your longest practice session ever?

[zinger]

I usually have my cabinet / console running while I'm doing other stuff during the day. 1 credit, take a shower, 1 credit, make breakfast, 1 credit, surf the internet etc etc.

[spadgy]

usually i dont improve my score beyond the first two runs, but my stability and confidence in patterns and such definetly does.

Agree with this totally. I can, once in a blue moon rack up 6 to 8 hours tackling shmups with a mate, but I really have to swap games every couple of hours to keep it rolling nicely.

I played Super Mario Galaxy for 14 hours the other day with a friend. That's unhealthy - like to make those sessions are rare rare treat!

[spadgy]

Also - on my own I like to keep it to two or three hours. Any more than that playing on my own and I start to feel the pull of my wife or the skateboard.

Speaking of marriage and shmup sessions, I caught my drunken wife two nights ago nailing Psyvariar 2 at about 1am when I returned from being out. She was scoring good too. No idea how long she'd been going, but she was playing - I'm definitely in love!

And yeah - that's all she was nailing!

[unsane]

has anybody here ever sat down with a game for a long period of time and seen a big improvement?

Well i just played Raiden for 7 hours straight and replaced 6 of my top 9 scores. Beat my record 3 times (2 of them coming very late in the session). My record from the day before was ~700,000, and after this epic session it's almost 1,200,000, for a 60% improvement. My thumbs hurt.

My average shmupping session is about 2 hours though.

There are certain games I can play until I pass out, like a couple years ago I was at a LAN party with some friends and we played Quake III for more than thirty hours straight

Heh only game i was able to do that was WoW. Since it doesn't require much thought or effort, your quality of play doesn't suffer very much even after 14 hours.