Trivia You May Not Know

By now if you have a TV, internet access, or have been to an arcade in the last decade you've heard of the arcade game known as Dance Dance Revolution, DDR for short. The basic concept is to watch the screen for arrows scrolling past, and when they hit the top of the screen you step on the corresponding arrow.

What you may not know is that one year after DDR's realese another dance game arrived on the scene: Pump It Up. Made in Korea this game has the same basic game play with a few subtle changes. The most obvious difference is that while DDR uses the four cardinal directions (up, down, left and right), Pump It Up uses four diagonal arrows and a fifth center pad. This has lead to many claims of Pump It Up's (PIU or just "Pump" for short) superiority to DDR in difficulty. This debate usually degrades to fan boy level insults however, like the more mainstream console wars.

One definite advantage of Pump is that it's less protected by it's manufacturer. When Finish Line wanted to make a commercial featuring their shoes and a dancing video game. Instead of pay out the nose for Konami's blessing (the makers of DDR) they instead went with Pump. Take a look for yourself:



And that's not the end of the dance arcade games. You've also got In The Groove, a DDR look-a-like by ROXOR games that allows custom step patterns from players. And in the arm-moving department there is Para Para Paradise, where you wave your arms through sensors to mimic "Para Para" dancing style, a hybrid between the Macarena and karaoke.

With any luck, you now know more than you did! And maybe have an urge to listen to Vivaldi's Winter again.

Quick words on this week's Pirate Master

First: I told you so about the ties.

Second: I'm loving the captain change and bribes happening. The prospect of captain change via expedition keep the game from becoming stale.

Third: All around the show's really picking up, especially now in the fall-out of Sean going back on his word, causing a tie, and screwing up half the crew's plan.

Only thing I have left ot be bitchy about is that I don't know how the end of the game will work.

Sloppy editing on the high seas.

Ahoy all, I'm fresh from another episode of Pirate Master and still trying to get my land-legs back. Well this week there was no mutiny again. I really hope it's not one of those game mechanics that no one's ever going to use because they're scared. Most likely when the pirate voting crew shrinks to around 5 they'll be more talk of mutiny.

Two main technical gripes this week. One, what a crappy intro. Well, it's not horrible, the stock footage and all that is great. But the words, like putting "SABOTAGE" or "BURIED TREASURE" kinda screams power-point level aesthetics. Also, the font used for the pirates' names seemed very rough and out of place, and very obviously lazily whipped up in After Effects or Live Type.

Two, the voting editing. When stabbing their cards upon that huge-ass totally awesome dagger, we got a sneaky reverse-angle shot coming from within the barrel (or next to it) looking up. For that split-second it looked as if no words were on the cards the pirates used. Weird. Then again the names could have been exactly across the stabbed part. However, later on they cut to a shot of all the cards laid out, SANS HOLES! Why would they show that? The shot was pretty obviously done later to fill in, but why not stab fake holes? Where they worried that they would not be legible? Also, how the pirate's names were written on those cards were obviously not the same as the cards used in the voting ceremony. Perhaps they use a small type-face on the voting cards, to prevent eagle-eyed viewers and pirates alike from reading the votes. But the major gripe I have is why show the fake cards later? The host announced the vote count, 4 to 5, so there wasn't any new information provided. I suppose if I had seen the show without the shot, I'd want to see the cards eventually, but I could handle seeing them stabbed through the center. Maybe they ran short on editing time in post-production.

One final thing: if they split into two crews for the treasure every week, what happens if the captain's team loses? Does the captain still get half the treasure? Does the other team elect a new captain? Does the ship explode? Hopefully I'll find out next week.

P.S. What about ties in voting? My guess: captain's choice.

The Ivory Tower

Firstly, this is a long technical blog post about the board game "The Game of Life," so if that sounds lame, feel free to stop reading. Second, I'm basing this on the 1992ish era version, not the most recent 2005 update with new salary rules, career abilities, and house sales.

So the other day I was thinking about the game of LIFE and how I always pick "college" because I assume you'd be a complete dumb ass to choose "career." You need to go to college to be the doctor who's the sweetest job on the board right? How likely can you get big bucks as an artist? They've got less spots than other jobs, don't they? Which is better....career or college? I decided to find out.

First of all I had to choose my criteria for "better." Obviously the one that led to the most money. In this game the most money is made in A) your salary, determined by your salary card B) your income, money you get from other players when they land on your career space, and C) LIFE tiles. Especially in this version where they are typically around 100 to 500 thousand dollars. I decided to tackle these in order.

Counting the spaces on the board I found 18 pay days for all players, and a 19th for "career" players. That was easy enough, and I know that the average salary is $60k so career players get $1.14 million dollars in salary every game of life.

College salaries proved more complicated, as each college grad gets three salary cards and then chooses their favorite. Okay, high-school probability class...nine choices of salaries means 48 possible 3-card combinations (3 nCr 9 in my TI-83). And surely players would choose the highest salary in each combination..but how many involved each salary. Well....if there was only 8 salary cards, taking out the 100k holy grail, we get 61 possible sets of 3. Logic tells us that 28 combinations out of the 84 contain the highest salary of a tenth of a million dollars. Using this method we get 26 for 90k and not 100k, 15 for 80k, 10 for 70k, 6 for 60k, 3 for 50k, and 1 for 40k. It's impossible to be stuck with 30k or 20k because you get three options no matter what.

Now, what to do with this data? Well to get the average I multiplied each salary with its probability of being chosen and added the sums. This gives the college player an average salary of $90,357. Multiplied by 18 paydays gets a lifetime wage of over 1.6 million.

This already placed college players at a half-million ahead of their career counterparts. However, I hadn't answered the question of which career card gave the player the best edge. I kept on crunching numbers, now trying to find the best careers.

Income from careers occurs when an opponent lands on one of your career spaces, then they must pay the given amount. To determine the average income I had to take the sum of cash these income spaces had per career, divide by the amount of spaces to determine average pay-out per career space, and finally multiply that by the likelihood of someone landing on one of your spaces. Cash-per-career space was simple arithmetic, but the likelihood of landing on a given space required some fudged statistics. On the game board there are 108 spaces all players must land on, plus or minus four depending on branching paths. I slopped on 2 spaces to average it out, getting 110 spaces. Average spin is 5.5 spaces...meaning a typical player lands on 20 spots on the 110 space board, or roughly 20% of the spaces. This gives any space a 1/5 shot at being hit, so I multiplied the per-space average by 20% times the number of spaces in that career. Finally, I multiplied all incomes by three, based a four-player game. This gives me the following ranking of careers by income:

Artist with $112,500, Travel Agent and Athlete with $96,000, Superstar with $80,500, Teacher with $84,000, Doctor with $77,100, Accountant with $75,000, Salesperson with $43,500, and finally Police Officer with $39,000.

Calculating for the teacher was different, because they are all dependant on other players' actions. There are two night school spaces, which are each $20,000. I decided that there would be a 50/50 chance of someone wanting to use them, so I factored them in at half their value. Then the other spaces were paid on a per-child basis (college, summer school, day care). For these I needed to determine the average amount of children per player.

There are 8 spaces on the board awarding children to players, on average 1.2 children apiece. Given that out of any 8 spaces, a player is likely to land on 1.6 of them...which gets about 2 children per player. So, all the teacher spaces dependent on child count were assumed to be at the 2-child value.

Another special case was the police officer who only gets on space, but gets five grand for every time someone spins a "10" Given the 20 turns each game has, assuming 4 players, provides 60 spins a game by opponents. So in a typical game the police officer can expect for about $30,000 from "speeding." This is what puts them at the bottom of the economic bracket.

Finally the accountant only collects when taxes are paid, so these were calculated in a similar manner as the teacher, the odds of landing on the space multiplied by the average taxes played by a player.

Surprisingly the college degree required jobs (teacher, doctor, and accountant) are in the lower half of the salaries. But, when you take the odds of being able to choose the best jobs, college ends up on top again, earning an average income of about $376,821 which outdoes the average of a career player, just short of $80,000.

This puts the total gap about 800 grand now. This puts them clearly ahead, regardless of the $50,000 debt. Plus college players get four more chances at LIFE tiles, which are extremely valuable in this version.

So, hypothesis proven! Maybe next time I'll put this kinda effort into something less obvious.

SurvivARRRRRRRRGH

So, it's Thursday Night and that means that Mark Burnett's newest game show is premiering. Pirate Master is a reality game show in similar styles of other Burnett shows: Weekly outing, million dollar top prize, confessionals, drama, and obviously hand-picked awkward people who are doomed from the start. But more on Jon later.

I was excited, but nervous about a new show in which contestants actually worked crew on a ship. I mean, were they -really- going to sail a ship? The answer: Yes. Turns out they had all gone through training and therefore proved very capable crew members, hauling a huge ship to shore and weighing the anchor. Crewmates climbed netting to let down sails, and no safety net either, as the numerous helicopter camera shots proved to us.

The story was pretty lame, but then again I don't think Mr. Burnett has ever had to make one before. Something about a chest from some dead pirate who had a large booty (heh heh, booty) and split it amongst him and his 13 crew members (14 treasure chests to find...16 contestants....yeah that sounds about right). The crew has a big treasure chest with many cute little locked drawers and ugly fake barnacles. Each drawer has maps for the next treasure. Then they go about finding it.

This is where I'm not 100% sure of how the game will work. As this was the first week, they started off the treasure hunt split into two randomly selected groups, and they both had a compass and map. Then they set off down a river in a race. First component was to find a hanging skeleton, and get three keys to unlock the next map. The crew seemed stumped by the contraption, when along comes Jon.

A little back story on Jon. He was talking earlier during the "Yay we're here for a million dollars" beginning section and seemed incredibly out of place. While everyone else are bartenders, salesmen, military trained fire fighter, or a Rupert look-a-like; Jon is a scientist/exotic dancer (they never went into this) and overall awkward guy. So of course I sympathize with him. Damn you casting directors! Anyways, back to the challenge.

So, Jon takes the three keys and in about two seconds jiggles the lock open. Now the team moves further down river, well ahead of their competitors. They arrive at the sabotage, a chance to screw over the other crew, first and set of a net across the entire river. (I really hope these little sabotages are back every week, it was one of the sweetest parts of the episode.) Finally they make it to the part of the river the map indicated, but with no luck diving for treasure. It was supposed to be at the "gator's lair." Once again, Jon is on the case. Knowing that gators make lairs in mango trees (who the hell knows that?) he dives under a nearby one and low and behold, Jon's won it! Of course, Jon takes this as a sign of his superiority, and when you're usually ostracized from society, why wouldn't you?

Back on board the ship, the winning crew counts their claim, totaling forty grand. Then the resident host (some Australian or New Zealand-y guy) tells them to select a captain. After an awkward pause and an obvious "Duh, pick me guys" look from Jon, the crew picks Joe Don (or something, it's hard to remember names after one episode) to be captain. Well, all the crew but Jon does. Unfortunately this means big JD gets half the money. They he had to choose officers, going with pretty girl and unemployed 20s guy. They got five grand each while the underlings got stuck with only 2k. Immediate tension and senses of betrayal. Turns out the position of Captain is not the do-goody leader type, but of being effing spoiled, getting a private bedroom, some type of booze barrel, swanky jackets for both officers and captain, and finally, a cool hat.

As the day moves on we finally get to the goods, how to kick people off the boat. This show's term of choice is "set adrift" which seems piratey enough to work, and less hokey than "walk the plank" would've been. The selection process is interestingly similar to big brother style elimination (Big Brother 8 coming soon): The captain chooses three crew members to be given the black spot. They then are tried in "Pirate Court" (dun dun DUN) and have time to explain themselves. Finally, all the non-spotted crew members put in their votes for whom to knock out. HOWEVER! If every vote is for mutiny, including the two officers, then the captain is set adrift. I really hope someone gets the balls to do this at some point.

But, not this episode. Jon and two other crew members of little importance were spotted, and brought to court. Jon, sensing danger, took the ship's only two compasses hostage during his plea to remain on the boat. Then everyone took their cards (one per candidate, plus one for mutiny) and stabbed one on top of a dagger! A fucking DAGGER. No one pierced themselves, which was kind of a downer, but hopefully will occur within the duration of the series. Jon's loner attitude outweighed the threat of losing compasses (I'm 90% sure they'll get new ones) and he was set adrift. With his $2000 at least. I think. They didn't make it clear, but I'm pretty sure he gets to keep it.

Cool things about the show: finding treasure. This is always good, I loved Treasure Hunt...or whatever the Da Vinci Code show was called. Also, the crew splitting up the doubloons and get to have them during the show. They are free to do whatever they want with them, including bribes and such, which will prove exciting, I hope.

Final word: this seems doomed to only one season. I mean, it's airing in the summer, so I can't see it getting canned while competing against re-runs. But I think it will have Treasure Hunt's and Murder in Small Town X's problem of being too big to really make it repeat. Of course, it's less story driven then those two shows, so it has a better shot.

To conclude: YARRRRRR!

Mafia

A game of good vs. evil, Mafia is a game of deception, perception, and murder. The setting is of a small town that has discovered that there is a secret mob amongst their citizenry and must hunt them down. The players are assigned one of two roles: Townspersons (good) or Mafia (bad). However, each player is only sure of their own role, making the mafia's identity a secret.

During the day all players must try to determine which player among them are secretly part of the mob. Then they vote to lynch one player. That player is killed (removed from the game) and their role is revealed. With any luck, it's a mafia member; otherwise, an innocent townsperson is killed. Then night phase begins and the members of the mob secretly communicate to decide which player to kill. All the players "wake up" the following day to discover the dead body and start the voting process over. Victory conditions are simple: be the last group standing. It is a game of the uninformed majority vs. the informed minority.

Now, this game has become very popular in forum play, its main home being here. When played on-line the game is strictly about post analysis and vote tracking. Also, voting in the online game is done at the townspersons' discretion typically, move their votes when they choose until a majority of the votes are on one player. That person is instantly lynched in game.

For more about strategy, you can check out the wiki. It's not organized very well, nor complete, but has many of the basic concepts, along with a listing of all special roles that are used to add extra twists to the game.

And now I'm back, from outer space!

Hey internet! It's almost summer and that means that I have too much time on my hands! Actually, right now I have some finals I should be attending to, but who cares right?

New developments in G^4 world include a flickr account, and a tumblr! So be sure to check those out. I'm going to try to get my arse in gear as far as games blogging goes. I know I'm not these guys or this site, but I figure if I'm going to be neurotically obsessed with games, I may as well make it look like it's for a reason. Here's to a great summer '07!