

Data Mining Infinite Mario - bweber
http://bweber.posterous.com/adding-telemetry-to-infinite-mario

======
rcfox
Can't be bothered to create yet another account to comment, so here's my
constructive criticism:

Why did you bother with the web interface for recording your statistics? Why
not do it directly from the game?

Also, I think it might be more interesting to know which enemies caused the
most deaths. Just saying that enemies caused the most deaths isn't very useful
to anyone who has played any variants of Super Mario.

~~~
kjrr
Knowing which enemies cause the most deaths is a way to measure the
'deadliness' of an enemy, which is important for making it adaptive. It's a
poor measurement, however, since the actual situation that causes a Mario
death comes from groups of enemies.

Infinite Mario needs to work out some serious gameplay bugs before worrying
about statistics. Enemies that come up from underneath Mario aren't supposed
to cause deaths, the bullets aren't supposed to be affected by gravity (nor
are they supposed to flicker), and the plants are found neither outside of
their pipes nor walking/hopping around. My experience playing it was
infuriating, since it didn't respond like a normal Mario game. I'd die
multiple times hitting a hopping enemy from above, because I was coming down
as it came up.

Then I looked in the code... there's a lot of copy/paste going on, so I
couldn't be bothered to hack at it and make it less lame.

