The Journal

WarioLand

Or "Sometimes gambling pays off".

I think it was Christmas '94 when my parent got me the WarioLand cartridge for the Game Boy. I was in love with Super Mario Land 2, I thought it was the greatest game of all times, it was fast, it was funny, full of power-ups, mini-games and secret levels. Also, Mario could sprint all throughout the game.

WarioLand had a culinary theme, levels were called courses and words were related to kitchen items or culinary terms or foods. Every time you ended a level you could choose between two mini-games or to skip to the loot -and treasure- storaging.

The mini-game I never played was ßa game of pure chance, you had two buckets above your head and you could choose either to pull one of the buckets or to bail out. Inside the buckets were either a burlap sack full of money or a 50 tons (10 tons? Can't remember right now) weight that fell on Wario's head. By finding money you doubled your level loot, otherwise you would half it (rounded to the lower number).

I never played that game because I've never liked betting but I never realized that the rewards were much higher than the losses up until recently. By playing all 3 tries you have 4 different outcomes: 8x with a chance of 12.5%, 2x with a chance of 37.5%, 0.5x with a chance of 37.5% and 0.125x with a chance of 12,5%. From a purely statistical point of view by playing the same match 8 times you should have a Total = 8x + 6x + 1.5x + 0.125x = 15.625x. The average gain per game then should be AvgGain = Total / 8x = 15.625x / 8x = 1.9525, almost doubling whatever you were making before the game. This proved to be helpful by playing the secret level in World 1, that gives you always 91 coins at the end. By playing that level 8 times you should statistically have almost 15.625 * 91 = 1421 coins. By playing that level about 60 times you should collect more than 10000 coins. Obviously being a game of chances there's always the risk of blowing away the loot. One of the limitations also is that you cannot win more 999 coins of loot.

Why would I put myself through all this? Because at the end of the game, when counting up the loot all 15 treasures would be worth 90000 coins, and by collecting at least other 10000 coins you would win The World. Which was way bigger than anything Mario ever won on Game Boy. Suck it Mario!

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