity might aid the learning process? As with credit feeding, I suppose it depends heavily on the game, there. If a game's Easy setting allows strategies that simply won't work on defaults, avoid it. If it instead lets you develop routes and patterns that can be tightened up for defaults, that's obviously much better.
Fascinating sights. I wonder if that's the desk 
