I Can't Play Shmups

[Sapz]

But, the most important thing is to never give up. I can't argue that there is no upper limit to skill (those weirdos trying to 1cc Dodonpachi for example :V), but you shouldn't sell yourself short if you truly want to succeed.

:V Prometheus, that guy with the 2-all I mentioned to you, is an advocate of the idea that there isn't an upper limit for skill; IIRC, he's been playing DDP for a little over 6 years and made constant small improvements over that time period. Stop telling me I can't do it. ;_;

As for myself, I would rate my random dodging skills (i.e. what a lot of people consider actual skill at danmaku) as maybe average? A little above average at best. Despite that, over the course of 14 months or so I worked myself up through the series until managing to 1cc UFO Lunatic, often cited as incredibly difficult even amongst the other Lunatic modes. Practicing the games by themselves will help a little bit but it's not really what you're looking for; the key for effective practice is focusing on specific areas of the game. Go through the game until you encounter some kind of problem, whether it's dying with bombs in stock, or a particular stage segment, or a specific spell card, or a certain type of bullet pattern (I know a lot of people have trouble with interlaced-style bullet patterns like you see in Hourai Elixir and Mishaguji-sama), and then practice that until you either get good at it or write it off as a designated bombing spot.

Like this, even a player new to the genre can 1cc a game - on a related note, it's been proven that MoF, on any difficulty, can be beaten by bombing every single attack a boss throws at you and still have a significant amount of bombs left over; this kind of contradicts the idea that some players are unable to beat certain difficulty levels, and I think a player who considers themself to be a Normal mode player could 1cc MoF on Lunatic, given the proper preparation. Bananamatic and others have already pretty much mentioned most of what I wanted to say, but I'll just reiterate that no-one is obligated to be able to beat the game on any difficulty level, but you have the capability to do damn near anything if you're enjoying yourself enough to warrant the playtime, experimenting and research required.

Sorry if this was kind of incoherent; just got back from an Opeth concert and I'm a little out of it. :V

[kakkesu]

If I may add something about the hours and hours of practice tactic:

You have to be smart about spacing out those hours and hours, or else many of them will be wasted once you hit a mental saturation point, which is essentially the point where your brain cannot process any further stimuli (e.g. yet another round of danmaku) in a way that allows for actual learning (= performance improvement) to occur.  If you insist on that 150th consecutive attempt at a Lunatic 1cc, be aware that the part of your brain responsible for making you better at the game may have already called it quits on the 50th attempt.  It'll be ready for another 50 rounds in a day or two (maybe even a few hours if you've got a particularly quick mental recovery time), but for the time being it's done and nothing you do will get your brain back at full learning capacity before the end of that recovery period.  I'm a particularly stubborn idiot, so I've had a ton of firsthand experience with overestimating my mental saturation point, which all too often resulted in my marathoning a stage with little to no score improvement only to easily smash the highest of those marathon scores on my very first play after 20+ hours of not touching the game post-raegquit.

[Hello Purvis]

imo you should also develop some basic shmup skill...by playing shmups.

don't concentrate your eyes on your hitbox, a good player can look much further up and still be in control - focus on the screen, not on the 10x10 space.

learn how to stream and re-stream the bullets, some stages can be trivialized completely by knowing how to stream - I'd say that 70% of the stages are pixel aimed in touhou.

also learn to(and don't be afraid to) bomb properly. not losing bombs is 70% of a normal 1cc.

when going for a 1cc and not practicing:
when it's hard(or never captured it before), bomb it.
don't risk dangerous dodges, bomb first. then die.

If you still don't 1cc, figure out how to do more attacks without bombs.
If you die with bombs too much, learn how to bomb better. it comes by itself.

when you are bad, you improve much faster than when you are good. atleast in games :V

and what's HME :V

Your avatar makes this post so much better.

Also, I'm falling on the side of "Not everyone can do lunatic" Some lunatic players have a tendency to forget they are hand/eye coordination freaks, just ignore them or laugh at them when they trivialize your woes.

Best advice I can give? Do some practice or StB or summat before making your real attempts. It'll help get your mind in the right place without the easiness of the earlier stages lulling you into false security.

[Turtlesaur]

I want to add something even though it's a few days later:

Play some non-bullet-hell shmups. Get a SNES and some Konami shmup (I'd recommend Pop'n TwinBee, but Gradius/Parodius could be decent with savestates), set them to the lowest difficulty and beat them. Then try a difficulty somewhere in the middle. Use save states or game genie codes if you have to.

Pop'n TwinBee especially is fairly easy when set to game level 1/easy, fun enough to keep you playing, gives you a refillable health bar (in addition to plenty of lives & continues) and will teach you the basics of not getting hit by bullets. It also has bombs and you'll quickly learn when you should use them.

Then return to Touhou and play PCB or IN. Just go into them on easy, max lives etc. Don't be afraid to use continues. You'll get some more experience and ideas about how to do Touhou spellcards. I'd recommend IN because you get to deathbomb reasonably and unlock Spell Practice along the way. Struggle a bit and return to EoSD a few days later and you'll get your 1CC.

The basic point is that some diversity is king when you're learning shmups. The non-bullet-hell shmups should teach you some basic reaction time & streaming skills while the other Touhou games should teach you how to handle different kinds of attacks (both spellcards and hard stage portions).

[Gandalph]

Don't worry about sucking at shmups. I passed Easy on all the windows games, barring UFO, which for some reason I still cannot pass. It took me two years to get to this level, and I'm fine with stopping there. I don't have the natural skill or the patience to become good at shmups, so they aren't very fun for me. I used them as an opportunity to improve in other areas instead. First, I used them to learn how to use a disassembler and hack. Second, I am in the process of using them as a testing ground to see if I can make an AI based on image processing to find objects of interest.

Some people don't enjoy these games in the way they are meant to be played. But we can still use them to have fun in nonstandard ways. Find a creative way to have fun with Touhou if you are fed up with banging your head on the wall in frustration!

[Alice★f]

If you insist on that 150th consecutive attempt at a Lunatic   1cc, be aware that the part of your brain responsible for making you   better at the game may have already called it quits on the 50th attempt.

I'm a   particularly stubborn idiot, so I've had a ton of firsthand experience   with overestimating my mental saturation point

I'll agree with this. I'm also another particular stubborn idiot. Spending up to three in the morning, and on my 250th try on SA Extra lol

And still no success, but I'm still going at it

BTW what does TAS mean anyway?

Tool-Assisted Speedrun

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Not much to say, but you should take a break from Touhou. If you don't feel you can do something, 1cc'ing anything on any mode will be much harder if there's that half of you who doesn't think you can do it.

Not sure if that doesn't make any sense, but you need to feel confident and set realistic goals for yourself if you want to get good while maintaining confidence.

[mew77]

So a TAS is when you try to get the game to run faster than it should?

[Alice★f]

So a TAS is when you try to get the game to run faster than it should?

No, quite the opposite.

A TAS can have different effects. One of them is slowing the game down to have more time to read bullets and dodge them easier. ie: 30 fps instead of 60

Another common feature is rewinding gameplay so that if you die, you can just rewind back to when you were about to get hit and move out of the way. They're sometimes called "save states"

However, things like unlimited lives/bombs are more like hacks/cheats

[Krimmydoodle]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBSE2QkHMeU

In other words, a TAS is when you use things such as slowdown and savestates to create an entertainingly inhuman (if "illegitimate") recording of what is theoretically possible in a video game.  Speedrun implies that tool-assisted runs have a tendency to aim for fastest time possible, although this isn't necessarily the case for something like Touhou where much of the game runs at a predetermined speed (can't do anything to make stage portions end faster).  Honestly, it's a minor pet peeve of mine when people say "TAS" to describe something that isn't played for speed, but I let it go.

Some people shun tool-assisted videos because of illegitimacy and cheaters are assholes and all that.  I believe that tool-assisted videos have their place, as it's quite entertaining to watch video games get destroyed in the most humiliating ways possible, as long as they're clearly marked as such and kept separate from videos made from human skill.

[605Scorpion]

Now I'm confused, did this whole thread happen with people not realizing I was asking about help with cheating?  I thought I made it clear in both my posts. 

[Alice★f]

Now I'm confused, did this whole thread happen with people not realizing I was asking about help with cheating?  I thought I made it clear in both my posts. 

People are wondering whether Touhou is a game for you or not. Guess the point is, if playing seems like a chore for you, maybe you should take a rest for a while and come back to it when you feel better.

Beating Touhou isn't the most important thing anyway. There are many other things to enjoy from Touhou aside from its games.

[Sen]

I'm just another Touhou player, and a below-average one at that. :]

Are you the same Ruro who was the first person outside of Japan to 1cc PoD.D Lunatic? :V

[Sapz]

Are you the same Ruro who was the first person outside of Japan to 1cc PoD.D Lunatic? :V

That is the same Ruro. She's a lot better than she gives herself credit for. :V

Spoiler:

That took me so long to beat my God ;_;