I went back to try another DDP run. Nothing spectacular, two stupid early deaths, burned out and croaked on the fifth. Didn't have any motivation to keep playing (Galuda is a soft pillow in comparison, I'll go play something that doesn't hit me with a brick for a bit).

I did notice something curious - the limits of my 'pushing' abilities seem to be near the end of any given shooter. If I really sit down and force myself to practice and play one game, and one game only, I can get up to either the last boss, or very near it, but I'll always stall out and die there. This happened in GW (second to last boss), GW2 (last boss), MM (fourth stage boss, thbbbt), APB (last boss), DDP (last boss), DOJ (third stage boss), GB2 (fifth stage boss)

If I STOP playing the game for awhile, then come back later refreshed, I find that my abilities have changed somewhat (presumably for the better, but that's a hard thing to judge when you still don't finish the game eh?), but I still get stuck pretty quickly. Generally about a stage or so before what my limit was before. Pushing gets me right back to where I was before.

Given the paucity of 1ccs I've managed, it's a strange feeling, and a difficult thing to measure - how much improvement am I actually seeing? I KNOW I'm getting better - eg, I made it to 5-2 in Galuda almost immediately, I accidentally beat Bakraid normal course, I've taken the last boss in DDP down to pixels, third loop in CRS, but shooters don't really care about incremental improvements when it comes to 1ccs.

I suspect if I was credit feeding, I might have an easier measuring stick (I'd be seeing the number of credits used to complete the game slowly falling over time). But since I've never done that, the only real indication of progress is occasional breaks into new stages in X game, and the odd push to my score (which tends to plateau, as I really detest most scoring mechanics in shooters - boss milking and single miss combo games bug me). That final hurdle, the elusive 1cc of a game I've been working on for a long time, has so far been just that - elusive. It's frustrating to see a slow improvement in your abilities, but no ultimate payoff.

Score competition was a useful tool to motivate me, and the simple sense of community and discussion for some games helped as well, but that can only take you so far. At some point, you simply have to figure out on your own what is stopping you from progressing, and work to eliminate it, one little piece at a time. I'm not certain if militant, disciplined practice and relentless pattern memorization is an absolute necessity for clearing all shooters (though Psikyo games make me wonder about that :P), but it certainly seems to help. Unfortunately, that isn't my style of play at all. Unless I'm enjoying myself, I won't put in that time (and if I force myself to do so, I burn out quickly, resulting in even worse play) - for that reason, games along the lines of Strikers and Ikaruga have only recieved cursory attention from me.

I'll keep plugging away. Another curiosity has been observing the number of people at or near me score/progression wise, and the handful of people a level above, that are capable of game clears (and almost without fail, the highest scores as well). It really seems that once your skills have reached a certain level, the competency you have achieved will take you past all of the games at that level of challenge for a 1cc (witness the very rapid completion of Galuda by players who were already 1ccing other games in the past). Mine have not... yet. It's been several years since I started playing shooters seriously. I wonder how many more it will take before they reach that level? :)