Killing Ketsui: How Moglar Severed the Bonds of High-Score Hell and Set a World Record

Moglar5k (Magolor9000 on Youtube) holds the world record score in Ketsui: Kizuna Jigoku Tachi, Cave’s 2003 dystopian corporate-military bullet hell. Legendary for its focus on aggressively dispatching enemies with proximity chaining and lock-on shot, as well as its insanely difficult Omote and Ura 2nd loops, Ketsui truly demands excellence of play. In today’s interview, Moglar discusses his own practice methods, enjoying a game for thousands of hours, and how to one-credit clear 2-loop shmups.

April 2021

CAT: Hey Moglar! I was wondering if you have any wisdom to impart on learning skills, at Ketsui or in general. I’ve been making some inroads lately at Rolling Gunner, but I feel like as a general thing, deeply learning a new skill is something I find very difficult. I have drawn for years and years, and yet I sometimes feel way behind people who took it up two years ago, for example.

MOG: Think a lot, both when you are playing/drawing/whatever and when you aren’t as well. When you are playing, look out for things that you could be doing better and try to get a better understanding of everything. When you aren’t playing, you can consider what you want to do or learn next, come up with new ideas, and think about upcoming goals and how you can go about achieving them.

Don’t force yourself to use the absolute fastest seeming practice methods you can think of if it’s not as fun. I don’t think there are a lot of methods that will be huge killers to progress speed, so long as you don’t find yourself using one of them just stick with what’s fun. The less fun you are having the worse you will perform since you won’t put in as good of an effort. In the end you won’t be learning faster and will have lowered motivation to some extent.

The main ways I’ve noticed that people really screw themselves with progress rate is by either not challenging themselves enough and not learning new things, or the opposite, doing things that are way beyond what they are capable of and ending up with completely unacceptable consistency. I think the best is to try to be in the middle of those as much as you can, although as long as you aren’t super far on one end you should always keep getting better the more time you put in.

February 2023

CAT: Before achieving the Ketsui world record you tackled Touhou, innovated speedrunning tech in Hollow Knight, and uploaded a sub-20 minute Super Meat Boy any% run to Youtube—which you called “bad.” Have you always pushed games to their limit? Or was there a certain game that started this skill snowball rolling?

Eh… maybe a bit much. You can answer that if you want. But I guess what I’m wondering is, you had a pretty solid thing going, speedrunning platformers like Celeste and Hollow Knight. Why switch to shmups? And why Ketsui?

MOG: Well, I first started watching speedruns when I was 11ish. For a while I was mainly just watching a lot of them. I had a short period of this with shmups as well. I never streamed til I was 13 but I messed around with some speed stuff a bit before that. There were a couple of noteworthy things; one was doing strat hunting in Toad’s Treasure Tracker. I would mess around with that game and tell the one guy running the game at the time some of my findings in his Twitch chat.

The other was Kirby Triple Deluxe. I spent a good amount of time making a route for the game. You have to collect a certain amount of collectibles in each world to open the boss, so that was the main routing difficulty. After routing everything I did a couple runs. The first one got a 2:15-2:16 I believe, and the 2^nd was a very slightly better run at 2:15. The best time on speedrun.com was 2:18, so I beat that, which is pretty cool. Although the best now is 1:53, so it wouldn’t be too good nowadays.

At 12 I got S rank in Splatoon, and was one of the first people to beat the now very well-known Pangeapanga’s Skyzo level in Super Mario Maker, beating it a couple hours after upload, if I remember correctly. Never ended up playing any of his future levels too much, but I messed around trying to set good times on a bunch of random levels in that game.

A few months after I turned 13 the punch card glitch was found in Undertale. I really loved that game when it came out, but only watched speedruns of it because it didn’t seem interesting enough to run myself. But when that glitch was found I immediately started running the game. Undertale is still definitely the most impressive thing I’ve done in speedrunning, and it was the first time I ever put out any video of my play. 

So, the answer to that question would be that yes, I was pretty interested in pushing games and challenging myself in them from quite a young age. But I can’t say always—I wasn’t pushing games when I was 3.

I started playing and watching Touhou a bit in early-mid 2017, since I knew they were supposed to be hard bullet hell games, which sounded pretty cool. Later that year the Touhou player Yatsuzume hosted Satis (also known as semenfairy, cooldood69, etc.) after a stream. He was playing Crimzon Clover Unlimited, which was my first introduction to arcade shmups.  Afterwards for a bit Crimzon Clover was the main thing I was playing, but Ketsui ended up being #2. Ketsui had the coolest looking score runs which probably sparked some interest, but it was also just the most fun to play out of everything. Bit after mid-2018 Ketsui became the main thing, and I just kept going with it. It’s an extremely fun game that always left me with tons of things to learn and improve upon.

In the future I’ve been wondering how much I’ll play shmups vs. speedrunning. I don’t think there are really that many shmups with scoring that suit my taste honestly, but Progear, Dragon Blaze, Esprade, and Space Bomber at least all seem pretty likely for me to enjoy a lot. 

Another thing is that Hollow Knight is ridiculously popular now. If I end up getting into Hollow Knight Silksong a lot, it wouldn’t be surprising if I could get enough views to make lots of money from it. I’d imagine it would be harder to retain good viewers with shmups vs. some other speedruns, so that could sway what I do potentially.

Shmups can also be really boring socially compared to speedrunning, which is definitely another factor that could keep me a bit more on the speedrunning side in the future. Also, I guess you say I “had a pretty good thing going,” but it’s not like I had a lot of viewers. There wasn’t really a monetary incentive to stick to it, so it’s not like there was anything that would make me stay with speedrunning instead of playing shmups. I just wanted to play fun games.

Although on the other side of things, I kind of wonder if most speedruns might feel a bit too simple after playing Ketsui for so long. Hopefully not, though.

CAT: Previously you told me the main impediments to skill gain are playing games that are too easy or too hard. So I find it very fitting to learn that some of your first speedrun experience was with Captain Toad and Kirby Triple Deluxe. These are super easy games the way most people play them. Some gamers even have an attitude of “I won’t play that, that’s a baby game.” But you were playing them in a super hard way.

Even so, I keep thinking in my head that there are “best” ways to practice, like some secret sauce or golden ratio between stage practice and full runs or something. But you’re basically saying “yeah, all practice is pretty good, so don’t worry about it and just do what feels fun.” In the end, does it all just come down to putting a lot of hours in a certain game?

MOG: It’s mostly about putting in the time, but there is more to it than that. For scoring I think it’s pretty important to have a good balance of learning new strategies while not trying to do more than you can handle at the time. Whenever I see people improving really slowly, they’re usually on one extreme end here. I’m not sure if doing more than you can handle is as bad as barely learning at all long term, although it seems to be the far more common of the two. When I was trying to improve my Ura scores in Ketsui, I would try to learn a couple new strategies at a time and get them down really well, so that I could improve my routes by a couple million while only slightly reducing my odds at getting into the loop.

If someone is just playing survival for gaining overall shmup skill, playing games that aren’t harder than their current hardest clear, or playing stuff that is way too hard would slow down your speed I think. Honestly the best way to improve here is probably just playing a game that is really hard to 2-ALL from pretty early and sticking with it. The game will automate the whole process I mentioned earlier. You will be continuously pushed by the game without it ever completely destroying you, and you don’t need to put any thought into game choice.

Ketsui and Dodonpachi Daioujou are probably especially good choices—going for Omote and then stepping up to Ura, or doing Daioujou Black Label 2-ALL and then doing White Label. By the time you’re finished you’ll have done one of the toughest clears in the genre. But if you did this then most games wouldn’t really give you a satisfying challenge anymore. So, enjoyment wise, I don’t think it would make sense to force yourself to do Ketsui or Daioujou just for skill improvement.

CAT: Hmmm… I think I get where you’re coming from. But I can already hear the gnashing of teeth if I don’t follow up on that answer. You’re saying basically to stick to the middle balance by pushing yourself just past where you currently are. And then you keep pushing, and bit by bit your skill floor will rise until it’s well beyond where it was before. At the same time I think a lot of people will say, “Hey wait a damned minute, Moglar. You’re telling me to take things easy and just push a bit at a time, and then you tell me to start 2-ALLing Daioujou?” It sounds a bit like saying they should grind slime knights, but actually what they want to do is beeline straight for the demilich. Can you clarify this approach a bit? For somebody already struggling, how should they approach these games—some of Cave’s hardest?

MOG: I mean, you start by getting to 1-3, 1-5, 1-ALLing, looping, then getting to 2-3, then 2-5, etc. You aren’t just going for the 2-ALL immediately. You are going for lower goals that are reasonable enough for newer players and then just continuing until harder goals happen.

It’s not really comparable at all to playing Futari Ultra immediately or something. That mode demands extremely tight gameplay from the get go; Daioujou and Ketsui don’t do that at all. It’s more like playing every Futari mode in difficulty order and then starting Ultra. That would be a rougher leap than the other games would make you do even going from Black Label/Omote to White Label/Ura, but you get the point still.

CAT: Right. I think a lot of newer players rush themselves. They compress a 70-hour 1-ALL journey into 30 minutes, and beat themselves up for not being able to clear after a handful of runs. Learning takes time. And that requires some amount of self-direction of course—I don’t think most modern games foster self-direction at all. Or society at large for that matter. So that’s its own vital learning experience, unless you want to hire a dominatrix to whip your ass until you clear Daioujou. Which… I guess DaringSpino gets that same experience grinding turtle in Daioujou White Label, without spending a dime.

For players looking to tackle a second loop, or Futari Ultra, or Daifukkatsu Black Label Strong, do you have any advice beyond tackling the loop a few stages at a time? You’ve remarked that Ketsui Ura loop was way, way, way, way, way harder than Omote. Did you do anything extra to prepare before jumping in?

MOG: For Ketsui Ura, I put some time into learning the loop right after getting my first Omote clear, but I ended up just going back to improving my Omote score after a bit. The Ura loop was really rough on my first go, but after getting 405 million Omote (personal best was 358m at the time of my first clear) it was more reasonable, and I finished out getting my first Ura 2-1 start clear after a good bit of practice.

For Ketsui, if a survival player is struggling a lot with Ura at first, I’d recommend going for an Omote clear with 2 lives remaining and then try again. If it’s still a bit too much you could continue Omote til you have 3-4 lives remaining. But if you’re having more fun getting pounded by Ura than you would be having with Omote, then just continue with it.

You could try switching to a different game which seems a bit too tough, or by doing your current hardest clear with 1-2 extra lives remaining as preparation. Although if skillset isn’t shared too much between the two games, then maybe it won’t help much.

CAT: Last night I had this practice session where everything was just… awful. Straight up repeated dying to everything in stage 3, almost no score, no cash-ins whatsoever. Confusingly, bewilderingly bad. I definitely swore at my monitor, a lot. I get this impression from your interviews that you’re completely stoic when you play. On Ketsui stage 2 boss grenades: “I don’t remember those being a problem.” On being asked if you ever have difficulty recovering after death: “No, not really.” Am I just projecting, or are you able to remain totally calm even if a world record or personal best crumbles at the last minute?

MOG: It doesn’t bother me much at all if a world record pace run dies near the end. Getting a near world record run is way, way better than dying in the first two stages over and over or whatever. I can definitely get frustrated though, and maybe like once a month or so get really mad.

CAT: Do you have anything more to say about strat creativity? Maybe that’s one thing that’s especially hard to talk about. Probably it comes with having played multiple games at a high level and analyzing others’ runs, and then sort of learning the weak spots at which a game, or even all games, can be attacked. But for instance, with Futari God I watched Iconoclast’s replay and learned that I could rapid shot and double bomb the stage 2 turtle midboss for a quick kill leading to a very lucrative cash-in bonus wave of lobsters and mantas. That’s not something that I think would have ever occurred to me… even in all my practice to “do something weird and different,” I was focused on survival and misdirecting shots. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. And then afterwards I thought, “well, obviously if you cancel the boss, Cave has to have put SOMETHING there.” It was pretty humbling—that this idea had occurred to somebody, and was maybe even an obvious thing for them to try.

MOG: Figuring out new, more optimized strategies is about 1) Understanding a game’s mechanics 2) Identifying opportunities where they could be used to get more score than current strategies 3) Finding out if it works and/or how to make it work, and 4) Figuring out how to make it doable with high consistency if it works.

It depends on the game and the specific strategy when it comes to which parts will be harder or easier here. I think for Ketsui, identifying opportunities for higher scoring was the main difficulty. Identifying opportunities and making them work is generally going to be hardest, but if they’re pretty obvious then achieving consistency will be the hard part, since the reason why no one was doing a strat before would be the difficulty. I guess you could argue to what extent consistency counts as “strat finding,” but it’s still gameplay innovation anyway. The better you understand a game’s mechanics the more likely you’ll be able to do the rest, so I’m not really sure how to assign a comparative difficulty rating to that. It feels a bit more like a prerequisite.

If a game has been played a lot, you’ll generally have to play longer before finding anything new. Not only will the strats be harder, but any new strats you find will probably not be huge gamechanging scoregains. You will probably be more worried about getting down what is already known before trying to figure out completely new strategies. I didn’t really start finding new stuff until I was at 500m in Ketsui.

Strat and routing skills will be regularly put to the test throughout playing a shmup, although that will generally be vastly simpler than figuring out a new higher scoring strategy. Routing for safety and finding tricks to make things easier is also a thing, but I find new discoveries to be the most interesting and rewarding.

CAT: How did you feel when you finally nailed the world record?

MOG: Well, probably top 2 moments in my life, the other likely being the 551m. When I got the world record I’m pretty sure I had already been up for 10+ hours, but if I remember correctly, I ended up staying awake for another 24 hours after that just enjoying the high.

I am unsure if it was as good as the 551m though. 540m was a major goal of mine due to the top PS4 score being 537m at the time, and I saw it as putting my Ketsui score on a bit of a higher level compared to the best western scores back then. The 551m was less expected than the world record. It happened earlier than expected and the world record happened later than expected, so this could have caused the 551m to be a bit more exciting.

I don’t think I stayed up for 24 hours after the 551m, but I’m pretty sure the high stuck around for like 3 days somehow. You would expect it to mostly go away after going to sleep, but I guess that wasn’t the case that time.

CAT: Wow. I’m really glad to hear that you’ve sort of… loved Ketsui the entire time? Gus finds practicing Futari really boring, and Kayar treats Saidaioujou like a job. So it’s comforting to hear from a top level player who continually enjoys the challenge and learning experience of their chosen game.

MOG: I’d say I have loved Ketsui for pretty much the entire time, yeah. I think it did get a bit less fun over time, but on the other hand it felt more rewarding later on so that mostly made up for it I think.

Although, at this point there doesn’t really feel like there is a whole lot to learn or improve at anymore, so ever since the world record it kinda has been a bit boring honestly, which is probably a big part of why I’ve not played much since. Still, I think I could probably continue enjoying it at least a bit if I focus on trying to get good loop 1 scores. Focusing purely on the no-miss is really not fun even if that would be the main goal either way.

Since I have barely played for so long, though, the motivation is quite low. So we will see if that no-miss ever ends up happening.

CAT: You’ve set the Ketsui world record at a stratospheric 599.7 million. That’s a masterful achievement. It’s also… tantalizingly close to 600 million. You seem ready to move onto other games—does it bother you to leave that last scoring milestone unmet?

MOG: I don’t really care about 600m at all after getting a score so close to it. Not having the no-miss bothers me a bit though. But as time goes on, I care less and less. 

Moglar’s Estimated Survival and Scoring Milestones

70 hours: 1-ALL (111 million pts)

180 hours: First Omote entry (191m loop 1, 211m total)

350-400 hours: Omote 2-ALL (353m)

600 hours: Omote  405m with 260m loop 1 (And first try on Ura loop and IKD Special)

850 hours: Ura 2-ALL 441m

950 hours: Ura 511m and Omote 441m

1300-1350 hours: Ura 551m

1400-1450 hours: Loop 1 290m

1550-1600 hours: Ura 574m

1850 hours: World record 599m

2000 hours currently played

Dominating Detana Twinbee! Refkey’s Surprising Strats for Surviving Super Hard Shmups

Refkey plays Detana Twinbee, notoriously one of the hardest shmups Konami ever made. In this interview we talk about healthy mindset for beating a 2-loop game, the differences between Cave and Konami, and treating failures as funny.

CAT: You seem especially interested in Detana Twinbee and Gradius 3. Is there something special about this era of Konami?

RFK: A lot of it has to do with how it feels playing the game. I’ve played several Cave games in the past. My impression is that 1-ALLs are doable without even having to memorize routes and practice. However, many games with 2-ALL difficulty, whether Cave or Psikyo or otherwise—any game that revolves around saving consumable resources such as bombs and lives to tank out hard bosses tends to make players reset the game. 

This personally killed a lot of interest for that genre. Konami is a bit different. Power up mechanics exist but those are permanent as long as you don’t lose your life. Many claim that this era of games is not fair because of harder to recover check points. However, there’s a sense of utilizing overpowered options while fully powered up. And if I happen to lose a life, there’s a sense of improvisation that I can pull off. This improvisation isn’t really consistent, of course. But the thrill is there.

CAT: Hm… so even though some might say “Detana Twinbee and Gradius 3 are the hardest of the hard,” you can power through large parts of the game with a fully upgraded ship. Whereas with Cave you get gradually worn down until you don’t have enough resources for the true last boss. In Konami you “gain and keep” while in Cave you “try to lose slowly.”

RFK: Yeah, that’s generally how I feel. Also, “inconsistent” improvisation is the best part, especially with Detana Twinbee. Whether you lose a life or remain fully powered, there are a lot of moments where you have to try different behavior because there are more variables to enemy movement. 

I think you could do this in other games as long as your routes and execution are solid enough. But you would still probably reset a ton because at that point you want score and a personal best. Not so much with survival play.

CAT: That lines up with how I felt about Gradius 2 on PC-Engine. It felt very good to power up the ship, and once I was at full power I felt like I could set the Vic Viper to cruise control. Until something bad happened—then it was a scramble to recover. Recovery wasn’t impossible, and it was quite fun. I was surprised that I could recover on the Moai stage, for instance.

That’s the impression I get of Detana Twinbee. With Cave you have to do things the Cave way, dealing with their bullet patterns. I see Detana and I think “this game is kind of zany.” There are more controlled shmups and then there are shmups where you are reacting to the game’s wildness.

RFK: I still do think you need strong routing for these games as well. The only real difference is that your route will not work at some moments, so you sorta predict and make decisions around them. 

In Detana Twinbee specifically you have only three lives and no score extends at all. Meaning you would want to survive as best you can. I’ve 2-ALLed the game 13 times at this point, and the game still gives me a heart-pumping experience, especially when I get to the later part of the game.

CAT: How long have you been playing Detana Twinbee? How did you start playing it?

RFK: Probably a year and eight months. In terms of hours… it’s a bit hard to say. More than 400 hours at this point. 

My first impression was that the game was a bit difficult even for the first loop. I watched several replays and paid attention to maneuvering the bells using charge shot. I got used to the game more quickly than I expected for the 1-ALL. The 2-ALL was different. At that point, I had to sit down and figure out how the tail barrier works. I was getting a general sense of the game. But I still needed a ton of work to make the run more consistent.

CAT: Were you already skilled in shmups before playing Detana Twinbee?

RFK: I did play non-Konami shmups before Detana Twinbee. I reached Omote loop 2-2 in Ketsui, cleared Futari 1.5 Maniac, Battle Garegga with Golden Bat, Darius Gaiden Z route, and others. I don’t know if I would say I was skilled at the genre, but obviously speaking I didn’t really play any novice modes back then.

I picked up Detana Twinbee right after I did the 1-ALL in Gradius 3. The famous shmup difficulty wiki list did get me curious about the game. Funny thing is, I wasn’t able to find any 2-ALL replays on English Youtube channels. I’ve only seen a few 2-ALLs by Japanese players like Jibyuan, Koizumi, and TZW. I’d hear people say, “Hey, nobody internationally has done a Detana Twinbee 2-ALL, I’m gonna do the first 2-ALL!” But none have ever done it since then. So I played the game for myself and it gave me more excitement than ever. I immersed myself into it well and eventually got the 2-ALL for myself at the end of 2021.

CAT: How did you feel that day—when you finally got the Detana Twinbee 2-ALL?

RFK: Short answer is: Happiest day ever.

The longer answer is that I no longer had to worry about anything anymore. I could just enjoy the game. I reached my goal, and now I could continue to enjoy the game.

CAT: So for you it was a natural progression, then. I was under the impression that you jumped straight into Detana Twinbee the same way Kayar jumped into Dodonpachi Saidaioujou. But it seems that after Gradius 3, this was the obvious next thing to try. And you liked it so much you kept playing.

A lot of more novice players are beating their head against the wall and bouncing from game to game. Maybe they’re not entirely sure what practice looks like. I realize I can’t tell anyone “here is how YOU could 2-ALL Detana Twinbee.” But maybe it would help them if you talked about your practice. How did you approach Detana Twinbee?

RFK: The biggest thing I have to say is… practice is one thing. But before that I think “mental health” or some kind of attitude is what you would need to take care of. I’ve seen tons of people wanting to 1CC many games for many reasons: impressing fellow players, feeling the thrill of overcoming difficult challenges, or just satisfying themselves. 

In my case, I knew that going for Detana Twinbee right after Gradius 3 is still going to be a huge leap. Not just because of its infamous difficulty, but because these are very different games even though they’re both developed by Konami. 

So here’s the punchline. Set your expectations lower and start respecting the game, rather than thinking “I can do this in X months.” Taking more time is always okay. If you need a break, don’t force yourself into getting even more frustrated. Once you’ve sorted your mindset out, then start practicing. 

In terms of practice method, I’ve tried as many resources as I can. Try to access as many replays as you can on Youtube or any other platform. Watch as many as possible. Even your replays. The point isn’t to replicate exactly world record tier runs, but rather to understand their situation. 

Then you break up your practice using save states or training modes. Unfortunately, ACA Detana Twinbee [ACA Bells and Whistles in US] doesn’t have a training mode. So I created several accounts to make save points where I usually struggle. 

I do practice routes for certain segments but I don’t grind them. My practice is similar to how you practiced Mushihimesama Futari 1.5. I will play some of the saved parts where I usually struggle and try to connect the route all the way to the end. There was a time I struggled with 2-3, so I started at 2-3 and tried to clear from there. This type of practice is usually done at home. 

When I visit Akatronics game center, I play the whole game to see if I can connect everything. And of course this whole connection will not happen in a day or two. And this is where you watch your replay. See what kind of mistakes you have made, and try to come up with new theories to nullify that same issue happening. 

For that first time 2-ALLing the game, my gameplay wasn’t even stabilized on 2-2. But even after that I didn’t grind the game. Instead I played the game regularly. After a year from that point, I’m playing reliably up to 2-3 and working on stabilizing 2-4 and onward. 

So in a nutshell: make some saves and practice segments at home to lab strategies. Then try to apply that during the full run at the arcade.

Like I said, don’t grind. Instead try to give yourself time to “forget” what you learned today—on purpose. You’ll forget small details no matter how long you grind per day. The big focus here is to figure out “what you really forgot,” and relearn it again so you get to remember how to play the segment more naturally than ever.

There were times I forgot how to play 2-2 and 2-3 due to a long break. That was really the point. I wanted to forget as much as I could and relearn it again and again. At a certain point I simply cannot forget anymore. This process may not be time efficient. But it is much less stressful than grinding every day and expecting higher and higher rewards from your effort. 

The easiest way to forget as much as I can is to only visit the game center once a week, and play home practice for a couple of days. The key here is consistency of play schedule. Taking a break is good, but if that break is inconsistent you may lose interest in the game. 

I brought this up because some people are too afraid of forgetting what they’ve learned. But I would say continue to be natural about it. So yeah… a lot more about mental management that practice method, isn’t it?

CAT: Well that’s definitely important though. Like, you’ve come back to Detana Twinbee for 1 year and 8 months even though it’s difficult. Many players will get themselves frustrated because they can’t 1CC in a week. “What’s wrong with me? I’m so bad at these games.”

Moglar is obviously a very strong player. He was a strong player before he began playing shmups… but even he played Ketsui for 2000+ hours. I haven’t played any shmup for that long.

Consistency of practice is half the work of practice. Maybe there are “better” ways to approach games, but in the end just continuing to play a certain game is the most important thing to do. 

Organized forgetting though—I’m very surprised to hear that someone else is doing that.

RFK: Yeah, Moglar is definitely another level. He is going for world record tier in a game where in depth optimization is very important. Kayar and Gus are the same in that regard.

CAT: Right. Maybe that requires a very different mindset. The “this is just what I do and it doesn’t matter if I like it” mindset. Possibly that can arise naturally out of a mindset like yours. I’m not sure. Maybe “it’s important to just come back and practice” morphs into a habit morphs into “this is just what I do.”

RFK: The thing is, I’m not all that interested in scoring in video games. Surprisingly speaking. 

Well, I do kinda want to make personal bests and stuff. Unlike people like Moglar, Kayar, H.J., and Gus, I still try to play the run as much as I can without resetting games again and again.

As for the mindset you described, yeah, I don’t think anyone can replicate how I approach the game. But at the same time I cannot do the same for others. For example, there are people who love to quickly grab 1CCs and such… but I simply cannot try hard to grab 1CCs as quickly as possible because that’s just too stressful for me.

And this is where “everyone is different” comes in.

CAT: Absolutely. There are maybe some “best” ways to practice—or maybe not? But if the “best way to practice” is one that drives you nuts, you’re not going to do it, and it’ll be the worst way to practice.

RFK: I don’t know how I did it. But really setting expectations lower helped me in a lot of ways. Not just “I will take some time” mentality, but also, I get to laugh a lot even if I lost the game. There’s a sense of feeling “funny” when losing in a game instead of “painful” and “stressful.”

I dunno if any of this makes sense to you though. Even I don’t understand this sometimes. It’s just like playing Gradius 3. Very hard and unfair but still gives me a good laugh at the end.

CAT: For sure. There’s not much to be gained from getting mad at the game, and much to be lost from saying “That was a stupid mistake. I’m an idiot. I’ll never get this.” Probably much healthier to laugh and say “it’s funny how that happened.”

Some people may not be able to control that… they may be in a habit of blaming themselves for everything. That sort of psychology can be very hard to pull yourself out of, I’m sure.

To some extent that may also have something to do with Gradius 3 and Detana Twinbee. Earlier we were talking about “controlled” Cave games versus “zany” Konami games. I see on Twitter people post videos of the cube rush in Gradius 3 and I get the impression that it is a very funny part of the game. Even when they die to the cubes, players seem to have a sense of “Can you believe what the cubes just did to me?” The difficulty is so steep and unpredictable you almost have to laugh.

But then you have a Cave game, which while they do have random elements, there’s a sense of them being a very controlled game. So if the game is very much under control, it must be the player who needs to control themselves. Nobody really has full control of their body, and if you add in the game there’s even less control. But it feels like you should have been able to do it, so when you fail it feels like completely your mistake.

I play Super Mario Kart Battle Course 2 with my gradeschool friend whenever he’s in town. That is a very unpredictable game. It seems whenever we play that game, we have to laugh about something. Even after years, we still say “Did you see that? Can you believe what happened with that red shell?” More recent Mario Kart games still have a sense of randomness, but that’s not what I mean. Super Mario Kart has such an unpredictability and a sort of “aliveness,” that it still manages to surprise us how the red shell circled once, twice, and then managed to chase around the corner. Even if we’re heading straight at each other in the open center for a red shell duel, we don’t know what will happen.

While I was playing Futari for so long, I would look at your posts about Detana Twinbee and say “Now this is a very different game. This is a game I want to play.” Futari is very under control, very perfectionist, but Detana Twinbee seems very zany, surprising, and alive.

RFK: It seems like you understand this concept more than I do. 

But yeah, this whole sense of “unpredictable” is the strength and weakness. It gives you the sense you are trying to go on hard reads on games, and if that succeeded it becomes a very satisfying experience and if not it becomes funny entertainment. The weakness is not everyone will be able to comprehend the silliness and absurdity of its nature.

When I get to play Futari 1.5 Abnormal Reco, it definitely didn’t give me the sense of “unpredictableness” and improvising things on the fly. It’s what you’ve described so far. The game is “specific” and “perfectionist.”

But at the same time I still set my expectation lower so I don’t blame myself too much and don’t take it too seriously. 

CAT: Do you feel that Detana Twinbee is misunderstood or underplayed?

RFK: Both, obviously. It’s generally underplayed, but those who played the game haven’t gone in depth. Even in Japan right now you would see a ton of Gradius 3 players around, but for Detana you would only see very few including me.

How to Play Bullet Hell

I punch the power button on my CRT monitor. I dial up the volume on my speakers. I turn on my Xbox 360. The faint whirring of a spinning disc. Xbox logo. Loading screen. Cave logo. M2 logo. Mushihimesama Futari. 

I dial my personal timer to 60 minutes, enter training mode, set my stage, god mode, infinite lives. One fast, deep inhale. Hold it. Release slowly as if blowing out a candle. Standing straight and centered.

Enter stage 5. Waves of popcorn, then cancel the triceratops twice and destroy the pagodas. Cash-in on the flying fortress dragon via dodging the first two waves and then lasering the third pattern hard. Easy peasy. The snaking dragon midboss is always tricky. Redirect his fireballs and weave through the pattern. Bomb during second set of fireballs—haven’t found a good way to redirect or predict them. And weave through a tricky pattern for the cancel. And on, until and through Queen Larsa, her majesty ever hateful. 

I find myself getting caught up in the 4^th stage. Ever since seeing Iconoclast handle the mantises and caterpillars, I’ve been captivated by the first half. Looks easy, but isn’t. Push the first mantis off the side of the screen so I can cancel his pattern and swoop in. The mantises are hard to kill just right. You have to do the main damage with your rapid fire, because the laser wants to target the caterpillar. Try then succeed to cancel-kill the mantis and swoop up gems before landing on the body of the caterpillar. Hold laser, build counter, ride between the waves of bullets spraying from the caterpillar’s sides while tap-dodging—die.

“Fuck,” I yell, having tried for years to be a person who doesn’t yell fuck at videogames. I am aware of the fact that I have been grinding stage 4. Grinding is a thing I tell myself I should never be doing. Part of the reason being that it causes me to yell fuck at videogames.

“Dad? What are you yelling about?”

My toddler hops down the basement steps.

“Nothing, dude. I died in the game. It’s cool, you can go back up and watch your Pete the Cat.”

Aidan sits on the floor next to the cat bed and plays with his electronic Mario Kart set. He pulls up a chair to stand on and watches me play. He grabs the little blue truck off my table and the red die falls out of it and tumbles past me to the floor. He starts messing around under the table which makes me nervous that he might bump the Xbox 360 thereby tilting it and scratching the Futari disc and—

“Dad, I’m hungry. I want some food.”

“Well why didn’t you tell me you were hungry instead of coming down here and messing around with everything?”

He stares at me. I realize I am grumping at him for having done the thing I just asked him to do. I turn off the 360. I dial down the volume. I punch off the monitor. I have played for a total of 15 minutes.

We go upstairs and I read him stories while he eats. The Berenstain Bears. Gustavo the Shy Ghost. Leila the Perfect Witch. Narwhal and Jelly. He slowly devours his Balance cereal, Cheez-Its, and five peach halves.

“Dad, I like your colorful buttons.” He realizes I am still grumpy, is complimenting my arcade stick because he knows I’m proud of it.

“Thanks, dude.”

“I’m ready for bed,” he says.

He says goodnight to mommy. We brush our teeth. I triple tap the reading lamp on his dresser to turn it on and we lay down in his racecar bed and he asks for a chapter of Zelda’s Legend. Then I turn on his gentle LED nightlight and tap off his reading lamp. 

I lay down next to him. I tell him I love him and that he is the best. I can’t see his face, but I sense him smile as he turns over and gets comfortable and breathes more slowly. I lay in the dark and think of three things I enjoyed today. One. Two. Three. 

I kiss his hair. I pull myself over the edge of the racecar bed and head back down to the basement.

I Will Never Set a World Record (And That’s Okay)

To paraphrase and misquote Kayar, Korean world record holder for Dodonpachi Saidaioujou:

“Well, what players should understand going in is that you are not going to have fun. After a certain point Saidaioujou is not fun anymore. For world record play, it’s work. I come home from my job and play maybe 3 hours. Then on weekends, if I’m feeling energized, I play pretty much the whole day.”

I’ve heard a similar sentiment from Gus, of Futari Ultra fame—”at a certain point it’s not fun anymore. I’m sick of grinding this damn stage. That damn stage 2 boss. This game is… really boring now.”

I honestly can’t imagine it. I struggle to work one job, let alone two. And to spend all of my time playing something that I don’t even enjoy… I honestly can’t imagine it.

Good thing that I don’t have to. Being that I’m a parent, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t set a world record in a Cave game even if I wanted to. Maybe a sort of marginal game, one that hasn’t been explored to death. But Mushihimesama Futari Black Label Original, for instance? That’s 30 minutes of point blanking increasingly fast shots, of knowing where they’ll come out before they come out, of restarting on any single mistake. That’d mean going against players that have 15 years’ experience with this game alone.

Talking with my wife, I was incredulous of the whole thing. “Imagine spending all your free time basically working a second unpaid job. Just coming home tired and getting back to the grind, from one grind to the next, day in and day out. Crazy.”

“Oh, I get it,” she said. “Like writing a novel.”

Iconoclast’s God Mode Replay

The other night I watched Iconoclast’s God Mode replay of Mushihimesama Futari, a game about a nudist bug-straddling teenager who is tasked with avoiding 100,000 purple circles. This was a pretty good replay because Iconoclast is a pretty good player of videogames.

Kaboomboom! Iconoclast double-bombs the stage 2 midboss, earning an extra 30K cash-in on the shock lobsters. Swishashwing! Iconoclast rides the stage 4 mind-control caterpillars for some big juicy cancels. Dingadangdong! Iconoclast cancels Larsa’s lunatic lanterns in stage 5 from outside the blast radius. My inner copy monkey was very excited to be learning all these high level maneuvers. I was really learning a lot of pro strats.

Except it turned out that all I was learning was how to game over on stage 1. Since watching this replay, my fingers have turned to hot dogs and I am no longer able to tap dodge almost anything.

My theory is that Iconoclast is a shmup demon, who devours the shmojo of anyone who watches one of his replays so that he can win Tiger Schwert models. He may be a pretty good player—but he is a pretty bad man.

Videogames Are Dumb As Hell

Videogames are dumb as hell. This has been a problem for videogame critics since time immemorial. 

Let’s rewind. In the beginning there was a board game called Go. Go was a pretty smart game, because it didn’t have any words. Now, other people played Chess. Chess was a bit dumber than Go because, although it still didn’t have any words, it named its pieces after recognizable symbols so dumb people could understand the game.

Fast forward to videogames. Pac-Man is pretty smart, comparatively. There are lots of symbols and not too many words. But videogames ran into a huge problem as they began to rely more and more on words. Suddenly they were telling stories, and the stories they were telling were really dumb.

Hold up, you may say. Books are pretty smart. Well, yes. Book are just words. Words, by themselves, are smart. Let’s not forget that art, by itself, is also smart. But when you combine words and art you (unfortunately) get comic books, which are about as dumb as videogames.

Videogames compound the problem by combining art, words, gameplay, and all sorts of other things. This was a really bad idea.

Some games have managed to be less dumb. Silent Hill 2 is renowned as a not dumb game because the main character is intentionally portrayed as not knowing literally anything about how to exist, sticking his hands in dark rusty holes and throwing perfectly good fruit juice down laundry chutes. Also, he doesn’t talk that much compared to other virtual characters.

Earthbound is also considered not dumb. Again, this is because it realizes that games are definitely dumb, and lampoons the dumbness of video games. There are a lot of words, but the words are self-aware commentary on dumbness. Also it stars a child, and children are well known to be kind of dumb. The only problem is that Earthbound is also a roleplaying game, meaning that it is boring. 

Critics will have much work ahead of them if they persist in treating videogames as not dumb. There will be a lot of hand-wringing and angry comments and spilled juice boxes.

I Saw So Many Beautiful People at the Trader Joe’s Today

I took a deep breath as I was about to exit the car, because I’d been listening to a podcast about how the right-wing media has co-opted the party, and I realized that the sort of space I was in, was kinda this fuzzy distracted passive place, where really I would have been better off driving in silence so as to get my head together. But I hadn’t done that and so my head was not together.

As I walked toward T Joes to get my cart there was a guy standing near the trash can maybe reading a magazine, and he had on a traffic-safety-orange beanie and a studded leather eyepatch over his left eye and we locked eyes and I nodded to say hey I see you there and it’s cool that you have an eyepatch but I’m not going to say that out loud because it would be stupid since you know that and it’s a fact of your daily life, and he nodded back like hey brother I appreciate the nod.

I got my cart and went in and around the older lady standing there and realized there was an extra cart cleaning station so I took a sanitary wipe and wiped down the handle of my cart and the sides, where I sometimes grab the cart to pull it along and out of somebody’s way when they want to reach down and grab some of the seltzers, which is usually where I park the cart so I can just quickly grab items and return to basecamp without having to steer around a bunch of people.

Once I finished with the produce I moved my cart over to the eggs and dairy section and passed an Asian man with acne and an acne-scarred face that looked kind of callused over and reminding me of the sort of salami splotches I have on my arms between the freckles and the pale scars from all the mosquito bites I opened as a kid, and well anyways you’re not really supposed to like a face like that and besides you can’t just say hey man I like your acne-scarred face so I didn’t.

A young woman came out of the staff area and her pale face was round like a moon and she was sort of smiling in the same way that you see moons smile in illustrations, like the moon is kind of thinking about something funny but you’ll never know because the moon keeps secrets.

Then as I walked by the eggs one of the T Joe’s workers said to an older lady who was picking up eggs, “Good time to go vegan!,” which I think was a comment on how eggs are really expensive now, but I’m not sure the lady appreciated that comment because she didn’t say anything.

Then, then I saw Somebody Really Cool. She was a woman, a gen Xer, just very visibly ten or fifteen years older than me—you could see that she was starting to get a little bit lined, but she had makeup on to smooth things out and look kinda hip and young. And she was wearing jeans. Now I suspect that jeans are a sort of political topic among women and men too I guess, where usually women will have these tight hugging jeans that are slim all the way down or they’ll have hip huggers that emphasize their waists and sort of collect their muffin top (I have one, we all have one, it’s fine) into something cute and fashionable and thick, but then maybe sort of hang loose at the bottom and give a sort of free spirit type of vibe—

Anyways, this Really Cool Gen Xer did not have either of those types of jeans, she had just straight up jeans, off the rack jeans, clearance at K-Mart light blue denim jeans of the jeaniest, low-fashion variety, like you would see on your uncle as he gets out of his white van with the sticker of Calvin peeing on the words gun control next to the one that says piss off a liberal: work hard and be happy. 

But she is clearly not your uncle who likes stickers because she has bright orange hair, like orange orange, as orange as your hair will allow you to have it, and it’s sort of pulled up in the back a bit but also hangs down loose at the sides in waves that obscure and reveal the sides of her face and her ears. 

The piece de resistance is her leather jacket, which is embroidered with the main character from Aeon Flux being her bad self, which to be honest, I know nothing about since I am not a gen Xer and did not have cable at the time and most certainly would not have been allowed to watch Aeon Flux even though I did watch horror movies and I do remember watching a double feature with my (also gen Xer) brother of Ninja Scroll and The Exorcist where my mom came up during The Exorcist and said what are you watching even though she clearly knew and made us turn it off even though we had just watched Ninja Scroll, which is, in my estimation, worse.

But even though I know nothing about it, and even though it was obscured by her hair or another piece of clothing or something, I could tell it was the Aeon Flux main character and I could appreciate that this was an exceptionally cool jacket and pretty bold too, with Aeon Flux character as usual having a pretty in your face costume that seems to present her vagina as a pretty front-and-center aspect of her character design. And I wanted to say to Really Cool Gen Xer that this was a truly sick jacket, and her hair was sick as well, but she was with another woman who was wearing non-descript grey and black and a grey beanie and I felt that might be a bit awkward, to say how sick this jacket was when she was with somebody who was maybe just as sick as a person but not dressed quite as sickly. 

And besides, again, I don’t know anything about Aeon Flux, and would have been forced to admit such, and maybe just say something about how I just admired the animation from afar, and dug the maybe-Moebius-style comic book boldness of it, and that I had watched Spawn once or twice on hotel cable but never managed to catch Aeon Flux, it having slipped me by almost entirely. So I just kept getting groceries and glancing at this leather jacket and orange hair between aisles.

My cashier was wearing the aforementioned hip-hugging muffin top jeans and had a sort of simple style that I appreciated, just her jeans and an olive T Joe’s tshirt that acted as a sort of one-two-three punch with her dark and wavy hair and her frankly unorthodox face that was pretty and simple in the same way as her clothes. I asked if I could bag for her and she had a very unorthodox way of saying she’d like that, but for the life of me I can’t remember what she said.

I went to the machine to put my card in and she started bagging and her accomplice returned to help her finish the bags. Now this guy is sort of a young guy maybe ten or so years younger than me, and he’s always had a sort of depressed vibe with his very pale skin and his very lanky body and his dark turtlenecks and his dark maybe greasy hair that sort of falls a bit unkempt around his face and past his eyes, kind of an incel look all told, though I’m not exactly sure how one can look like an incel. But today he was wearing a burgundy scarf, and it just tied everything together. And I was so pleased that whether through his own sense or the sheer cold of the day he had found something that so completed him, and he smiled as he bagged with the other cashier, who smiled back, and I wanted to tell him how much I liked that scarf on him, he honestly looked precious, but I was on the way out.

I got into my car and decided to drive with the podcasts off and the music off. I sat for a moment and wondered why do I find it so hard to tell people a nice thought I have about them. Maybe it would be unwanted. It would come off as flirty, or thirsty, or weird. Probably people want to do their grocery shopping in peace and quiet as quickly as possible, and any comment is just adding on to the time that they have to suffer the chore of picking up food items and placing them in a cart. 

I pull out of the parking lot and drive past all the Google buildings and the apartments for the Google people and the running track for the Google people in the Google people apartments. I drive past a homeless guy or a guy with a sign anyways, and I don’t read the sign because I don’t think I’m going to give anything to this guy, because I don’t even know what’s in my wallet. So I don’t look at him at all. Then as he walks back and turns around to the sidewalk, I sneakily check into my wallet and discover I have a 5 dollar bill.

So I open the window and hold it out for him and he notices the open window and turns around. I tell him to have a blessed day, which I’m not religious but I always got a warm feeling when the old black church women would say that to me after I bagged their groceries at Giant Eagle. He is excited and grateful and says wow bro thank you thanks so much and I say you’re welcome man take care and then I start rolling up the window and I think he realized then that it was a 5 dollar bill and not a 1 because as he walks back toward the sidewalk he gets excited again and says oh wow thanks so much oh man wow.

I drive home in silence. I see another homeless guy with a sign that says Just Hungy Thanks, but I’m not sure I have another 5 dollar bill and I don’t look. I stop and start the car as I drive through Wilkinsburg and turn onto the pike. And I think about the beautiful people at Trader Joe’s and all the things they have to say.

Castle Shikigami 3 is the Goodest Shmup Ever

Castle Shikigami 3 came in the mail this week—the first Xbox 360 shmup I’ve bought in probably 12 years. I didn’t expect much out of it, honestly. Everyone seems to talk about Shiki 2 a lot, and then occasionally Shiki 1. And of course, the semi-sequel Sisters Royale was hot for a brief moment. Call it a cute cult classic. But Shiki 3? Shikigami nobody talkin bout that shitto 3.

Castle Shikigami 3 is the goodest shmup ever.

I don’t mean it’s the best shmup. What I mean is that, from every angle, the game is just good. Solidly good. The 8.5/10 of all 8.5/10s. 

Shiki is a grazing series. Now, grazing mechanics can eat my butthole. Not that shmups with graze mechanics can’t be good—Psyvariar Delta is a class act and the newly released Graze Counter GM looks excellent. But whenever I hear a new shmup promise that I can “get close to bullets for arcade style risk/reward scoring!,” I let out my cranky grandpa gamer farts. Shiki, though, is a pretty vintage series. Alfa System has earned their cred. And the grazing is actually not too odious. You don’t have to graze against everything like a pervert on the subway, instead you just pick a bullet and hug it. Like a friend.

So for all that, the scoring is good. The music is also good! The opening theme “In the Heaven” is, imo, a banger. Having a strong opening track is a great boon to a shmup, because you look forward to starting a new credit. Overall the soundtrack is that sort of electronic drum-and-bass ADHD stuff that the Dreamcast is known for. Not 100% my cup of tea, but done pretty well. At least well enough that I adjusted the BGM volume up so it wasn’t hidden under sound effects.

Characters are pretty cool! I don’t know that there’s a proper 100% waifu in the game, but Kim is sort of a mommy and Fumiko is a purple-clad witch, which… witches, fairies , and bunnygirls are always appreciated, as far as I’m concerned. No bunnygirls here, just a girl with a bunny. The characters are a quirky lot with diverse rapid and focus shots (tongue twister for ya), but Alfa System had the decency to put in a very standard Cave-style character in Reiko, who also has a very strong time-stopping bomb.

I really like the bosses. They’re kind of silly in that they have these patterns that, at least with Reiko, you can take out their attack phase with absolutely no problem whatsoever—and then their next phase they’ll attack you with some crazy fucking thing straight out of hell. That should be terrible, or jank, or whatever, but it ends up feeling like this sort of give and take, or like a piece of music that rapidly crescendos (oxymoron?) and then goes soft. And even the crazy patterns mostly don’t feel stupid in the way the most meme Cave patterns can. 

The bullets! I don’t know that bullets deserve their own accolades, but these are nice. The Shiki series has a sort of trademark neon purple shuriken bullet that makes up many of the waves, interspersed here with smaller circular neon green bullets. The entire effect is rather nice. I’ve played through a lot of shmups, and there’s something about a Shiki bullet pattern. They’re comfy.

The graphics… may be the weak point. They’re not bad. They might even be good? They’re 3D graphics, which is a rarity these days, but in the 2000s was kind of the place to be. Ikaruga or Under Defeat, they are not. But they do possess that mid-era polygon charm, and being in 3D allows the game to do some nice “flying at an angle over the landscape” effects, as well as some “alternate dimension purple visualizer waves” for the climactic battle. And what a battle that is—a multi, multi-phase battle against evil katana hottie Tsukiko Joshima as she merges with some kind of cosmic screaming demon baby. 

All this to say that the game is a lowkey banger? For a game that I thought would be meh, on a console I thought I’d mined for all its best shmups, Castle Shikigami 3 comes as a very welcome surprise to me. It’s the sort of straightforward, fun, just plainly enjoyable shmup that I was searching for, something that wouldn’t carry the burden of needing to play it to infinity.

So I’m hopeful for the upcoming Switch port of Shiki 2. There are a ton of great, quirky, wild and wonderful shmups on the Switch. But there are not many bullet hells that are as solidly and plainly good as this. It’s weird to say, but sometimes you just want a peanut butter sandwich? Right now, Shiki 3 is my PB&J. With grape jelly.

Sterny’s Painless Progress Method, TL;DR Version

Recently I completed a “Year of Shmups,” where I greatly increased my skill at shooting games. My method was simple in practice, but a bit lengthy to explain. I’m creating this shortened version so you can get the highlights and start practicing. This method was made for shmups, but can be adapted to most/all genres with a bit of tinkering.

1. Play 25-60 minutes, six days a week

The most important thing is consistent playtime. No hot tips can get around this. When you play, focus on what’s happening. Pay attention to the game. Set a timer for an hour, and play as long as you want in that time. Or, play in blocks of 20 or 30 minutes. Pick a break day where you won’t play any shmups. Honor that day off and use it for something else. Why take breaks, and why limit your playtime? Because burnout is the number one enemy of mastery.

2. Main game versus alternate games

You’ll want to pick a main game. Pick a game of excellence, something fun and appealing with a lot of depth to its systems. Likely you already have an idea of such a game. Play your main game every other week. On weeks where you’re not playing your main shmup, you’ll pick an alternate shmup. This can be any other shmup you’ve wanted to play—think of it like a cheat week away from your main game. Play this game for the entire alternate week. No hopping around between games! Pick an alternate game for that week and stick with it.

So your schedule will look like this:

Week 1: Main shmup

Week 2: Alt shmup

Week 3: Main shmup

Week 4: Alt shmup

Rinse and repeat. You can switch alternate games each alternate week, or you can stick with one alternate game until you clear it.

3. Pre-test, training, full runs

a. Pretest

When you start a new mode of your main game or when you begin a new alternate game, give yourself a pre-test by playing 1-3 full runs. This lets you assess the game’s difficulty and prepare for any challenges. 

b. Training

Start training on the levels and sections that challenged you. For me, this is usually stages 3, 4, and 5. I will often devote extra practice to the bosses as well. I make a practice sheet to keep me honest and on-task. This is easy and takes minimal time compared to all the use you will get out of it! I take my sheet and write down how many times I will play each level.

Stage 3 (10x)

Stage 4 (10x)

Stage 5 (10x)

3Boss (5x)

4Boss (5x)

5Boss (10x)

I draw checkboxes, but you can use hashmarks or whatever is easiest for you. Then I play the levels in training mode, playing no level or boss more than twice in a row. Each time I beat a level or boss, I put a mark next to it. I alternate between levels until I have played them all the number of times specified on the training sheet.

c. Full runs

After I’ve finished training each specified level or boss to completion, I’m ready to do full runs to test my progress. Usually I will do 3 full, credit-feed runs to check where I’m at. If I one credit clear the game during testing, great. Otherwise I will go back into training and add checkboxes. It can be tempting to keep doing full runs if you’re close to getting the one credit clear. But if you do 5 full runs and haven’t cleared, you’re usually fooling yourself. You’d be better off spending some more time in training mode.

4. Varied practice vs blocked practice

Research (as in scientific, not my own personal research) indicates that varied practice leads to faster improvement than blocked practice. What this means is that you’ll want to alternate between levels/bosses/savestates instead of repeatedly grinding the same segment. Don’t play the same thing more than twice in a row, basically! Depending on your game’s training tools, this may or may not be viable. So be as varied as you can be with the tools you have.

5. Re-centering

During practice sessions, try to take a mini break every three stages, or after every handful of practice segments. Meditate for a few breaths in and out, or do some light physical exercise, like 10x body weight squats, 10×2 arm windmills forward and back, and 10 forward bows. During full runs, I like to use the score tally between stages to re-center my breath. I take a full exhale in, hold the breath at its peak for a few seconds, then slowly exhale as if I’m blowing out a candle. This reduces some of my jitters and allows me to focus more fully on the stage ahead. I won’t try to tell you how to live your life, but just remember that if you don’t get proper sleep, you won’t get proper practice, either.

6. Just Right Challenge

Try to aim for clears that are just a baby bit harder than your last clear. Each successive clear is a ladder that builds up to bigger and better things. Don’t aim for the hardest games right away! If your main game is pretty tough, that’s fine as long as it’s a game you love. If there are novice modes, clear those first. And try to pick alternate games that will give you steady successes, rather than getting yourself sandwiched between a very tough main game and an equally tough alternate game.

7. Mindset

The most important thing about mindset is to not get in your own way. When you make a mistake in training mode, don’t beat yourself up about it. That’s why you’re training. You’re there to make mistakes. Sometimes mistakes in full runs can be painful, but just recognize that you’re playing games in a very difficult genre. You’re playing this genre because you don’t want to win every time. Recognize that by spending a little time practicing every day, you’re building up to bigger successes. Track your clears. It’s easy to forget them, but if you can look back at a list of clears, you’ll be able to see how far you’ve come.

I know from talking to others that this can be a bit overwhelming and confusing. It’s easy for me to follow this method because I created it and thought very deeply about its every aspect. Putting it into practice was easier than writing about it. If you’re confused about this or that, comment here or message me @bunnygirlbutts on Twitter. I’m always happy to talk.

If you’d like an expanded version, check out my interview with Dace at Shmuptopia: https://youtu.be/QxRRPsUKnaQ . I think the only major change I’ve made is to implement varied practice over blocked practice. And give Dace a follow as well on youtube and twitter—he’s a super nice guy, and a looker to boot.

Much love and patience while practicing,

Sterny ❤

Skill Issues #5: What If You Practiced Anyway?

Maybe you’re not feeling it today. It was kind of a long day, a bit stressful honestly, and you’d rather unwind with a beer than play Kaizo Mario. You’ve got enough time, honestly, the willpower just isn’t there. Golden Girls reruns are calling your name.

What if you practiced anyway?

Maybe you feel a bit stuck. Your gaming’s been at a plateau and you’ve been walled by Ludwig the Holy Blade for the last three days. You’d like to play the rest of The Old Hunters DLC, but if this is the first obstacle they put in your way? You can’t imagine playing the rest.

What if you practiced anyway?

Maybe you’re kind of between games. You’ve been maining Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu Black Label, but you’re not certain if the love is still there. You were working your way up, trying to crack a new milestone, but somebody pointed out you could get it easily by just using a scoring exploit on the lasers and… eh. It just kind of killed your buzz, a bit.

What if you practiced anyway?

This isn’t a call to go hard. This isn’t saying never take a break, or that you should spend hours every day practicing and learning games for skill. Honestly, if you just walk away from games for good, forever—you’d probably be just fine. But if you’re waffling, if you really want to get better at games but you’ve been feeling the inertia pulling you back? Just take 25 minutes and practice anyway. Like it’s a habit you don’t even have to think about. Or like, oh man, guess I gotta take a poop! 

After you drop your practice bomb, then you can crack open a beer, or put on some herbal tea, and say whatup to Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia.