January 25, 2006
| Metacomics >>
Quantum Gaming in the Vic Viper
The New Gamer’s R. LeFeuvre has just posted a video called “Averaging Gradius.” Here’s what’s up:
A bunch of people recorded themselves playing the first level of the classic NES shooting game Gradius. (You’re in a spaceship, you have to kill enemy spaceships, you get the idea.) Then, LeFeuvre layered all the recordings on top of each other. Because the game scrolls of it own accord, at a steady pace, the recordings all stay in sync — except of course for each players’ movements. So what you see, instead of a single ship going at it, is a fuzzy cloud of ships — bright where strategies overlap, faint where someone does something especially daring (or dumb).
It’s like quantum physics!
Seriously, I think this video is sublime. And I wonder: Could you make a game that emphasizes not precision but probability? How would it work?
(Via GameSetWatch.)
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Thanks for flagging this - as a massive fan of Nemesis (the European name for Gradius) this was absorbing - not least of which because I had no idea that the NES version was such a faithful rendition! (The Spectrum and C64 versions were anything but!)