I thought that majority of the people here would know this already. While this is very true, to further increase “learning”, I would recommend playing Street Fighter or anything else not too far after you wake up in the morning. Also right before bed just to sort of review things that you’ve been trying to learn or things you have learned. Yes, it’s perfectly fine to play in between those times, but those times are crucial to learning and retaining memory.
All of the people that I know who play Beatmania say this one thing. “After not playing Beatmania for about a week I get better scores” My theory is after playing the game day in and day out and taking a small break, you let the game sort of simmer in your brain. That way the next time you play, all the notes and patterns from the songs are programmed into your head.
I can vouch for this because it works for me and it even helped a lot back when I was trying to learn basic Japanese.
Back to Beatmania as my example: The more you play a certain song the better you get but then you start to get worse. It’s because if you do something for too long your pretty much lose focus and go on auto-pilot. Auto-pilot as we know will never be as good as a actual human pilot but works well enough just to get by. While you may pass the song in Beatmania, your score may be worse and can become very frustrating.
Just stop and take 15 or so minutes away from the game and let the new information you gained situate into your brain. Sit back down and continue. It may take a little longer for some people .
Here is an even better example for people who were once new to arcade sticks.
Remember when you first got your stick and you couldn’t go forward without accidentally jumping. Not to mention hadokens would leave you jumping in. Remember how you played all day but it seemed you made very little progress and you just wanted to go crawling back to the pads. Well, when you woke up the next morning and popped in that fighting game and gave it a spin, all the shit you were trying to do the night before you could do easily and off the bat.
All the trouble of accidentally hitting in between buttons or jumping were all gone. It’s like you’ve had it for months but in fact it was only a few days. It all comes from consistency but also a good break. Of course never loaf too long on a game or you will become rusty on the stuff you’ve learned and have to bring your skill back up which never takes too long.
Take the most you can from your all nighter MrQuestions, but when you start to decline in skill then I advise you to wrap your game up and get a good long sleep. While laying down with your eyes closed you’ll more likely be replaying the matches in your head which is perfect. Think about it and think about what you should have done in certain scenarios and what your opponent should have done.
I can promise you the next morning you hop in SF4 and do some quick Arcade Mode warm up matches, you will be surprised with how much you improved in your online matches.