Why "Just practicing" is a terrible model of making progress as a shmup player (and a case study of bad condition)



I find beauty in working systematically at the fundamentals and perfecting those
I'm not so much talking about the stage 4 route (explained below) but more about this : last Monday, I played unknowingly with (Tetris induced) bad condition, trying to work on stage 4 and I found it no fun.

I was blaming the stage (unfun design, lesser than stage 5 etc) but in reality I was projecting my own (that days) inability.

I couldn't rely at all on reading bulletpatterns and i felt forced to route everything hard, *and* at the same time I couldn't execute routes consistently !


And all of a sudden, yesterday (that week's, Friday (with only a 1 hour game session between those days on Wednesday) seemingly out of nowhere I could do 16 minutes of that stage 4 without making a single mistake in anything, reading, routing, bullets from a far, running into bullets etc.


How is this gigantic difference possible ? This cannot be explained by "just practicing", there is alot more going on and it's very possible to grasp that and control it,l (supercompensation principle, optometry, possibly Tetris) the "just practice model" is horrible in many ways.
For one, it doesn't ever get to the bottom (the fundamentals) of what shmups is about and makes you go endlessly in circles wasting time working on very superficial stuff that doesn't make you better at the genre and the core of what shmups are about itself. It only temporarily makes you better at game X. Second it also traps you into a mind maze of endless going through the same cycle without ever reaching the area outside the maze of the mind.
Had I known I would have had bad condition that day, I would ofcourse not have played, but if I did would have interpreted everything different, like not blaming stage 4 itself as being worse designed than stage 5.

With the principle of supercompensation principle its very hard to get bad condition ever, unless ofcourse something else interferes that interacts with condition.

That interference was actually also a good thing this time, because it was also pretty hard evidence (as far as we can even speak of evidence to begin with) that the cognitive processes Tetris uses overlaps with shmups, in a condensed way.
Meaning Tetris is very potent(specifically because of the condensed part giving it the property to scale) I just need to find a way to systemtically tame that beast😇

Thank you for reading this post, bye !!

About me :
"Hi, i'm Animegirl, i heart shooty shooty pew pew games !"

Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/animegirlstg/profilecard/?igsh=MW04Yzd

YouTube : https://youtu.be/25RTf4miNZE?si=hTkXzn85hz_CAMhA







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

DoDonPachi Saga Part 5 : Stage 4 payback time !! ermm I mean analysis and process of routing stage 4 (...and uhm bikini's)

Image
DoDonPachi Saga Part 5 : Stage 4 payback time !!  ermm I mean analysis and process of routing stage 4 (...and uhm bikini's) Previously, on the DoDonPachi Saga... After I managed to totally own stage 5 I did a full run to see how I would do there. Stage 5 went pretty good, very consistent with my practice sessions and  because of that I managed to somehow save the run which went terrible, by scoring a survival and score pb (personal best) making it to stage 6 and almost hitting the 20m (which gives another extend) By that time I hadn't done any runs for like 3 weeks and stage 4 in particular was rusty with 3 misses. So before doing any more runs I wanted to take some time to relearn the route and at the same time optimize it for consistency by pre assigning 2 bombs at the last section just for good measure. Stage 4 took my clothes, what now ? Should I just "practice" or just keep grinding runs and hope for the best ? That is not my style. The mo...
Read more

DoDonPachi 1CC Saga Part 2: No Missing Stage 1 to 4 (and the truth about "getting better at the genre")

Image
DoDonPachi 1CC Saga Part 2: No Missing Stage 1 to 4 (and the truth about "getting better at the genre") GOAL : getting a 1CC in DDP and raising my hardware skill cap of raw bullet pattern reading to become a 2nd loop player. STRATEGY : do well in the first 4 stages so you can fully bomb every pixel in stage 5 and 6, then route stage 5 and 6 and forget to bomb. On my first day of runs, after doing a week or 3 of routing and practicing stage 3, 4 and 5 I managed to get to the stage 4 boss with an extend and 4 bombs left. However instead of just safely bombing it and get to Stage 5 I chose to more or less sacrifice the run to get experience of doing the stage 4 boss under pressure. I ended the run with 12.8m score. After this first attempt I noticed my Stage 3 gameplay wasn't as consistent as I wanted (see Part 1 of this series). After going back abd optimizing the routing and strategy for stage 3 I went for another session of runs. On my second day I instantly played well (...
Read more

Supercompensation Chronicles Part 2 : Touhou 7 PCB Lunatic

Image
This was a hard test and some pretty solid and definitive proof for me that the principle of supercompensation is working and it will work for anything and everything, stage, boss, game and difficulty. The clip doesn't look so impressive but I managed to make it through the hard part at the middle almost every single time, that's pretty significant, 2 days ago I couldn't do this at all, maybe 1 or 2 out of 10 max ! This pattern looks easy but it's somehow demanding to read and navigate. I have done 3 sessions of Touhou Lunatic patterns and at the 3rd I can now make it through a very tricky unroutable and tough pattern consistently either almost or completely. By just playing normally and trying this pattern over and over it feels as if you're just hitting a wall, a ceiling, a "hardware cap" as some very good players would say. I don't believe this is how it works at all. Here is the recording :      I actually decided not to do ...
Read more