the adventures of teapot the cat

Your Average Gamer

Posted on January 31st, 2006

Take a game, and study the moves that a player takes to finish a level. You start seeing interesting patterns, and gain insight into the constraints placed upon a gamer and their available choices. Writer R. LeFeuvre has an article on a level of Gradius.

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 when there wasn’t a single bullet near it.

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