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Mindblown: Samurai Shodown's mashing minigame determines winner randomly.

jooey

The Motorcycle That Wouldn't Slow Down
What's worse: this being called a "minigame" or that Joystiq took that and the rest of the thread and ran?

I half-joke because it was a must-listen regardless.
 

MormaPope

Banned
I remember playing Gears of War 2 splitscreen and in one chainsaw duel I put my controller down while my friend mashed and I ended up winning the duel. We were both perplexed.
 

ntropy

Member
wat about storm's ice super in mvc2?

3366431_o.gif
 

pants

Member
I'm no programmer, but would dice roll be easier to program and than a mashing meter?

Easiest implementation I can think of would be
(mashing meter)
if
player1 count > player 2 count
Do player 1 win

else
Do player 2 win

Random
Do RandomPlayer

(but you'd have to code a randomPlayer method, selecting 1 or 2) (well most languages comes with a built in/premade random method)
 

KDR_11k

Member
I don't think SMB3's randomization makes any real difference, it just changes how long TASers have to influence the RNG before the item is drawn. Well, if they could be arsed with the toad houses, after all those are really slow and it's probably faster to just grab what you need from a level.

So does that mean the FGC now hates SamSho as a non-competitive game? After all random tripping is what prevented them from playing Brawl.
 

Jamie OD

Member
Recently on Idle Thumbs they discussed how Skill Tester machines are set up so the vendor can adjust claw tension to relax as it rises up from the pile. Devious.

Saved-by-the-Claw-300x168.jpg

I noticed this first hand. Thought I was able to grab an item in such a way that the claw would catch onto the tag and still lift it up. Instead the claw went limp as it rose and easily slipped past the prize without budging it from its spot.
 

Dremark

Banned
I don't think SMB3's randomization makes any real difference, it just changes how long TASers have to influence the RNG before the item is drawn. Well, if they could be arsed with the toad houses, after all those are really slow and it's probably faster to just grab what you need from a level.

So does that mean the FGC now hates SamSho as a non-competitive game? After all random tripping is what prevented them from playing Brawl.

SamSho has items anyway so it shouldn't have been viewed as competitive even before this came to light.
 
People really didn't know this?

I used to play SS a lot when I was younger vacationing on the family beach house, we had a pretty awesome arcade near the beach.

As soon as the swords clashed I just waited until the animation finished while my opponent frantically mashed his buttons. Sure I lost some clashes, but it was really fun when I won and the guy was like "WTF dude???"

Ahhh good times...

By the way, Gen-an rocks!


Yeah, seems people must have figured this out. Some people would have surely just stood there and not touch the buttons (or maybe once or twice), and then if it was random they would have won sometimes. Secret would have been out then seems like.

This is actually psychologically fascinating. All it would have taken was for one player to not press the button and win to bust the myth.. but it seems no one ever did! Sign on the screen says mash button, we mash button, and all observed results are predicated on that.
Won? We mashed good! Didn't win? Must mash harder!

We're not far above the level of the pigeons at the food pellet dispenser...

Yep, and out of millions of matches statistically it surely happened thousands of times, that for whatever reason one player or the other didnt mash any buttons. that's why I'm a little dubious of the idea that this could have been any kind of secret.

Which one was the fighting game where it was discovered that the first player always gets an advantage? I think it was a fairly recent one.


edit: Mortal Kombat

Can someone elaborate?
 
Either method of choosing a winner, random selection or counting button presses, is so trivially easy to implement that it's hard to imagine implementation difficulty being the reason it was done this way. AI players present no meaningful difficulty either. You can just assign them a fixed number, and if the player presses more times than that then the player wins.

It's possible that they changed to making it random as a gameplay consideration. They may have found that otherwise it gave someone who was particularly good at button mashing too much of an advantage.
 

shuri

Banned
Those claw games are rigged too as one poster previously noted. They can be set to win only after a certain amount of money has been paid by players; no matter what it fail to grab anything.

I own a japanese pachislot machine; its pretty much a slot machine but you press on a buton to stop each row, and the game has a 'difficulty level' inside where you can set how 'lucky' the players will be.
 
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