And now Game Theorists Theatre presents a dramatic recreation of Bowser stepping on Big Blue.
(Intro)
Hello internet!
Welcome to game theory. The Joker that no one is excited to see enter the smash conversation.
So when I've covered smash in the past
it's always been at a larger scale piecing together the lore searching for secret levels hidden in the game's code doing things like
Calculating the infinite number of ways that you can play this game
All of those episodes are actually linked you right there upper right-hand corner of the screen
But today I actually wanted to do something different. I want to focus on something a little bit smaller a little bit more subdued
One character one move. Seems lame right? But this isn't just any move my friends
It is a move that is faster than Sonic. It is stronger than Ganondorf a move
That is so brutal and violent that takes Gaur Plain and suddenly transforms it into gore
Plain, he for everyone Nintendo, ha, you wish you didn't include this move because it ruins the E for Everyone rating
technically. You see one of my favorite things about smash is its ability to test the limits of character moves and items Smash Brothers is
one of if not
really the only arena to test different fighters from different franchises against each other
You want to race against a super sonic hedgehog and an electric rat,
great! You can do that
How about an all-out slugfest between gaming's two most famous reptilian kings to see which one reigns supreme you can do that, too
I mean I could seriously just watch the compilations of characters trying to leap through longer and narrower
pathways in this game because
You always get surprised by the results like the fact that Little Mac over here who literally cannot recover to save his life is somehow
Able to escape the tallest hit in the game
Faster than you could say final destination no items suck on that Kirby with speed boost and jump ability
That's according to a video by Nintendo unity, by the way
Or the fact that there are multiple ways to create a move that instantly does
laser sword noise
999 percent damage because spirits are broken and this game is fun
But it was while watching another one of these sorts of videos that I was inspired to do
Today's theory you see back in
December the channel community game actually did a video testing out who could survive running on the stage
Big Blue. Now, to catch you up Big Blue is a level inspired by the racing game f-zero a game that takes NASCAR and
cranks the dial up to
11 because now you have racers flying along on the track at
hundreds of miles per hour
Now in Smash the Big Blue stage actually has you fighting atop a jet and then some of the smaller
race cars, all the while while the track is flying by underneath you if you land on that track
It's almost an instant death as the platform's race ahead to leave you in the dust and as a mere off-screen explosion
As such you can also treat the roadway of big blue almost like a giant treadmill a treadmill that is so fast that only the
Fastest characters are able to keep up with it
But according to this community game video even those speedy racers can use the help of an item
this is me injecting those characters with a little bit of extra juice, but not
Deadly juice or steroids or anything like that that this is brand friendly guys
Even though we're talking about brutally murdering childhood mascots when I'm saying extra juice
I mean injecting them with like a bunny hood or a spirit boost or heck some mega mushrooms
Youtuber Aaron Voe did an incredible job of testing to come up with a tier list of everyone's ability to survive this level thus ranking
Everyone's speed and the results are kind of what do you expect sonic is at the top, duh?
The only character who's able to survive solely with the help of a mega mushroom
and then you have Fox Captain Falcon chic and littlemack following around shortly behind now, that's cool and all but there is someone
Who is faster someone who doesn't need items to outpace the racetrack of big blue?
we all assume that sonic over here is the fastest character in this game because it's his brand and all that but he's not it's
Actually Ridley, the fire-breathing space pirate dragon from Metroid, a character that has died
so many times he's got more lives than a cat now Ridley is a brutal character
It says a lot when his introduction to this game series is him literally killing the game's mascot, but it's his forward B attack
That's particularly unique
He can pick up his
Opponent in his talons and then just physically drag them along the ground and if that wasn't violent enough he's actually able to do it
Fast enough to outpace the Falcon flyer in this footage right here. He is actually
outpacing a jet flying above a futuristic NASCAR race
Granted things in the smash brothers series always have to be taken with a grain of salt in the name of balance
We need to tweak things a little bit so that when Palutena who is literally a god faces off against Isabel a Shiba Inu
It doesn't end up as a one sided stomp
but still, the speed and violence of this one move is unprecedented in the Smash Brothers series and when you actually
Stop and do the math behind what's really going on as a part of this move?
It suddenly turns this family-friendly game into a gruesome bloodbath
so be careful the next time you pick your favorite character to play as
Because you might not want I'm having to go through the physical
Horror that this move is gonna subject them to I mean think about this if you've ever scraped your knee on the pavement
You know how much a small low-speed scrape with the ground is gonna do to you just imagine the level of devastation
that would happen if you're going at
whatever speed ridley is going at here. Where others decide to speculate, game theory decides to calculate
*loud clicking noise*
Went on much longer than I expected, and that is exactly what we're gonna do today
[giggling] the first
factor we have to consider here is just how fast a ridley would have to be moving in order to out speed the stage itself
Now when you're playing the game without stage hazards, all you get is the Falcon flyer jetting its way along the racetrack
This isn't particularly helpful for our calculations though. believe it or not
The Falcon flyer never actually appears in any s-0 game
Yeah for as prominent as this thing is in Smash Brothers
It's only connection to the f-zero lore is one frame from one comic from the first game's
Instruction manual and then one page later you have this blatant ripoff of the kingpin from spider-man
No to get an accurate read of this stage of speed
You actually need to turn on stage hazards
Which unleashes a legion of actual race cars that are playable from f-zero games and that part is critical there
F-Zero is a racing game. And so like any good racing game. It has a speedometer that we can then use to gauge
What kind of speeds these racers would be traveling at on the Big Blue course.
Now, to calculate the speed of Big Blue over here in smash ultimate
We actually did 30 runs of the big blue trek over here in f-zero GX
on standard mode now it is worth mentioning that the Big Blue track in Smash is
Very different from how it actually looks in f-zero game
So for consistency's sake we actually wrote down the average speed only on
straightaways. Those 30 runs were spread out across three different racers: Blood Hawk,
Super Falcon, and Fire Stingray, all cars that we see in Super Smash Brothers across all that data. We found an average speed of
1087 kilometers an hour which for us still living in americaland is
675.4 miles per hour, which is pretty tame by f-zero standards
but for a bunch of normal fighters that is
LUDICROUS speed "Prepare ship ludicrous for speed". Especially if you're the guy who's getting dragged by the fire breathing space
dragon. From there
we can estimate Ridley's speed it takes just shy of
14 seconds to drag some of the full length of the stage if you want to get exact
It's actually thirteen point nine eight. And in that amount of time. You're actually travelling a distance of around
98.5 feet based on the relative sizes of Fighters Ridley's average speed then would be the speed of the race cars
plus the amount that ridley is gaining on those vehicles for a total of
680.2 miles per hour
680 MILES PER HOUR, that is a hundred miles per hour faster than the speed of a commercial plane
He is almost flying at the speed of sound, which is 761.2 miles per hour
1225 km/h
Technically, he's at point eight eight Mach which is actually an interesting coincidence since point eight eight
Mach is actually a fairly common flying speed
You see most things in life have a most efficient or optimal setting and in the case of flying
This is often based on the shape of a wing, now on average both airliners and fighter jets choose to fly
near the point eight eight Mach speed because they get the best gas mileage
relative to their wing design once you start getting much faster than that
You actually start getting air disturbances from minor shock waves that are produced as you get closer to the speed of sound now
I don't think that any of that was intentional by the smash team
I just think it's a really cool coincidence that ridley finds himself flying at those speeds
Well, I suppose it's cool for him. It is absolutely
devastating for whatever cute Nintendo mascot finds themselves unlucky enough to be gripped in his talons. Let's talk  damage
shall we? People who fall off motorcycles at speeds over 50 miles an hour can expect to get some third-degree road rash
If not worse, now third-degree road rash much like third-degree burns are no joke like exposed muscle and bone
No joke, so if that's 50 miles an hour
Ridley here is dragging people along the road over ten times that speed level
imagine how much more damaging and painful that would be
Oh wait
you don't have to I
calculated it for you to get a better idea of what Ridley Road Rash would look like it's helpful to understand conceptually
What road rash actually is? Why does it hurt to get a sprain? Well scrapes are caused by friction
that's why it doesn't hurt when you go down a slip and fly a slip and slide is specifically designed to have low friction the
rougher the surface though the more
friction there is and the worse the damage is gonna be and there are a few things as rough as
Asphalt and prove it. We actually have a special guest today a portion of Los Angeles's roadways
Los Angelenos you wonder why your potholes are so bad
It's a bunch of us youtubers stealing pieces of your roadway for entertainment YouTube videos
Congratulations, but seriously, look at how rough this thing is. It's like the world's most aggressive loofah sponge
yeah this is bad, but there's one other component of friction here that we have to take into consideration
What's called the normal force force which acts perpendicular to the direction of your motion?
it's basically a more complicated
scientific way of saying, "Hey the harder you're pressed down into something, the more friction you're gonna have."
This combination of the two factors the
Roughness of the surface and how hard you're pressing down when you're rubbing them together is expressed by a fun
Mathematical formula F equals u n now whoever says Sciences and fun hasn't learned about frictional force
equations, am I right?
up top!
uncomfortable silence
We're all we're all my math and science nerds add up top
Silence
Okay, so that first step in the equation is the force of friction F sub f
which equals the coefficient of
friction little you look in number a number that represents the roughness of the surface times the normal force and
The thing that we just talked about. So to know just how much of Mario's face is being turned into a human pavement eraser
Imagine this is Mario. We need to determine two separate things. First. How rough is the track of big blue and
Secondly how much deadly rage is Ridley putting into his
dragging side-b attack as he rubs Mario's face against it and you get this Oh,
Mario that's a couple inches shorter and
Also a scratch knuckle cue
The first question is easy
We'll assume that the track is just asphalt like most other NASCAR tracks now in all fairness f-zero racers
Do use futuristic magnetic levitation systems that let them hover above the track
So there is a slim chance that the tracks made of some smooth metal like titanium
But considering the fact that Ridley performs this move across all sorts of surfaces
Across all different textures using asphalt here isn't gonna be that much of a stretch
therefore our coefficient of friction is going to be
0.9. Then comes the question of how hard Ridley's pushing people down into the stage. Now
Ridley doesn't seem like the type to pull his punches
So what's calculated as though he's pushing his victim down into the ground using his full weight Ridley in the games
Doesn't have a cannon weight heck, Ridley doesn't even have himself a cannon height
I mean his size is
Constantly changing across the metroid series. You thought the ridley is too big meme was only an argument for smash brothers fandoms
Ah think again friends. Here's Ridley's height compared to Samus in the original Metroid for the NES and
Here is his height in metroid zero mission
Which is supposed to be a remake of this original game in Metroid 1. Here's Ridley
He's like 25% taller than Samus and then over here in zero mission. He is a literally
111% taller than Samus he is literally
Double samus's height. And if you want more examples of Ridley's fluctuating size over the course of these games
Montage time!
So, why does any of this matter?
Well, Ridley's size relative to Samus is important because, while Ridley doesn't have himself a cannon size
Samus does, according to the Metroid to manual Samus in her suit is a hundred and ninety centimeters tall
Which means that she is six foot three inches. From there
We can use smashes character scaling to our advantage for like the first time ever in one of these theories
It allows us to settle the disagreement that exists around exactly how big ridley is relative to Samus
Obviously the scaling in these games isn't exact
But if there's one thing that we can count on it's that these games try to be somewhat faithful to their source material
I mean Sonic is really fast Bowser is slow but powerful and heck
Villagers stone cold stare is just as soulless as it ever was in the animal crossing games
Fire Burning
And, with that said, we can actually find out that Ridley's model appears to be about
25% taller than Samus the same as he was back in the Metroid 1, so we're gonna go with that, that would make him
238 centimetres standing up or about 7 foot 10 inches tall
Using this approximation of Ridley size, we can actually now estimate his weight
based on all the details from Ridley's design
He most closely approximates an American alligator a reptile that actually weighs in between 200 and 400
kilograms or in americaland
440 pounds and 790 pounds
With his height just under 8 foot Ridley would actually trend on the smaller size for the species
So we're just gonna take that lower bound as the range
440 pounds now ladies and gentlemen, it is finally time to have some fun and by fun
I mean plugging hypothetical numbers into a scientific formula that has a cute acronym to remember it
solving for f we find that the frictional force is
2478 Newtons which is
Meaningless
Newtons are always weird to interpret so you know what today we're not caring about the digits we care about the
damage, so let's translate this into some destruction, shall we? Now, in a past episode of game theory covering
just how deadly Mario Kart races are, we determined that in a car wreck for every mile per hour you're going over 30
You're gonna lose one millimeter of your body, roll the clip
since the average thickness of human skin is 1.3 millimeters at
31 miles per hour you hit the ground you're looking at losing most of the skin that's covering up your delicate inner parts
Ridley is dragging you
650 miles per hour faster than that, that means
65 centimeters of your favorite characters body is just disappearing into the pavement
That's this, and then another one of these and then, like five more centimeters
25.5 inches
Over two feet of human flesh or poke a flashier Kirby flesh just gone erased
Also notice how Ridley is actually doing the dragging over your character's body
He's not using you like the long end of a pencil here. He is dragging you looooong ways
that means each and every inch of your body is feeling the burn and then guess what it's not feeling that burn anymore because it's
Just ground away into nothingness. It is gone. Your body isn't two feet thick
I mean you might be thick but not that thick you're just gone, and wait
that's not all, that number is assuming you don't have a
400-pound space dragon shoving your face into the dirt if you don't think that's gonna affect the numbers at all
Well, then you don't game theory, bro
If you're not having two feet of your body just outright erased was bad now for every mile per hour over 30 Ridley's going suddenly
You're losing yourself three point five millimeters of flesh
Yeah
that is two thousand two hundred and seventy five millimeters of flesh ripped clean off your body nearly 90 inches or
seven and a half
Feet rubbed into the ground by this one move
It doesn't matter if he's holding you sideways up ways down ways diagonal ways
Who cares? You are just gone, you are rubbed away into oblivion
the pencil that your body
eraser is attached to is suddenly squeaking against the paper that it's trying to erase because the metal is now hitting it and
Just thinking about that sound is making me cringe the worst feeling ever just pencil's man
Sure, your damage counter may only be reading a mere 17 percent or 20 percent or whatever
But Ridley has just cheese grater your Jigglypuff into the ground in this game. Yeah, it's all for fun
It's all cute. Oh, look at our favorite characters punch each other in the face. Yeah, super fun
No in real life if you do the math Ridley is literally ripping you to shreds
Using the ground forget mariokart being the deadliest Nintendo game ladies and gentlemen
We have ourselves a new champion
So the next time you're looking at that huge roster of faces all begging you to choose them now with the new additions of Joker
and piranha plant
There's only one clear choice to make, if you want to brutalize your opponent
and I mean really make them hurt. The choice is obvious
Ridley
everytime, even if you don't officially win the match you and I and all the rest of us theorists will know that you are
doing a heck of a lot more damage than Nintendo over here cares to admit
But hey, that's just a theory, A GAME THEORY!
Thanks for watching!
Erase me away
This is me erasing away
Ah no, I'm being rubbed into a dirt, it's very painful! (LOL)
