/vr/ - Retro Games

I picked up this little game on Steam for like 3 bucks over the last sale called "Shmup skill test". It's a collection of shmup-based minigames intended to, well, test your skills. You complete a series of randomly selected minigames, and at the end you're graded and given a "gamer age" based on how well you did, and you can also play the challenges individually as you unlock them to up your score for leaderboards. I'm kinda tangentially connected to shmups because I love arcade games and I've played a few small shmups (including running a caravan competition on /vr/), but I've never truly committed to any, and my skills are very poor. I wanted to upload some videos to show the game and get some tips.

https://files.catbox.moe/lpuyzq.mp4

This one's called 8-bit and it's basically Star Soldier with a Galaga/Galaxian-like intro. Thankfully I can press multiple buttons to shoot, so I don't have to constantly mash one. I could grind out more points shooting the bullets in the intro, but that dramatically increases the difficulty once the Star Soldier part starts, and I don't think it's worth it relative to the score. I think my biggest problem is that I get anxious really easily and make a lot of false moves as a result along with losing focus on trying to read the bullet patterns, where my ship is, and where the enemies are. I'm also just scared to weave through bullets, which makes it even more anxiety inducing once the screen starts getting full of shots.