I find myself strangely drawn to Japanese bullet-hell shmups despite sucking at playing them. There's something about peak 2D pixel art sprites over parallax scrolling fantasy environments while dodging through insane geometric bullet patterns and spectacular animated explosions that's beautiful and hypnotically compelling.

I just wish I wasn't so hopeless at them, only managing to survive seconds at a time by constant credit feeding. While I realize the entire genre is notorious for being brutally difficult and that's in fact the appeal to many serious players, I dream of shmups where:

* Difficulty scaled dynamically up a smooth gradient based on real-time player performance

* Success didn't require deep level and pattern memorization. My cognitive style is anti N-back and this requisite shmup ability remains forever beyond my reach. I need the shmup equivalent of Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess960) where the necessity of book memorization is removed and the focus is mostly on reactively dodging in the moment.

* The engine supports interactive practice modes enabling weaker players to gradually build skills such as: rewind, ghost follow and partial dynamic slowdown (eg only bullets get slower, only when N of bullets > Threshold, growing gradually slower as N increases, returning to normal below N).

On the last point, some modern shmups do at least have "practice modes" but they seem like developer afterthoughts, typically very basic bolt-ons instead of being integrated, dynamic and granular. The result often leaves me feeling more frustrated than trained. While it is possible to apply hacks to emulated shmups which can help a bit, these are usually limited to brute force such as pause, global frame rate limiting and infinite lives or invincibility. While MAME and Retroarch do have rewind features, I believe they are hacky since I've never been able to get them to work reliably with shmups.

My deep attraction to the genre seems doomed to remain unrequited despite buying and playing so many, watching various training videos and following many guides. I feel like I can't reach the level needed to trigger the fun-obsession loop of a typical bullet-hell shmup because it currently requires a minimum level of a few neuro-competencies I don't possess. Even top players and fans admit (and occasionally revel in) the inaccessibility of the genre, highlighting the need to memorize deep pattern sequences, commit dozens of hours to rote practice and how it helps to be "at least a little on-the-spectrum."

This makes me sad because top players, fans and developers are also worried about the long-term decline of the genre from cool niche in the 90s to seriously at-risk in recent years. I suspect there may be others who are, like me, strongly attracted to shmups but too-often barred by a metaphorical "Must Be This 'Neuro-Level' to Ride" sign. Yet other once niche gaming genres have successfully broadened their appeal by deeply integrating 'accessibility' features like racing games have done with: ghost cars, rewind and suggested driving line/speed indicators, and fighting games with granular, smooth-scaling training modes with extensive on-screen instruction.