How long did it take you to get decent at shmup games?

[evil_ash_xero]

Of course it doesn't happen all at once, but how long did it take before you really felt comfortable with the genre?

I get so damn frustrated sometimes. Shmups are easily my favorite type of game, but I'm horrible at them. All of them. I don't even play for score yet, because I feel like I should first get to the point where survival is second nature to me-- I can't seem to do that. I haven't found a game that I can 1CC yet. A lot of times I can't even beat a game/loop if I feed. I'm usually just playing on the default difficulty, as well.

My buddies will come over and watch and be like, "Oh my god, how can you do that?" ...but I think that just makes it worse, because I know that I'm not any good and it's almost like rubbing it in. I'm just glad that I haven't smashed any controllers yet.

Think it's hopeless? I have a really competitive nature when it comes to games and I'm not sure how much longer I can put up with sucking. I try to memorize stages and patterns, I try to experiment with different types of controllers... what's next?

Hey, i'm glad to see someone else with my problem on here! I love shmups, but suck pretty bad at all of them. Well, compared to what some of the people on here can do. The only shmup I have ever ICC'd would be Thunderforce III. And I don't think i'll ever 1CC any others.

To somehow answer your question, it took maybe a month or two to get "comfortable" with Cave type shmups. Not that i'm very good at them, but it certainly took a while to grasp what was going on.

Humorously, the first Cave(or manic game) I played was DOJ, when I just started importing PS2 shmups. I was like "uh, you gotta be kidding me". I still have that feeling when playing that, but not no much.

s/m

[TKGB_Mental_Gear]

I guess I'd consider myself pretty decent. I can make it to the 4th level on Battle Garegga in 1 credit but damn that level is too damn hard for me to pass in 1 credit.

I believe that when you get into the game and concentrate entirely on surviving the game that you become decent on it.

[indstr]

i tried learning the scoring system on progear today because i realized that if i can earn 3mil points, getting an extra life will give me a better shot at 1cc'ing it i thought it was pretty fun, although i only got about 2.2 mil, i am sure i will be able to do it with a couple more tries

[shoe-sama]

just cancel bullets

[unsane]

s/m

What's that s/m mean? I thought it was 'short message' until that reply...

[spadgy]

i tried learning the scoring system on progear today because i realized that if i can earn 3mil points, getting an extra life will give me a better shot at 1cc'ing it i thought it was pretty fun, although i only got about 2.2 mil, i am sure i will be able to do it with a couple more tries

I'm just getting to the 'extend' point in a few of my regulars. I guess once I hit it, that should lead to quite a leap forward...

[Randorama]

but I do still have an inkling some people are just built to be slightly better at one thing and other people biased towards being slightly better at another.

Yeah, the inkling is mostly right. If you try to do something and you have "more natural horsepower" in one of the many cognitive faculties involved in that activity. A question without ill-will: I suppose that you have some other hobbies in which you have used your brains to learn how to move your body correctly and quickly enough (skating, right?), why another task (of the "mind synchronized with body" type) should be any different?

Nobody bothered to study shmups (that would quite useful, though), but let us say some of my colleagues could compile extremely long references about e.g. the attentional blink can make things better in visual tasks (the attentional blink is, roughly, the frequence at which you blink your eyes when you do a focused task like reading).

Not to sound trolling on spadgy, but the point is that yes, there is a lot of accurate knowledge (read: scientific publications) on various aspects of cognition. Given the way these aspects interact (module-wise, i.e. cascade models), it is by no means easy (i.e. not something you can do in the time of a post on shmups.com) to find out if you can get a small advantage if your saccades are faster.

Then again, playing decently is a much more complex task and it requires huge amounts of practice. For the sake of example, one may "naturally" start a bit further on a scale of "reflexes" (say, 1 instead of 20), but still he will need e.g. to get to 10 before passing...stage 1 of Raiden DX .

Again, though, playing well means solving a series of problems in a set of rules (video-game!), so you first need to understand how the game works, then understand how the AI is trying to kill you and steal you more coins, then put the various small solutions into a big one.

If one makes a mistake and is a fast thinker, he can solve it on the spot. If the programmers do not allow for fast solutions in the crucial spot, you will still lose a life. As fast as one can have his twitching syndrome, implementing the wrong solution will still be game over.

Then, implementation (shaking that joystick around) is not conceptual, but motoric: I know how to do some sections in Shikigami no shiro III, my precision is lacking though, so I need to train more. Of course, if one wants to put all of his intellectual efforts in ruling out thinking from brains, then he has just won a non-starter, and should really not wonder why he doesn't get it.

(and Yes, I get paid to know this kind of things and even make experiments about them).

[-Bridget-]

Gee, this is all getting quite complicated.

Interesting, but complicated



I personally play mostly based on reflexes and quick thinking, as I am very fast, which is my main skill/ability. But I suck royally at memorization. If there's a section in a shmup where I NEED to memorize something in order to pass it (fortunately doesnt happen too often in most of the shmups I play, like Cave's stuff), then I *will* die there over and over and over and over and over and over......


But throw sections at me that DONT specifically need that, and I may very well pass it the first time.


Other problem is I tend to be sorta "inaccurate" and have a tendancy to smash into really stupid things, like playing Mushihime, where I'll be on Ultra, no-miss / no-bomb stage 1 or 2, and then crash into the item bug that appears right before the boss (argh!).



It's interesting how different players handle all these things differently and have such different styles.

[shoe-sama]

reflexes don't do shit if you're looking in the wrong place lol

[spadgy]

Not to sound trolling on spadgy, but the point is that yes, there is a lot of accurate knowledge (read: scientific publications) on various aspects of cognition.

Not at all mate. Informed, insightful and interesting more like.

A great read.

And let's face it, if that counts as trolling, it's the kind of polite intellectual trolling you have to respect. I'd like to think that that's how Mr. Randorama and his work piers have arguments. All scientific professionals in fact.

"What do you mean given the way these aspects interact (module-wise, i.e. cascade models), it is by no means easy? You utter utter bastard!"

[Randorama]

A great read.

And let's face it, if that counts as trolling, it's the kind of polite intellectual trolling you have to respect. I'd like to think that that's how Mr. Randorama and his work piers have arguments. All scientific professionals in fact.

Oh no worries, it's just that I didn't want to sound ad hominem, in practice I wanted to focus on one problem that you elegantly avoid in your first topic, the "oh noes the mad shmups g3n3s from Japanland!" syndrome (a pernicious delusion hovering around, sometimes...).

Another thing you correctly observe is the strictness of routes: in most modern games, even if you have to chain, you often have sloppy sections. Mind you, DOJ or a few other titles are really merciless on this, but in most titles you have some decent room for variation.

If you already "go back" to DDP, some sections (esp. stage 5 and 6) are really like "shoot stuff->bottle neck in which you have to be precise->shoot stuff". Surely there may some optimal strategy for the "shoot stuff" sections, but then it becomes a matter of aiming at the world record, to find the right one.

The other thing is that some strategies seem rigid when your reflexes are slow. Once you become faster in your actions, you realize that an interval at which you could just think of one movement becomes an interval in which you can think of *three* movements, which allow you to dodge the otherwise undodgeable pattern.

Of course, such a skill is game-general: it is simply about being able to think quickly and properly. Once you feel that implementation is the remaining problem in your tactics and you can quickly think on how to dodge patterns, you're already on the good road.

One example is the giga wing series: if you have a good understanding on how to use the shield and "reflect away" in the most problematic spots, the remaining patterns are by no means difficult to dodge, if you get where you're supposed to squeeze in. The rest is really some sober amount of practice.

Games like on DOJ or R-type II, on the other hand, not only have difficult sequences, they also require extremely dense intervals: instead of 1 minute of improvisation and 10 seconds of bottleneck, you have continuous bottlenecks and few (if one at all) possible good solutions. If you are not a machine, it is better that you plan before, and try hard to implement later.

Then, of course, it is also a matter of style. I lack precision so squeezing ships in danmaku games or performing flawlessly timed chains is not my best skill, hence I have never bothered to play decently DOJ

[themachinist]

I'm proud when I reach the first extend in games .

[PROMETHEUS]

to randorama : something I didn't know before is that there are people doing research in sports, specifically. Like trying to find which way of training is the best, which way of throwing a ball is the best or whatever. Right now, public popularity of competitive video games (as "sports" that people come to spectate, even when they don't play the games) is growing a lot, coming from Asia, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the first researchers in video game performance. I actually already read a research result or report about how casually playing simple action video games such as crazy taxi improved the visual ability of the test subjects (who usually didn't play games). If such casual play already increases some abilities like this, it might well be that more dedicated play of games that require serious skills improve a lot of general abilities too.

[indstr]

I don't believe much in "some people are naturally more gifted than others", I don't believe much in talent and geniuses, I think all that stuff probably comes from education and other skills acquired since early youth, and more importantly I think nobody really knows why the hell some people seem to get better results than others faster so

this post has been bugging me for a couple days now

you say "all that stuff probably comes from education and other skills aquired since early youth "....

this is all semantic.

basically you are addressing the issue of nature vs nurture. but whether talent is inherited, or learned at an early age (although i believe it is a combination of both), some people simply have more aptitude for different types of tasks than others. not just "a little bit more", but a lot more. i think a person's IQ also plays a large role in a person's ability to become adept at things

let's take a look at Mozart. he wrote something like 626 different works during the course of his life. not just 626 individual songs, a lot of these are symphonies, operas, etc.
can you honestly tell me that "john on the farm, who loves playing ukulele" wasn't as skilled as mozart simply because he didn't spend as many hours honing his skills? no, mozart spent so many hours
because he already had a natural knack for it.

i mean, i would consider music the passion of my life, but i'll never write 626 works. i'm lucky to get out 1 song every couple of months. and i certainly didn't write symphonies when i was a little kid

i'd also like to examine the extreme cases... people who have natural skills that are literally impossible for other people to do. this can be observed very easily in some autistic people.

watch this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVqRT_kCOLI

this autistic man can barely talk. but they flew him in a helicopter over rome. it was his first time seeing the city. he draws an entire panorama, with every single detail accurate. are you telling me you could do this with enough practice? i couldn't do it with a lifetime of practice, not even close. and i know that he didn't have to practice to be able to do this type of thing, either. it just comes to him naturally

everybody's brain works differently. some people have a photographic memory. me personally, i can't remember visual details for anything, but i have a very good audio memory. or some person might get lost easily, but they might be able to discern a pattern out of chaos very quickly... etc etc. there are so many ways in which our brains work, and so many different types of intelligence. everyone applies each type of intelligence to a different degree

in summary: i think your claim that "everyone is on an equal playing ground" is absurd

[PROMETHEUS]

in summary: i think your claim that "everyone is on an equal playing ground" is absurd

I didn't say that.

I said nobody knows where so-called natural ability really comes from (and if it really is innate). I don't think we know how important "innate ability", if there is any, is in getting really good at something.

The case you shown is very special, but if I had to take a very wild guess I'd say his brain or mind maybe underdeveloped many of its aspects but overdeveloped a few others, and that would be why he's gotten so good at memorizing and drawing so fast.

So maybe all people are like that to a lesser degree and that makes some people better than others to begin with. But I think most people can, if they work hard at it, get really good at about anything. And I guess you couldn't find a "normal" person (who doesn't have any kind of mind imbalance) who's really good at something without having worked hard at it. Mozart probably worked his ass off, and I bet you don't work on your music half as much as he did.

In summary : it's a fact no-one reaches the top without working hard. And , however good you may be when you start doing something, I think you can reach somewhere near the top providing you work hard at it. The reason why I think that is because I have never seen someone not make any progress at all if they work hard at something. They always get better, so if they keep going they'll probably reach near the top one day.

[indstr]

So maybe all people are like that to a lesser degree and that makes some people better than others to begin with.

i agree with this fully and it is pretty much what i was trying to get at with my post

In summary : it's a fact no-one reaches the top without working hard. And , however good you may be when you start doing something, I think you can reach somewhere They always get better, so if they keep going they'll probably reach near the top one day.

maybe now i'm just arguing for the sake of arguing, but how do you gauge "the top"?

you could say that brittney spears is near "the top" as far as commercial success goes, but to say that her vocal talent is on par with an actually skilled singer, like say Mariah Carey, would be far from true. brittney got where she was through heavy promotion and luck. and maybe some blowjobs. who knows, the world is an unfair place.

but consider it also from this perspective: if a person who is inept at a certain task, but for whatever reason dreams of doing that task on a professional level one day... if they spend the same amount of time honing their skills as other people who have talent in that area, then they still will not be "near the top", because there will still be all the other more apt people, better than them.

i know i will never be near the top at rome-arial-map drawing, no matter how badly i ever might want to do it.

but anyway, the world is not ranked like a top 10 leaderboard on a shmup game. everybody has different levels of success that can be appreciated by different groups of people. i don't like britney spears, but i like some indie music from Holland. to me, the holland musicians are more "on top" than britney spears is

i guess you're just a lot more optimistic than i am

i'm gonna stop rambling now because i'm basically arguing with myself

[jpj]

in terms of shmups, i know that ISO and TAC spent 50,000yen practicing mushi futari in the space of one month. if that's a 50yen arcade (you would assume so) that's 1000 credits of play in 30 days; ie playing an average of 30 runs a day, every day. SYO played ketsui for up to 4 hours a day, every day, to achieve 400+mill 2-ALL on ketsui within one year. ben-shinobi's 25+mill on radiant silvergun took 1000+hours logged on his saturn. maybe it's possible there are some people who can learn quicker. but it's plain to see that most records are set from huge hours of practice. and in the case of japanese players, they possibly have better access to learning materials and have the advantage/motivation of competition (national scoretables/local arcade). many of the best SFII players come from tokyo as the dense population lends itself to a great level of competition.

also, for DOJ, this game only requires strict memorisation for stage 4. the rest of the stages actually have a good amount of improvisation (if you know how to use your Hypers )

(i don't know much about mozart, but i think his prolific career and musical ability may be the result of how his father treated him )

[Icarus]

Every time this discussion appears (in some form or other), I always end up writing 10+ paragraphs/posts, and arguing back and forth until I'm blue in the face. So instead I'll cut my opinion down into a short sentence, which itself is a slight subversion of a well-known saying.

"Good practice habits makes perfect."

That is all.
<lurk>

[PROMETHEUS]

about what jpj said : the way they play is particularly hectic though. I'm curious how much less time it would take them to make the same scores if they practiced with save states ?!

[jpj]

some japanese players credit-feed to the end of the game each time they play (providing nobody is waiting behind them to play!). so instead of restarting all the time, you practice all levels with an equal amount of time. i started doing this with doj a while back and it helped me out towards the end of the loop. plus it makes practice less boring, because you wont think: i made a mistake in stage 3... now i need to start at the beginning again. in fact, i think if you don't credit-feed (or save-state) and restart all the time, you may find the opening stages quite tedious, and then feel like you've "hit a wall" when you start reaching the later levels. as the game will get progressively more difficult, but you've spent most of your time on stages 1 & 2...

[indstr]

BUT JAPANESE PLAYERS NEVER CREDIT FEED according to the infalleable guy at insomnia.ac.
he tells you how you SHOULD play, and if you don't play that way, then you are a pathetic sack of cheating $#!*

the eliteist bastard

personally, the way i've been playing lately is with a "3 credit limit". i put 3 credits in, see how far i can get... and then gauge my progress based on that. i've only credit fed through a game about 3 times, but i have used savestates for serious practice on dodonpachi and plan on doing that more frequently soon

every game should have a level select feature though ...cuz i can't do savestates in the cps2 emulator on my PSP

[Twiddle]

Every time this discussion appears (in some form or other), I always end up writing 10+ paragraphs/posts, and arguing back and forth until I'm blue in the face. So instead I'll cut my opinion down into a short sentence, which itself is a slight subversion of a well-known saying.

"Good practice habits makes perfect."

That is all.
<lurk>

You need to get in the hug pillow thread.

[BIL]

some japanese players credit-feed to the end of the game each time they play (providing nobody is waiting behind them to play!). so instead of restarting all the time, you practice all levels with an equal amount of time. i started doing this with doj a while back and it helped me out towards the end of the loop. plus it makes practice less boring, because you wont think: i made a mistake in stage 3... now i need to start at the beginning again. in fact, i think if you don't credit-feed (or save-state) and restart all the time, you may find the opening stages quite tedious, and then feel like you've "hit a wall" when you start reaching the later levels. as the game will get progressively more difficult, but you've spent most of your time on stages 1 & 2...

Well said, regarding that (maybe partly imaginary) wall. Having to replay the first few stages of a shooter is by far the thing that takes the most patience out of me. Sometimes I think I'd be happier just credit-feeding and whittling ten or so credits down to an eventual 1CC, but I tend to reason that I won't be setting any WR scores soon if ever, so I might as well make simply clearing the game a challenge on my own terms. But this actually made me put down Gradius II (arcade) for now, despite being a checkpoint away from clearing the first loop... not that you can credit-feed it anyway, but its first three stages became exasperating to me after a while. Gradius being an extreme example I guess, with the heavy punishment it tends to hand out for a single death.

I'm currently playing Rayforce, and something I've noticed is that as sadistic as its rank quickly gets, it's a game I can practice on one credit for long periods of time quite easily. Even stage 2 has several involving sections that require complete attention to maximise score without dying. Personally it's a lot easier to keep trying hard at a shooter when the earlier stages are well-designed enough to not become a sort of "husk" covering better things later on.

[Icarus]

You need to get in the hug pillow thread.

This one? I've seen worse.
(Referring both to the thread and the item in question.)

...so I might as well make simply clearing the game a challenge on my own terms.

Which is how people should be playing anyway. Some derive fun from maximising score, some from just playing. What is important is that you yourself enjoy your approach to the game, otherwise it becomes less fun and more a chore.

[CIT]

You need to get in the hug pillow thread.

This one? I've seen worse.
(Referring both to the thread and the item in question.)

Nah, this one.

...so I might as well make simply clearing the game a challenge on my own terms.

Which is how people should be playing anyway. Some derive fun from maximising score, some from just playing. What is important is that you yourself enjoy your approach to the game, otherwise it becomes less fun and more a chore.

Thanks, I was waiting for someone to write this. ^^

[EOJ]

BUT JAPANESE PLAYERS NEVER CREDIT FEED

I wrote a blog post awhile back showing how this is just not true:

http://danmakudreams.blogspot.com/2007/ ... th-in.html

Jpj hit on the main points in his post as well.

[Icarus]

Nah, this one.

Oh, that one. Tony Taka, LOL.
I've seen worse.
The unusual attempt at tribadism presented on a hugpillow is quite funny, however.

[indstr]

BUT JAPANESE PLAYERS NEVER CREDIT FEED

I wrote a blog post awhile back showing how this is just not true:

http://danmakudreams.blogspot.com/2007/ ... th-in.html

Jpj hit on the main points in his post as well.

i read this post of yours about a week after i read the insomniac post

[Imhotep]

I'd say, the most important thing is to play only one game at a time and being ambitious about it.

I'd also say that any member of this forum is able to evolve into a top western player whithin one half of a year playing that one or two games ambitiously (say: invest lots of focused playtime).

It's all about practice, talent is a minor factor.

[Randorama]

[quote="PROMETHEUS"]something I didn't know before is that there are people doing research in sports, specifically.
[\quote]

Here (I am in Sydney) we have some specific research groups on cricket, for instance. I was part of an experiment (basic batting without prior experience) and what it turned out was that I could virtually be a good cricketer, if I train and tune by motoric skills (reaction time, attention, etc.) to the contingent requirements of the specific sport.

In general, any competence (the knowledge of certain principles) must still be "bound" (or co-indexed) with the specific motoric system that carries out the task. If a chain in DDP consists in "shoot enemy 1--->laser enemy 2--->destroy zakos 1,2,3," and so on, you can learn it with relatively ease.

Then, however, you need to bind this computation with the physical movements: "extend finger for 0,3 seconds->relax finger (0,1 second lag)->extend finger (again) for 0,8 seconds" etc. Binding these two different computations is not automatic, hence the need of practice.

Note that the times I proposed are just numbers: it is better if you think in terms of *unit intervals*, so you would have (by means of example) "extend finger for 3 units-> relax finger (1 unit lag)" etc. If the 1 unit lag is too big (say, you lose a chain if there is a lag of 0,5 units between hits), your performance will suffer. Hence, via practice, you can "synchronize" your knowledge, reflexes and game... and pwn the game.

Most of the "debates" (brawls without bats, rather) about these topics tend to be about "no it's only knowledge! No it's only the l33t japanese genes!" etc., but in practice what happens is that you need to put together a number of factors and make them work in unison. Sure, you can have faster reactions times than everyone else, but if they are unnecessary and you don't know what plan to implement, cui prodest?

Note that in all of my posts I purposefully avoided the topic of "fun". Emotional responses to any kind of computation (mental or physical) are, strictly speaking, perfectly orthogonal to what the process is about. If anything, conflating them into one single "blob" may be seen as a case of synesthesia.

As a rule of thumb, though, overloading your poor brain and body will cause stress and negative feelings. Whatever you do, it is always better to tackle a solvable problem, once you can do it with ease, you will probably experience happiness/satisfaction/etc.

But this is about enjoying things, not getting better at something