Skill

[Nate]

NTM you can't let your temper get the best of you. Don't be an asshole.

When you're defeated and you know it - it's best to take a deep breath or two (and resume steady breathing) lay down the controller or step away from the machine, whichever, and compliment the game.

Replay sequences when you're not playing and try to visualize what happened and what you'll try next time to prevent it.

[it290]

I just wanted to add that I've been playing a lot of Imperishable Night lately and I think it's really been helping my manic skills. The ability to practice specific patterns and the option to save a replay are great features that every shmup should have.

In many shooters, and manics in particular, some bullet patterns can seem extremely chaotic and confusing at first. You can try to dodge them by twitch reflexes alone, but many of these patterns are designed to trap you and you'll never survive until you've played through it enough. Eventually, you'll realize the underlying order beneath a particular 'chaotic' pattern, and then you will understand what you need to do in order to survive. Once you've done this a few times, it'll really help you in the future when you try to figure out how to deal with new challenges.

I also agree with the post above about left/right and up/down movement. In most shooters, short and precise horizontal or vertical movements are far superior to flailing around wildly, and diagonal movements are less accurate, because the speed is often hard to judge and you have to hit two switches to trigger the movement rather than one -- and often those two switches don't make contact at exactly the same time.

[AiD]

I believe it all boils down to cetain things

1 . To be really good it doesnt matter how much you play/practice you will only ever be able to reach your own personal maximum potential, set your own goals and targets.

2. some people are lucky enough to be blessed with natural skills and can rely on them to beat your best efforts without even trying.

3. And then you come to the lucky bastards blessed with the natural skills and the desire to hone them to push scores into unattainable levels (no matter how long you try/practice) to the average player

mother natures/ shmups/ survivable of the fitest will always prevail

i think thats more or less bullshit, yes some people are better that some stuff at others (ie: reflexes etc) but as long as you enjoy what you're doing you'll see progress.

now if you become super anal, set clear goals etc, you will get frustrated, wont enjoy yourself, not only that, but you'll put unecessary pressure on yourself, because face it, doing good for 40 minutes is a lot about nerve conditionning, and then you're facing this last boss, 2 minutes to go, better not screw up!!!!!

Well I was responding to the initial posters views maybe you should read them first?

disclaimer: you have no doubt seen threads like this before so if you have i'm sorry Smile
But anway!

I find it mindboggling how some people can be SO good at shmups. Is it a natural talent that practice only nurtures(sp?). Is it a Japanese trait? Smile Can a shmupper who struggles to get past level 1 on the easiest of games(I''m not that bad but for example....) with enough practice reach the level of skill that makes 1ccing games a nescesity?

see point 1

As far as practice goes, do you think theres a minium amount of time required of play each day to actually improve? I wonder if thats being a little too pedantic haha

see point 2

Sometimes I feel i'm in this zone that people talk about, but then I normally die. Is my zone just not good enough? will my
zone ever be good enough? lol

see point 3

I was just replying to the points in the post thats all, sorry if my answers required a little tangential thought

[TVG]

tan-genital or not, i disagree with you, thats all.

lets use a shitty analogy because im too lazy to find anything else, the difference between, say, michael jordan and the average proffesional player has a lot to do with talent, however, this difference is minor in the eyes of an average person who doesnt play basketball (ill compare the average person to the topic poster for the sake of arguing, even if it doesnt really apply)

i think the average person can be a proffesional basketball player if he puts his life into it and has passion for basketball, with a wee bit of luck and a strong mind (some people dont have that, but this is not really something innate as it has to do with education and experience)
however, i dont think the average person could be another MJ even if he spent his whole life trying.

does it mean that the average proffesional cant improve his game? no.
does it mean he will ever be as good as MJ? highly unlikely.

knowing your limits is essential, but not until you've tried everything you can to overcome them.

people set their own limits for the most part, then nature comes into play (innate reflexes and hand eye coordination, both can be trained, and im not talking about shmups). with somthing as basic as shmups, there's a lot of stuff only experience can teach you, and that cant really be put into words. how comes im now able to "read" patterns on a level i didnt know was possible for me? learning. has to do with placing your eyes on the right spot and stuff, no one could have taught me that.

i disagree with you because on something as "simple" as shmups, the mental part is so important, that by telling yourself stuff like this you wont reach your best, thats all. not that its important because its just a bloody videogame, who gives a shit? you're not paid for it.

example, im playing game X, i like it, but it obliterates me.

i have two options

1) crawling in my corner either saying how much im a failure, or how much the game sucks and getting super pissed.

2) enjoying myself, playing, facing the game without nervousness, trough every play, a little detail will be more apparent, be it that a certain spot s safe for half a second, or remembering the angle of how one turret shoots, etc.
in the process, ive dodged a thousand bullets (if it's a manic) each time i dodge a bullet, the hitbox becomes clearer, the path i need to take to dodge a certain type of bullet is clearer, etc, im becoming better at dodging bullets, even if the process is very slow.

w00t, i need to stop ranting, its 4AM here lol, and this rant is rather useless anyway.

[Icarus]

1. Play only shmups that you like and that appeal to you. It's really no good playing something that bores you, because the only thing that comes out of it is frustration, irritation and lack of any kind of skill-building progression.
2. If a game is driving you to anger, put the pad down and do something else. Getting hot headed from dying stupidly leads to more stupid, totally avoidable deaths.
3. Be well rested. Do other stuff besides shmupping for several hours at a time, like read, watch the telly, listen to music, art, or playing sports. Playing for very long periods makes you lose interest, which leads to sloppy play.
4. Be aware. That tank that just appeared from behind that tree in Raiden DX is a sneaky little bugger.
5. Take mental notes when you play, take written notes when you dont. Learning to spot good tricks you come across and incorporating them into your style of play leads to quick, efficient progression.
6. Get into the competitive spirit. Just because your score might not make the top ten in one of the High Score threads, doesn't mean you might not make it there ever. Getting competitive drives you to improve.
7. Be confident. If you keep thinking "I'm going to die!" in a game, pretty soon you will.
8. Don't be afraid to ask. There are lots of good players willing to share secrets and tricks. Sharing tips adds to your competitiveness.
9. Develop a good practice strategy. Does blasting through a game, trying out new tricks and working on long term survival go better for you than refining and perfecting a game one stage at a time?
10. Stay healthy. Believe it or not, being in good physical condition is better for your visual, physical and mental control than playing a game when you're toasted, suffering from sleep deprivation, or hit with an illness.
11. Have fun playing. You can't improve if you hate doing it

[TVG]

2. Have fun playing. You can't improve if you hate doing it

you can, if you're paid, that is :p

[tehkao]

PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE

IMHO you can master any shmup if you practice enough....and I guess having the reflexes of a 15-yr old helps a bit...

Now, if we're talking about one-on-one fighters vs a real human...now that would take REAL skill...

[tehkao]

If a game is driving you to anger, put the pad down and do something else. Getting hot headed from dying stupidly leads to more stupid, totally avoidable deaths.

BTW it's funny but I don't think any shmup has ever driven me to frustration...on the other hand, games like Ghouls n Ghosts and Ninja Gaiden drove me up the wall...

[Randorama]

@Randorama

I used to take some offence at your hard-edged approach to gaming when I first started reading your posts. You can be a bit of a taskmaster. But now, I totally appreciate the way you play these games and also the way you raise the bar for all of us. Honestly, sometimes I'll be frustrated with a game, just about to give up, and I'll think, "Man, Rando would kill me for such soft thinking," and I'll keep going.

:_____:


Now i can die happy! (But beside that, plans to improve that Esp.Ra.De score? ).

But beside that, one interesting thing i would like to do is see how gaming influences and is influenced by cognitive disturbs. I suspect that, for instance, dyslexic people may have big problems with patterns. Or maybe not...

Now i need to find someone to fund such an experiment

[Ganelon]

Well, here's one thing I gathered: pulling off 2 all-nighters in 3 days makes patterns in games like DDP, which I 1CC'ed only months ago, practically impossible to navigate since my attention would just die at random points.

[MovingTarget]

ahhhh.... I love walking outside while tripping on sleep dep.

[neorichieb1971]

shmupping in my opinion is natural ability. I've played ESP rade for months now and I cannot get to level 6 without continuing, and rarely get to level 5 with more than 1 life.

[StorminNorman]

Natural ability helps, but I think practice is far more useful. The first time I played DoDonPachi, I couldn't even survive the first level. I kept at it, because I loved the intensity and now I can make it to level four consistently.

Sometimes, you hit a wall, though. I very rarely make it past level four of DDP, and I can never get past the midboss of DDPDOJ. My high score table for DOJ has less than a million points between the top and bottom scores.

I know I'll get better, but I just haven't been able to put the time in, lately.

[neorichieb1971]

Yeah, well in most shmups that I have played level 4 seems to be the next level of expertise. The learning curve between 1-4 is slightly different to that of 5-End.

Superplay DVD's actually put me off, because once I have seen what level of skill is required to get a 1cc, I know I will never do it. Plus, in most games where scores are about chaining or dismantling bosses piece by piece, thats just showing off stuff. I am having trouble just surviving when other people are racking up billions of points.

In some cases, Shmupping is a professionals sport.

to date I have only beat Gradius on the Saturn with 1cc. And Harmful park if you count that.

[Ganelon]

Well, if you beat Gradius, you can surely beat Life Force since it's generally considered easier.

I can never focus on scoring in my games. Chaining and collecting medals while dodging bullets? Not for me...my consistency is poor enough.

[MovingTarget]

I realised something the last time I was playing layer section, I'm a reckless drunk driver when it comes to shmups! Honestly I hardly even think about what I'm doing, just shoot, avoid and repeat. Sometimes I might think a little bit for the bosses... But maybe this is what I'm doing wrong? Do you guys really concentrate when your playing, should I have my eyes peeled and concentrate as hard as I can through the whole game...

I think it maybe this autopilot mode that causes me to be so inconsistent...

[sffan]

My high score table for DOJ has less than a million points between the top and bottom scores.

My score tables all get compressed like this, meaning I've reached my peak skill, hit a wall, whatever. Then I'm just happy when I can get on the list again, compressing it further.

[Icarus]

shmupping in my opinion is natural ability. I've played ESP rade for months now and I cannot get to level 6 without continuing, and rarely get to level 5 with more than 1 life.

I don't believe that there is such thing as natural shmupping ability. Nobody is born with the ability to be a record breaking shmupper. If anything, the ability to be good at a shmup depends on how well you're trained in:
- Visual awareness
- Hand-eye co-ordination and control
- Data to memory retention (being able to memorise routes, patterns)
- Hypothetical creation (coming up with ideas/methods to get past certain sections etc)
- Reactive ability
The better you are at these I would guess, the better you would (theoretically) be at shmupping.

Case in point: the Japanese are trained to be walking databases - rote memorisers of data, if you will - which would push their memory retention abilities to very high levels, and they are very analytical in their approaches to their jobs, their tasks, whatever, meaning they are taught to stop, analyse and refine everything to be totally efficient. In translating this to shmupping skills, it would mean that the large majority of Japanese shmuppers are able to play and study the optimal routes through all the games they encounter, and to commit the best tactics to memory for long periods, compiling the perfect route that much faster.

If anything the five skills I listed above can be trained to a high level by any shmupper, even the bottom-of-the-table players. It's really just a case of knowing your strengths, improving those, and training up your weaknesses.

[Marc]

Some interesting points of vire here. I can see the srguments for each of them, but I don't think you can really explain the way people attain various skill levels. For instance, I invited a friend of mine round not too long ago, proceeded to laugh at his mainstream-playing ass while he blundered through an hour or so of Max Payne 2 or some other piece of shit, then smugly pulled out the Saturn and DDP. 'Let's see you play a REAL video game' I said to him, with an evil glint in my eye, fully expcecting DDP to issue one grade-A arse kicking to his smug behind. You can imagine my utter astonishment, and complete annoyance, when he reached the third level boss on his first ever go, on default settings. Fucker.

Myself, I played DDP a week or so ago, and just seemed to be 'in the zone'. Always thought that stuff was a load of BS, but for some reason I could anticipate bullet patters as they were fired, knew where to be, what was coming, how best to deal with it, and the buzz was like nothing I have experienced. Reached the fourth round for the first time, down to my final life by this point, and proceeded to reach the boss on that life, on a level I'd never played before and had no idea what was coming. Think it was a mix of sheer adrenaline, blind panic and a lot of luck. 'Course it goes without saying that I haven't been able to do it since.

Sometimes this board is a source of encouragement. Sometimes it pisses me off because everyone else seems to be far more competent than I feel I'll ever be

[Randorama]

Some interesting points of vire here. I can see the srguments for each of them, but I don't think you can really explain the way people attain various skill levels.

Sorry but, i do, and get paid for doing it because, the wayi do it works, that's one cool aspect of science

[Berty]

I am also one who thinks that practice makes perfect. When there was that main competition for world rankings in Ikaruga, i was putting in at least two hours a day, even at work during my lunch break.

It was the only game that i could practice like that with because i really enjoyed it so much. It got to the point where i didn't even see the enemies, i just new where to move, when to shoot and when to change polarity. I suppose that the experience could be likened to a state of nirvana, i was at one with the first two levels.

Sometimes it was like being in a trance, I was no longer dodging enemies, it was like a big equation that i knew all of the steps and answers for, i had studied the game and learnt all of the answers to its questions.

[Ganelon]

Yeah, for those who think natural talent is a bigger influence than practice (not to say that talent isn't an influence), how many hours would you approximate you've put into those games? 20-30 hours?

[Berty]

I played Ikaruga at leasat two hours a day for 4 months so, 240 hours? And i still didnt end up getting a great score. I was really really good at the first two levels, but then i could not continue chaining further, simply because every time i made a mistake, i reset the machine and started again so i ended up playing level 1 and 2 the most.

[MovingTarget]

Unless I get a score I'm happy with I sometimes continue so that I can practice the later levels. I think it helps quite a bit.

[MovingTarget]

Do any of you go into a really focused frame of mind when playing shmups? Almost like a serene zen kind of feeling where your completely calm and everything works(99% of the time)? Or when the shit gets complicated does your heart start thumpin in your ed and the increased stress makes you concentrate harder?

When I 1 lifed the last stage of souky today(apart from the very last part) My heart was hammering and i couldnt believe how well I was playing, the thought of possibly my first decent 1cc was constantly in my mind. But while it lasted it was a great feeling. For the next hour I tried to play as well but only ended up getting severly pissed off as I died in stupid places and couldnt get to the last stage with a decent amount of lives.

I suppose what this post is really asking is, do you immediately put everything into the game from the first level or are you blase until the manic mayhem really begins?

[Randorama]

Do any of you go into a really focused frame of mind when playing shmups? Almost like a serene zen kind of feeling where your completely calm and everything works(99% of the time)? Or when the shit gets complicated does your heart start thumpin in your ed and the increased stress makes you concentrate harder?

Like everything in life, you will starting being very concentrated (heart pounding, nervousism, etc) when you do for the first time a very difficult task, even more if things aren't very smooth. When you do a thing for the billionth time, it becomes automatic and you reduce your attention span to a minimum, hence the serene state. It's absolutely different than any other activity in life (but this should be obvious, no?)

When I 1 lifed the last stage of souky today(apart from the very last part) My heart was hammering and i couldnt believe how well I was playing, the thought of possibly my first decent 1cc was constantly in my mind. But while it lasted it was a great feeling. For the next hour I tried to play as well but only ended up getting severly pissed off as I died in stupid places and couldnt get to the last stage with a decent amount of lives.

I suppose what this post is really asking is, do you immediately put everything into the game from the first level or are you blase until the manic mayhem really begins?

That's normal, as at some point the fear of screwing up runs as a counter force. With practice and habit, you will learnt to control it. As everything else.

and, of course, Try hard, like Don pachi says

[Tar-Palantir]

@Randorama

I used to take some offence at your hard-edged approach to gaming when I first started reading your posts. You can be a bit of a taskmaster. But now, I totally appreciate the way you play these games and also the way you raise the bar for all of us. Honestly, sometimes I'll be frustrated with a game, just about to give up, and I'll think, "Man, Rando would kill me for such soft thinking," and I'll keep going.

I don't know, after re-reading this post, I had a vision of this Fists of Fury-style scenario where Rando is murdered by jealous Japanese gaming clans, and then one of us does a Bruce Lee...

[Randorama]

I don't know, after re-reading this post, I had a vision of this Fists of Fury-style scenario where Rando is murdered by jealous Japanese gaming clans, and then one of us does a Bruce Lee...

I don't get this joke Could you explain it please?

[Tar-Palantir]

Fists of Fury aka the Chinese Connection was this Bruce Lee movie set in pre-WWII China, with this rivalry between a Chinese and a Japanese (bad guys!) martial arts house. At the beginning of the movie the Chinese sensei is dead (it's implied that the Japanese murdered him), and the films opens with his funeral and Bruce Lee is overcome with grief, literally digging up the master's grave. There are clashes between the two houses (dojos?) and a bit of romance, with the International Colony supporting the Japanese and finally Bruce Lee goes ahead and kills the guys who masterminded his master's murder.

So...hope this explains the joke . The question is...who plays Bruce Lee's part?

[JL]

I think that practice will make you a better player.