HonestGamers Blogs

You are not signed into a user account. Please return to this page once you are signed into your free account for additional options.

Apple retro stuff, with other if I feel like it.

BLOGGER'S OATH: I, ASchultz, do solemnly swear that if there's something in the past I need to whine about a bit, I'll try to inject humor, wonder and/or a link to a website that helped utterly dispell whatever I used to whine about but don't any more.

Actually, I don't care about their team either way. But they ruined a cool statistical anomaly related to small sample size.

See, if they had not beaten Western Illinois so handily, then 0-1 St. Peter's would be the #1 team in the excellent Ken Pomeroy basketball ratings. Because they lost by less than the home court advantage (3.5 points) at Seton Hall, and a bunch of other things happened...

Of course, small data sizes and blah blah blah.

[reply][view replies (0)]

I don't think this has been posted to HonestGamers blogs, and I'll risk redundancy to share this brilliant resume. It made me smile a lot.

[reply][view replies (1)]

Back before I got good at the whole spelling thing--not good enough to win a Spelling Bee, sadly--I managed to find creative spellings for words I didn't know how to spell, one based on the boring spelling rules I learned, and another based on how it'd be cool if a word was spelt.

My favorite memory of a misspelled word was "OSOUM" for awesome. Back in 5th grade everyone said that a lot and I wrote it while doodling and someone asked "what the hell does that mean?"

...so I'm curious about what anyone else had fun misspelling before knowing better.

--Actually, I did win a Spelling Bee but it wasn't official. My seventh grade class went to some "100 years ago" theme park as a field trip and we had a boys vs girls spelling bee. We were with my humanities teacher's other group and the guy in our class who was the favorite missed "Lutheran" and so did the girl in the other class. She totally butchered it, as she didn't realize he forgot to capitalize the L.

What a hero I was that day!

[reply][view replies (3)]

Today, I wrote a pretty cool perl script that takes what I have written for a day and sorts it into my big-huge-file(s) for writing, based on subject. It has to be formatted correctly. Basically a chunk of text will start

\ideas
Angst from 6th grade
Angst from High School
Angst from Purdue losing to Notre Dame again, **** the Irish
Angst from a GameFAQs message board post 8 years ago I can't let go of
Angst from someone pointing out a typo in a review/blog post

\movies
Ishtar
Yentl

\books
Infinite Jest

And so forth. The main file has \books, etc. and so it should sweep through and pick up everything, and if it doesn't, there's a handy little dump file the unused stuff goes to.

Of course, it did. I thought of many ways the script could go wrong and 1) not put information in or 2) quite possibly zap my whole ideas file, which I've backed up, but it still scared me.

This can be shaken out with more testing, but of course, the immediate step back I took was amusing. So I'll still be doing a few cut-and-pastes a day. In fact, I may still do so. It's worth being sure about, and I enjoy rereading the miscellaneous ideas to look for something good--I just need to quit letting backlogs pile up.

Because of this, I hid in/stepped up to work-related stuff I'd wanted to do for a while. I got a good chunk done, actually. Seeing how tangled my code was a year ago, and how easily I could muck with it, really made me feel good about what I have come to expect from myself in terms of clarity, directness, flexibility, and practicality.

I think that's come to apply to "real" writing too. It doesn't automatically inject that creative magic, either, but it leaves more chances for it...

[reply][view replies (0)]

I'm pleased with how the guide and its maps are going. More specifically, I'm pleased with the odd scripts I've been able to use to map the game out and find locations and I'm happy with how FCEUXD makes it so easy to find cheats.

My big coup was poking at a save state to change the locations so that my party would pop up at different points on the map, so I could map out 32x32 squares in order. The overworld is 512x512 and so is the underworld--though it is 512x256 of terrain and each dungeon is 4 64x64 levels.

That's a lot of numbers, but basically I've been able to tackle one a day, and I've been able to perform a bunch of other silly experiments to determine what cells need which reagents and so forth. My final trick is probably going to be taking the part of my FAQ that tells who is where and converting it to my own graphic creation format--I have a utility that can read binary data and self-created icons, and an "extra" file that adds annotations, to create a map.

This is really just text shuffling but it builds on what I already have, but it goes well with converting hexadecimal values to the sextant locations--giving the walkthroughee two ways to go through--and so forth. And it makes a game that may only be a 3 or 4 into an involving, interesting project.

I've been taking my time with this guide, and I think it shows. I have a list of details I wish to knock off, and as I gave myself a month to knock them off, it's a very relaxed guide. It will be better than Orochi K's, which did not get taken down though Pluvius requested it.

This method also paid off for creating Times of Lore maps, another NES game--its overworld is 1024x1024 and I caught a save state just as you exited and wrote scripts to change your x and y coordinates. I just need to use mspaint to annotate the maps, then I'll send them in. I was able to write PC maps based on decompression codes from someone else.

Mood: retrotastic
Game of the Day: Times of Lore(NES)
Song of the Day: Van McCoy, "Do the Hustle"

[reply][view replies (0)]

What were you doing at 9:09:09 AM and 9:09:09 PM?

AM: searching for my glasses
PM: on the train, reading a book

I always pay attention to when one is coming up and I note it the day before and forget it that day.

My favorite numerological story is when someone on 7/8/90 who looked forward to 12:34:56 PM had a plane that flew west to cross the Date Line, so he missed it.

[reply][view replies (14)]

So I was emailing with adaml, the person on GameFAQs who is trying to solve every North American NES game ever released. He's at 11. One of them is Ultima: Warriors of Destiny.

This is not a good game. As a port from the PC and Apple, it runs into disk-space problems, and so the programmers decided to keep...the endlessly looping sound.

As bad as the game is, though, the current FAQ is equally crummy. I think I gave Orochi K permission to use whatever he found in my guide, if it was helpful, several years ago. I did not expect him to take some of my stuff, some of the other guide, some game genie codes and hope this worked for the NES.

It didn't. I'm finding that out working through the game. It started when I mapped the whole thing out (COMING SOON TO A GAMEFAQS NEAR YOU!) Then I realized the sextant gave coordinates like 08E03S instead of A'B' C'D'.

At that point, I realized the reason for his "This is the last update. I will take no more questions concerning this FAQ." It's hard to be mad at something like this, and in fact it's useful to determine what is in one game and not the other. It just can't have been useful to any poor saps tempted into playing the remarkably heinous WoD all these years. They got doubly suckered with his FAQ.

Still, I figured enough cheat codes to figure what to do, and I am working through it honestly now. Between this and overdrive's Pool of Radiance FAQ (NOT part of the Bad Material,) that should knock it down to 9. He has a bunch of strategy games left. Wish I could help him with those. But I have so many other semi-bad old school games to play, and I never was much for strategy games.

Game of the Day: Ultima: Warriors of Destiny

[reply][view replies (7)]

The writing hangover lasted 4 days (a cheap NES FAQ doesn't count) and I almost forgot to pay my yearly condo insurance, too. I hope I didn't forget to, uh, proofread this.

I enjoyed working with my teammates very much, and I am glad their styles were different and contained a lot of something that might help me. And that they were willing to share it, and to share in the disappointments of maybe not doing everything I'd hoped with a review. Thanks for no finger pointing or questions about "what are you doing writing odd review/FAQ x with a team tourney going on." I'll be rooting for you guys in RotW for a long time, and to finish 2nd/3rd to me in contests I enter, heh. Thanks to Suskie for picking me despite my potential lack of range and True for putting up with my red ink on his reviews. They were fun to read, and anyway, first drafts should be about ideas. I have a feeling I could've gotten to know you guys even better, but what I did know, I liked very much.

But there were a lot of other teams' reviews I wished I'd read more in-depth. People who were just a name to me, I have a feeling for their styles. I'd like to read more. I may play old school games exclusively, but I enjoy reading vicariously about the new stuff--the innovations that work and don't--and seeing what remains constant and what doesn't. I've already seriously considered being a judge for next year, for this reason.

I'd have a lot to live up to of course. The judges this year had good comments and a variety of personalities and tastes, and while it was inevitable we might say Judge X would like this more than Judge Y, you couldn't really tailor a review for The Judges overall beyond, well, doing things right in general. And I think that's good. I also think the judges did not box themselves into any one personality, and I hope for all their work they had fun. Judging is tough, as it's not like baseball where an umpire calls a consistent strike zone. That is tough enough, of course, but writing is about changing that strike zone. Judges need to be the umpire AND the batter who hammers lazy predictable pitches out of the park. They were.

By the way, Jerec, your waking up early to post the team tourney stuff had a bonus side effect. From the topic, I realized the date was 8/30 and not 8/31, so the $10 PetSmart coupon I thought had expired 8/30--brain farting on the date after putting off using the coupon til the last day--was indeed still valid! I had maybe an hour to get to the store. So I did so, planning a thank you post later. I forgot the $10 bit--actually $15 as it was the last day of a cat food sale too.

Thanks to the commissioners, too. They had some controversy at the beginning. It was soon forgotten. They rolled out schedules in a timely manner and still captained their teams and mixed things up neatly with their own reviews.

Thanks to Zigfried for detailing his review writing process. It's an excellent formula that has obviously helped his reviews NOT read formulaically. You can't break a formula successfully til you've mastered it, and nailing this down could help many people avoid the trap of doing something different for difference's sake. When I remembered to read this, I usually was pleased with my review. On weeks I didn't, judges pointed out stuff I could've weeded out by reading it.

Thanks to the admins who added game info to the site, so I could write odd reviews, and thanks also to overdrive and bluberry for putting up with my 2nd rate trash talk--there may've been others--and everyone with a kind word for my stats topic and my preview. I found how hard previews are to write. A day later I looked at it and thought "I didn't mean THAT, did I?" So I appreciate drella's starting it--especially given he had an excuse to walk away entirely--and zippdementia continuing it, and the tongue in cheek playoff previews too.

It's useless and vain to go into details on my own strategy, and how much you may want to take from someone who went 4-5 with votes 13-14 is debatable, but for those who may compete next year:

1. Reviewing for a bunch of systems keeps things fresh. I didn't know how much I had in the way of variety, and old school stuff can have a lack of variety. I got 7, and quite bluntly the games that would've rounded it all out, Order of the Griffon for the TG-16, Tower of Myraglen for the IIgs and Xyphus for the Commodore, didn't have as much to write about as the games that overlapped them--Wasteland and 2400 AD and (a platform I hadn't planned) Robotron.

2. Writing for a game you've FAQed makes the knowledge bit easy, and those who get "you need more meat in your reviews" would be helped by this. I planned to review games I'd written FAQs for. I wound up getting 7 of 9--Robotron and Decathlon are ones I can probably write pretty easily for.

3. I was supposed to learn this lesson in college, but "write it a few days before it's due" really does allow more ideas to filter in, and it lets you say "what the -- was I thinking" to the more obvious blunders. It also lets you try new weird stuff, so any blunders as a result of just letting yourself go can get filled in. I rushed things a lot less now than I have before.

4. Writing a review every 6 weeks & focusing on it to polish it should have you set for next year. I was very exhausted by the end. It's also good backup for a week when you want to write a new review but can't. Anyone who's written good reviews through the course of the year deserves this break.

5. Modifying a review from 5 years ago--chopping it up considerably--is quite a time saver, especially if people don't know about it. That's what I did for 4 of the last 5 weeks. It should also give you confidence that you've gotten better in the last few weeks.

6. Proofreading should be a positive as well as a negative exercise. While you can probably cut 15-20% off a first draft, because lots of stuff can be duplicated/merged, there's also what you'd like to hear more of, etc. I tried putting a strict upper bound on what I wrote, and having something to add--without bloating a review--gives urgency to eliminating the stuff that isn't terrible but--doesn't quite belong.

7. There will be dead ends, so don't panic about that. I vaguely considered reviewing Robot Odyssey, an educational game based on Atari's Adventure. I also considered reviewing Ultima V, which was the first "moral choice" game, but Suskie noted I relied too heavily on knowledge of Ultima IV.

8. Any dead end, you should have confidence it can eventually get recycled into something good. The two reviews above--they'll get done.

9. Word 2000 and a cheap/simple text editor are a HUGE help. The first, for the negative proofreading/grammar police stuff--there may be other freeware proofreaders like StarOffice, I don't know--and the second, for simply organizing everything you want to do. I use NoteTab Standard, which cost $20 (well worth it) and lets you use outlines in a simple text document as well as tabs.

10. Have fun. Don't feel obliged to keep your old style or find a new one. There'll be ups and downs. They are part of the experience. Even when you get better at writing, the downs will still be there. You just won't notice they're higher than before. If you have writer's block, take a few screenshots of your favorite stuff. That lets you ask what's most important without Being Important.

So I wrote reviews for new systems--FDS, SNES, TG16, TI99--and have some planned for others. I found side projects for a few FAQs and reviews, and I nailed down future plans. I approach reviews a lot differently than 9-10 weeks ago. It was definitely worth it.

Game of the Day: SunDog, still

[reply][view replies (1)]

Well, that was quick. I got distracted from making a TT recap by a new old game I thought I'd look at a bit--then I figured out what to do--and it got really interesting, and I figured how to make maps from the save states.

The game's called Sundog: the Frozen Legacy, which explains the post title, and it's a good one, a trading game where you fly between galaxies to trade stuff. This is extremely inventive for 1984 (the only game with similar features that I remember is Pinball Construction set) and it even has a joystick interface where you move to a button and click on it. When I played it as a kid I was blown away by the interfaces and didn't know what the hell to do, and anyway beggars and robbers kept asking me for money, and I kept getting my butt whipped.

Fortunately there are online resources including a page by the creator, Bruce Webster. None has Apple maps or a complete walkthrough. This looks like a really good game to put maps up at GameFAQs for, and I have just submitted the first such map, so watch this space.

The only downside is that between Sundog and Rescue Raiders--and Shadowkeep, which I asked to have added to HG's database before I got stuck midway through--I can't think of other Apple games to explore. I'm open to old-school suggestions. I was also pleasantly surprised to see other people--ok, 1 other person--also still chipping away.

Game of the Day: Sundog

[reply][view replies (0)]

You saw last week's. The only real shifts are what you'd expect. I drop for getting swept, Espiga goes up for 1-2 against Suskie, who drops slightly, and True flipflops with woodhouse.

suskie 2303 c
1 bbobb 2211 7
boo 2197 c
janus 2141 c
emp 2124 c
2 zig 2095 3
3 true 2094 8
4 venter 2079 6
od 2067 c
5 zipp 2065 1
6 woodhouse 2046 4
7 doi 2015 12
felix 1994 c
8 espiga 1980 13
9 wolfqueen 1964 2
10 aschultz 1956 9
11 sashanan 1930 15
12 de 1912 5
13 belisarios 1895 11
14 randxian 1876 16
dagoss 1875 c
15 turducken 1873 17
16 disco 1813 10
will 1798 c
17 vortex 1695 14

More final observations, by the numbers:

Janus was the best 2nd-best player on his team. True was the 2nd-best 2nd-best.

Espiga was the "best worst." I was the 2nd-best worst.

Bbobb was a fantastic pick. Disco1960 didn't work out so well, but looking through his reviews I didn't find one I disliked. And if Disco had beaten me in round 4, where Sportsman admitted to making a tough choice, Team Janus goes to the playoffs in place of Team EmP--all other things being equivalent. Team Janus had 2 of the very best and 1 at 2nd-bottom but seemed to lose at the exact wrong times.

DoI stumbled late while being a great pick before. EmP got the order wrong for drafting his teammates.

Despite bluberry being disappointed Espiga wrote nothing new, Espiga did well by the numbers. The numbers don't reflect that he may've been running on fumes after his best reviews were out there, though.

I'm not sure whether having such strong teammates helped me or hurt my individual ratings. I would guess it hurt me--I'd guess everyone brings their best against the team at the top of the standings. While I'd hoped to be 12th or better in these final standings, that vs winning the team tourney is a no brainer. My teammates helped me get better with their own reviews, their comments on mine, and their faith I could do my thing. And that's the sort of thing numbers can't capture, blah, blah.

I've mentioned I enjoyed my opponents' reviews vs me more than theirs in other rounds. Looking over things again convinces me I was pretty objective about this. I also enjoyed facing different people in the playoffs than the regular season. Again, I didn't get to mix things up as much as I'd hoped, but there will be future tournaments for that.

Woodhouse seemed to be clutch, and I'm surprised his rating was relatively low. Unfortunately I never tweaked the ratings so that it factors how much your wins mean to the team. I think footballoutsiders.com has a method for that, but it's beyond the time I have, and it's probably proprietary anyway. I just worked out expected value. Woodhouse's loss to disco1960 probably pulled him down significantly, yet Team Boo still won--bad luck again there, Team Janus.

I also summed up the team individual ratings to give an index, and the results are about what you'd expect. I dropped turducken/vortex to 24th--that's where their composite rating went--and bumped disco and Will up one.

1 suskie 24
2 boo 28
2 janus 28
4 EmP 35
5 overdrive 36 (overdrive overperforms: good team management got them to 3rd)
6 felix 39
7 will 50
8 dagoss 60

One other thing: ironically, in the playoffs, a teammate winning dropped one of your opponent's ratings. That is, if you had different matchups the next time around.

[reply][view replies (4)]

If you don't mind tire tracks stamped "Team Suskie" on them.

I think Bluberry picked good matchups--my little statistical whatchamajigger says there's a range of .12 expected wins, based on the ratings and so forth. Actually it had the ideal matchup for him switching True and me, but it was minimally better. Straight up matchups would've been best for Team Suskie, but with a close 1.64-1.36 match expected (in favor of the good guys,) a surprise good review--to either side--can tip the scales unexpectedly. So, as before, the numbers are neat and shiny but don't mean too much.

Team Suskie is in an interesting position, though, and it reminds me of the 1989 Green Bay Packers when I used to follow football. They vaguely needed three teams to lose in the last week of the season. Each was favored, though the chance all three would win was low, and each wound up winning. Eagles beat the Cardinals, Rams scored a late TD in a seesaw game vs the Patriots, whose QB missed a wide open receiver the last play of the game, and Minnesota held on against Cincinnati, in a Monday night game no less--the football gods strung me out til the end! Thus did the Packers lose the privilege of getting killed by the 49ers in the divisional playoffs.

So ironically, the Packers, who managed wonderfully BS comebacks against other teams' prevent defenses all year--the best being a loss actually, 38-7 to the Rams to "only" 41-38, couldn't mount the season-long comeback that put them in the playoffs. Next year, the NFL added another wild card team. Three years later, the Pack WAS that sixth team. They suffered the first of three flattenings by the Cowboys, who then punked out and lost to the third-year Panthers rather than let the Pack have some revenge in their Super Bowl year.

How is this possibly relevant? Well, one of True and me needs to win or Team Suskie is cooked--with the ideal matchup we'd both have a ~40% chance, so hoping Suskie beats Espiga (our best shot based on past results but obviously no gimme) it'd be bad to bet straight-up on either of us, but both of us--that's worth a straight up bet to break even.

Math trivia: if p(true wins)=p(i win)=p(woodhouse/blu both win) then p=1/the golden ratio.

[reply][view replies (2)]

Provided with little comment and the usual disclaimer that anyone is capable of a whopping good review. Not much movement, which is not surprising with fewer matches this week AND with more overall matches stabilizing ratings. left = draft pick, right = rank. Nonplayers may lose or win a few points based on how their opponents or opponents' opponents did.

Only comment here is how well zigfried did despite everyone throwing their best at him. These formulas don't take into account who focused on which opponent or who saved their best review for when.

suskie 2332 c
1 bbobb 2207 7
boo 2168 c
janus 2137 c
emp 2116 c
2 zig 2092 3
3 true 2078 8
4 venter 2078 6
5 zipp 2070 1
6 woodhouse 2063 4
od 2062 c
7 doi 2019 12
felix 1995 c
8 aschultz 1977 9
9 wolfqueen 1972 2
10 espiga 1964 13
11 sashanan 1931 15
12 de 1913 5
13 belisarios 1904 11
14 randxian 1879 16
dagoss 1869 c
15 turducken 1862 17
16 disco 1820 10
will 1796 c
17 vortex 1697 14

[reply][view replies (3)]

So a fellow guide writer at GameFAQs mentioned an NES RPG called Shadow Brain. It's part Japanese, part English. It's pretty paint-by-numbers, so I'm able to figure out most of what to do. I was able to find which bytes did what--a lot of the game is, oddly, in English. It'll have text like "ID A" and so forth. So you know you have to get ID Card A. There are also lots of pictures with devices that hook up to a computer, and you have a sort of depiction of the Internet before it really existed. Games like that are neat, though Neuromancer did it better.

Still it's enormously frustrating not to be able to read stuff--or to know that you've changed something, because the letters look different and the numbers do, because you gained X hit points--and knowing that if you could, it'd be very easy. Like most people here, I've been literate from a young age. But I've always wondered what it's like to feel illiterate, or not be able to read.

In some of my work I run past Hebrew text or Arabic text, or other languages. I can just cut and paste all that now into Google translate. Games are one of the few places I can't cut and paste for, and given that there's an immediate emotional need to know--I just want to solve the darn game--I really do feel the frustration of not understanding the game. Coupled with being able to byte edit my character into gaining the items I want, being Japanese-illiterate leaves me quite frustrated & will hopefully spur me to make the small jumps to learn how to read the basic alphabets.

It's not the first time a Japanese game left me baffled, but at some points I realized mucking around with the game would be clearly less productive long-term than 15-30 minutes a day to learn things. There are internet resources, of course.

Game of the Day: Shadow Brain(NES)

[reply][view replies (0)]

Well Zigfried's topic finally pushed me over the edge. Some of GUTS's reviews go too far for me. But this one has something special. It's a swipe at Masters, but then they became friends a month later, so that's okay.

Archive.org is a wonderful site.

==============================

Unlike the other person that reviewed this title, I won't make you wade through 16 paragraphs of irrelevant ''wit'' just to read 3 sentences about the game. Want to know if it's good or not? Here's the lowdown.

GAMEPLAY
Lord of the Sword is a side-scrolling action adventure game, the closest comparison I can think of would be Shadow of the Beast 1 or 2. You fight your way through action stages, talk to a few people in town, find some new weapons, you know the routine. It's non-linear in that you can go many different directions at any given time, it's up to you to figure which way is the correct path. If you're the type of person who just likes stage after stage of intense action without any RPG elements, you'll definitely dislike it. But if you enjoy an action game with some exploration and puzzle solving, you'll most likely dig it like I did.

The story is pretty lame, but what 8bit game had a good story? Phantasy Star? Yeah that's about it. Anyway, the control is actually good, I don't know what the other guy's problem was. For weapons you get a sword (which you will upgrade later on by finding a couple better ones), and a bow. The bow is good for taking out annoying flying things from a distance. You'll use the sword the most, obviously. I personally really dug the crouching animation, you draw and strike like a samurai, it looks pretty kick ass. I'd always kill guys from a crouch just cause it looked so cool, hah. Pressing up makes you jump, which works fine, I never found myself jumping on accident like in some games with the same control scheme. Perhaps if my thumb was swollen from perusing a thesaurus all day it might present a problem.

I really liked how the game was layed out, you proceed from one area to the next through action stages, and sometimes there will be multiple paths where you can go up stairs or keep on straight ahead. There's a map if you press pause that will tell you where you are in the kingdom. The nice part about the game is that, yeah initially you'll have to backtrack a lot to figure out where you're supposed to go, but once you discover the order of things you can get through it pretty quick. This is why it reminds me so much of Shadow of the Beast, it's all about figuring out where you're supposed to go and when.

Interacting with people is pretty minimal, so most of the time you'll be hacking your way through an action stage, but talking to people is important to open up new pathways and to gain hints on where to go. Entering and leaving houses regains your health, so anytime you're in town, just enter and exit a bunch of times and you'll be healed. You only have one life with no continues to beat the game, so be careful. It's not that difficult to survive, hell I did it and I can't even beat Strider! But I can see where a baby would start crying about halfway through the game because he wasn't watching himself and got smoked, requiring him to start over. This game is NOT a fast paced action game, if you try to rush through you're going to die.

The one drawback to the game is that there isn't a save feature of any kind. Welcome to the 80s! But once you figure the first few objectives out, the rest of the game is a breeze. It'll take you maybe a couple hours tops to beat it, which is very reasonable for one sitting.

GRAPHICS
Pretty damn sweet for 8bit. All the sprites are big, and they're very colorful. I'd say this is one of the better looking Master System games, and definitely puts most stuff on the NES to shame. It's worth checking it out just for the cool animations of the main character, he's like a cross between a samurai and a medieval soldier.

OVERALL
I'd say this game is pretty decent, nothing great, but most definitely NOT bad. Plus it's cheap as hell, so why not pick it up? At the least you'll get a little entertainment out of it, at most you may really enjoy it and want to beat it like I did.

As you can tell this isn't my favorite game in the world, but I couldn't let the game get a bad rap just cause somebody wanted to show off their vocabulary. Here's a tip to all reviewers: TRY ACTUALLY BEATING THE GAME BEFORE YOU REVIEW IT! What a concept! Don't play half an hour, then rush to the computer with your thesaurus and start typing out a hybrid comedy routine/thesis on your childhood with maybe a paragraph of actual information about the game. No one cares about you, your life, or your vocabulary, and you're so definitely not funny. The end.

[reply][view replies (2)]

To follow up on my post about ratings, I thought it'd be interesting to see how much home field might be worth. So with the ratings in hand from the previous post, I schlopped together all 6 matchup possibilities given 6 ratings. Here is what I found, in terms of expected wins based on the formula expected wins=1/(10^(diff/400)):

Suskie vs OD
1.812 = maximum (Suskie vs Venter, True vs Belisarios, ASchultz vs Overdrive)
1.713 = minimum (Suskie vs Belisarios, True vs Venter, ASchultz vs Overdrive)

Boo vs EmP
1.713 = maximum (Boo vs EmP, Woodhouse vs DoI, Espiga vs DE)
1.657 = minimum (Boo vs DE, Woodhouse vs EmP, Espiga vs DoI)

So home field advantage vs "on the road" offers a potential .06 to .10 shift in expected votes. Home field advantage is half that (neutral would be in the middle,) or .03 to .05. That makes 1% to 1.7%.

Compare this to college basketball, where home field is worth about 3.5 points, and teams average 70 points a game, roughly. Home field offers a shift of 3.5/140=2.5%.

Or compare it to college football, where I'd guess teams totaled 45 points per game, with HFA being 3 points. That is 3/45 or a whopping 7%.

Given that it's hard to quantify how good some writing is, or how to appeal to a certain judge(who may rightfully get tired of seeing too much of style X and say so,) or how ratings are still bobbling up and down, home field advantage would seem statistically insignificant. Especially since any one person can sit down and write something brilliant, or draw a blank, in any given week.

But that's a reason home field advantage can be wildly significant and decisive, as the home team may have a secret weapon review to spring on the Other Guys.

So it appears home field is nice, but it's absolutely no substitute for writing well. Which we knew. But I guess it's quantified a bit now.

[reply][view replies (8)]

Archived Posts:
[01] [02] [03] [04] [05] [06]