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NES Games and Statistical Analysis

Posted by Zonk on from the serious-science dept.

szadig writes "The New Gamer has published an article which tackles the topic of averaging gameplay. The accompanying video features 15 different players simultaneously shooting their way through the first stage in the NES game Gradius. From the article: 'The average time taken to kill the end level boss was 20.055 seconds, with the fastest player finishing him off in a mere 10.01 seconds. Six people finished the boss off at nearly identical moments. It would seem that the boss, bored with the player, actually self-destructs after 27 seconds. Beyond the almost perfectly synchronized explosions, further proof of this self-destruction can be found in the videos: no 10,000 point bonus (given to players when the boss is defeated) was awarded to these six players and, in a few of the runs, the boss detonated when there wasn't a single bullet near it.' Can we apply other statistical methods to gameplay?"

5 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. You know.. by Headcase88 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Getting 15 people together to do a statistical analysis to find out whether a boss self-desructs isn't quite as efficient as just having one person avoiding the boss for a while and just seeing whether it blows up or not.

    A lot of the other stuff in the article was interesting though... looks like he put a lot of effort into it.

    --
    "When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
  2. Mirror by SillySnake · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'd make a torrent, but I'm running Gentoo on an 800Mhz Athlon and it's gonna take me a couple of hours to compile Bit Torrent :-/ If the site dies.. I'll give my bandwidth a go: http://www.wartsworld.com/AveragingGradius.mov

  3. Another interesting "average" by Jerf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Another interesting "average", though technically harder to pull off, would be to get 15 players simultaneously watching the same game in real-time, "averaging" in some reasonably manner the 15 inputs coming in, and feeding that to the game. It would be interesting to see if it sucks, or manages to play better than the individuals, or what.

    1. Re:Another interesting "average" by grumbel · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Depends, if the players try to do the same thing the average would probally be a almost perfect play of doing whatever the players were doing. If however one player decides dodge a rock by flying over it and another by flying under it, well, the average rams them directly into the block, not so good.

  4. Re:Life Force by T23M · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, Life Force was NOT the sequel, but a new series entirely (known as Salamander in Japan). Gradius II was a Japan-only Famicom release in late 1988; the next Gradius game to come Stateside was Gradius III for the SNES.