Wrecking Crew is one of the classic title for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), featuring an odd-looking Mario. The goal of the game is to destroy construction-related materials like brick walls and ladders using a hammer. In the meantime, the player has to steer clear of the enemies. The game successfully combine both the puzzle…
As you may already know, there is a NES game called Baseball which, like its name suggests, is about baseball. Even 30+ years after its release, the two-player mode is still a lot of fun to play. After a staggering defeat against a friend, I decided to gain insight about the game to better understand the…
Following the incredible boost in machine learning applications in the recent years, people have made artificial intelligence (AI) learn many tasks. For example, it has learn to drive cars, translate languages, understand pictures, filter emails, etc. This incredible development now even extends to video games. A notable effort came from Deepmind with a Convolutional Neural Network algorithm…
colors / ggplot / Playstation / TSNE / Video Games
Like books, the cover for a video game because it’s often a player’s first impression of the game. Indeed, the colors chosen are important as they can show a glimpse of a game’s atmosphere. For example, intuitively, we would bet that a cover with bright colors would be a kids game, or that a dark cover would be…
One of the most memorable NES game is Duck Hunt. Using the incredible NES Zapper (you know, that orange gun), the player has to aim and fire ducks on the screen. The classic game might not work anymore on your modern TV, but there are adapted versions on the market, including a version on the Wii U. In this…
No Man’s Sky is an action-adventure survival video game released in August 2016. Right from its first reveal, the game was highly praised, which caused excessive expectations and attention on the small team designing the game. Unfortunately, when the game was finally launched, players’ reaction were often negative, citing the lack of features that were…
The popular Mario Kart series started with Super Mario Kart (SMK), on the Super Nintendo. Obviously, the goal of the game is to finish first. In the Grand Prix mode, you choose one of the 8 characters and compete against the 7 others over the course of 5 tracks. The signature difficulty setting was introduced in…
Hello everybody! Here is my second article on the world of Pokémon. The previous article was very practical, showing actual advices for the first rival combat. Today, we’ll do something more conceptual and link colors with Pokémon types. As you may know, most of the Pokémon have colors that correspond to their types: blue – water, orange –…
Today, we’ll do a small analysis on the drinking game Fingers. In this game, people compete until a “winner” has to drink a cup (of alcoholic beverage). The game has simple mechanics, but still yields some interesting statistical reflexions: Some numbers are more probable than others. Markov chains can be used to compute the probabilities. The game is unfair.…
Aujourd’hui, nous analyserons le jeu Boggle de Hasbro. Ce jeu consiste à trouver des mots dans un court laps de temps en utilisant des lettres aléatoires provenant de dés à 6 faces. Ces mots donnent des points proportionnels à la longueur du mot. Les mots doivent avoir 3 lettres et plus et la liste de…
Excitebike is a NES video game that came out in 1984. The player controls a red motocross on a racetrack, with the goal to finish with the best time. The challenge comes from doing jumps at optimal angles, avoiding the other bikes and not overheating your own bike. One particular novelty feature of this game is the possibility to…
In Pokémon Red & Blue, right after choosing your starter (Bulbasaur, Charmander or Squirtle), your rival call you for a duel. This analysis will help you with some questions, namely: Is it worth to use stats-reducing move? If so, what is the optimal number of these moves? What are my chance of winning? Comparison of Pokémon In…
***Using these strategies can make the game boring. You have been warned.*** This time, I will analyze the popular guessing game “Guess Who?”. As its name suggests, the goal of the game is to be the first to guess who is the character picked by the other player. Every turn, players ask each other yes…
In last part of the lotto 6/49 analysis, we compared numbers to see which were chosen more often by players. Now, in this part, we’ll check how different announced jackpot amounts can change the expected gains when playing. It is a fact that when the jackpot increases, the number of players increases too. The question is then to see…
Lotteries often ask players to choose their own numbers from a particular set. Winning numbers are drawn by the lotery company and players win amounts depending on numbers matched. In Canada, there is one of these lottery games which is called lotto 6/49. To play this game, the participating player has to choose 6 numbers from a…
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