Dear Nintendo,
Hi! It's me! Austin!
And since I always drag these intros on and people complain about it, we're gonna try something new!
How
overpowered
and cataclysmically dangerous
is the home run bat in Super Smash Brothers?
Boom! Simple premise, simple math, terrifying conclusions. I am NAILING it today. Let's do this!
Super Smash Brothers is a franchise that started in 1999 with Super Smash Brothers 64
and it's Nintendo's Brawley answer to Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct
where you finally get to settle the playground debates about who would win in a no-holds-barred smackdown
between Samus Aran, Captain Falcon and Pikachu. It's -
It was Pikachu. In 1999 it was always Pikachu.
This game ROCKED, and it was easily one of the best games on the Nintendo 64
and other than Goldeneye, it was the only one that I remember super fondly after all these years.
Get out of my way, Natalya! Gaahhh!
Okay, I guess it's the only one I remember fondly anymore
Anyway,
The home run bat was introduced in this game and it has been a staple ever since.
It's the blue shell of Super Smash Brothers
Which, yes, I know may be confusing since there's an actual blue shell in Super Smash Brothers
but I mean, come on, just let me have this one. Okay?
The home run bat is a potentially game ending super weapon
that, when swung correctly, can hit a character SO hard
they uncontrollably fly off the screen and DIE, no matter how much damage has been done to them!
So naturally, I needed to figure out how disastrous this beast is.
So! Let's. Dig. Into it.
The first question I have to answer is: is it actually that dangerous at all?
This may seem confusing to some of you who are casual fans of Super Smash Brothers, or heck, aren't fans at all
But surprisingly, there IS lore for this game.
In fact, to prepare for this episode
I actually watched Matt's episode on the topic and as a result I was--
[Sobbing]
Totally fine
I promise!
but here's the short version for you:
Super Smash brothers isn't actually a bunch of Nintendo characters duking it out in real life
This is actually, instead, all things that are happening
inside the imagination of a kid playing with Nintendo toys in his room.
This is shown literally in the intro of the first Super Smash Brothers, and then little snippets here and there as the games progress,
and the child ages into a man, which immediately creates a problem of scale.
How big even are these miniatures?
Because if he's literally throwing these things around as they get hit with imaginary bats and what we see on screen is just his imagination
then it's entirely possible that the bat isn't all that scary at all.
Now, using an impressive combination of deductive reasoning, surveying techniques, pulling my hair out,
angle measurements, the exact dimensions of the Nintendo 64, geometry, astrophysics
and losing my f**king mind!
I was able to figure out the size of the Mario figurine in Super Smash Brothers Melee
and it was NOT easy
and, as I'll explain in a minute, ultimately irrelevant!
But just so you know, it was a little over three and a half inches
But then I realized that one of you annoying, adorable little punks in the comments will be like
"But what about the home run contest that has lengths measured in feet?"
Which, you know, is OBNOXIOUS!
But, FINE! I'll dispel your little objection, your majesties.
The home run contest was introduced in Super Smash Brothers Melee,
and basically you smack a sandbag with ya' bat,
or if you're a POWER GAMER, you find a sneaky workaround using Ganon,
and it FLIIIIIEEES off and you get points! Simple, right?
So all I got to do to dispel this problem is hop into a contest with Mario, okay.
Measure his height in pixels and use that to determine how tall the sandbag SHOULD be
according to canon, air quotes, "real world" proportions.
Given a canon Mario height of 1.55 meters
this means that our sandbag should, in THEORY, be 2 meters and 9 centimeters, or just under 7 feet
And if I smack this bad boy and use the feet traveled versus the notches on the ground,
I can determine that each one of these notches is about 3.26 feet long - basically a meter
And if the bag is about 2 notches long, it means that the bag is...
6, and a half feet....?
Wait a min- holy crap, 6.53 feet.
That's, practically no different from the Mario measurements!
I mean, if we take a notch to be exactly a meter since 3.26 feet is just .02 feet shy of being a full meter,
that means that the difference is even smaller than that! And the sandbag is exactly 2 meters high in the world!
Which means our margin for error from pixel measurements is 5%
which is a lot in a statistics class,
But it's practically zero in a world of pixel measurements when perspectives can be really often imprecise!
Why is it such a big deal that Mario's canon height and the dimensions of the world are consistent?
Because well for ONE, it shows that Nintendo has known Mario's cannon height all the way back in 2001,
and was making core design choices around it. Good job Nintendo!
But even more important for THIS video,
It means that we don't judge the physics on what we see on screen as little toys flying around
because while that's what's happening in the "real world",
in the constrained universe of Super Smash Brothers inside this boy's imagination,
things are following the laws of physics to scale.
Which is GOOD, because it makes the math AWESOME instead of BORING,
and it is BAD, because I spent TWO FRICKIN' DAYS figuring out how big one of these miniatures is!
[unintelligible]
[Classical music]
Alright.
This bat. Let's do this. Gotta calculate how powerful this thing is,
And thankfully I have two, that's right, TWO metrics figured out:
What is obviously Mario's height, but WAY more importantly is Mario's mass.
89.937 kilograms, which if you're curious, I figured out in THIS episode about how Mario flies.
Science is about standardizing as much as you possibly can, and Mario is one of our most reliable standards.
And today we're gonna be focusing on these two things AND one more:
His nose.
That'll make sense in a second!
Physics in Super Smash Brothers is calculated every frame,
unless you're in slow motion, in which case, they're calculated based on the frame rate the game WOULD be at - not really that important!
in order to figure out how fast our character is moving and how much force is needed,
we need to do some STRICT measurements,
which is where the all-important nose comes from!
When struck with the bat, mario freezes for a bit and enters this folded position.
When he starts to move, in order to figure out how FAST he moves, we have to measure THIS distance,
and in order to be the MOST ACCURATE we have to use the Pythagorean Theorem
But before that we need two reliable points to measure from which is when I
Noticed his nose. His nose is just
Perfect, and you can make a perfect X by lining up the bottom and the top of his nose that can be a perfect point
Both from position a and position B, then we can draw a right angle and use the Pythagorean theorem
Which says that this length here squared is equal to this side squared plus this side squared
Rearrange this into this use Mario's height as a reference and bada-bing bada-boom
We have an 89 kilogram Mario flying off at a whopping 33 meters per seconds or almost
75 miles per hour and accelerating at a rate of over
200 meters per second or over
20 G's. Holy Crap!
But it gets worse because while you could survive these forces if you're in say a car the forces aren't being delivered by a
huge car they're being delivered by a freaking BASEBALL BAT!
A BAT that measures approximately
1.2 meters high and has a striking surface of
46 point nine centimeters by 16 centimeters which gives it an area of point zero seven six square meters.
And why am I telling you this?
Because it would take approximately
18,037 Newtons or approximately the amount of force output by a car engine to launch you off at that speed and when you spread
that force out across an area you get what's called pressure, Newtons per square meter. Pressure is a big freakin' deal
It's why stepping on a single nail can send you to the hospital but most people could lay on a bed of nails
No problem, because a force of your body and gravity which is your weight is spread out
simultaneously across many points that together amount to a much wider
surface area which greatly reduces the pressure your body experiences from an individual needle.
So while if you were in a car experiencing this force all over your body, you'd probably be fine
although you'd probably throw up because you know 20 G's but No..! This thing right here is going right into
Mario's gut, that means broken bones, ruptured internal organs, shattered nerves, internal bleeding. This dude is freaking toast!
Good thing he re-spawns But, But, But, But, But it gets much much worse than this
This is just the tip of the iceberg
The previous math is for Mario getting smacked at 0% damage
damage and Super Smash Brothers works differently than it does in most fighting games the more damage that's done to you the more you
Get knocked back by attacks
Which means someone with 50% damage flies?
Faster than someone with 0% and so on
So naturally I calculated how fast someone hit with the bat at 200% damage would fly 87 m/s or almost 200 miles per hour
Nice, but what about more?
MORE!
I NEED MORE! What about
MAXIMUM DAMAGE?!.
Oh, children this is when it gets out of control.
When hit with the home run bat at
999 percent damage, the highest number in the game Mario - our 89 kilogram Mario - becomes a freaking
ballistic missile, rocketing off at
272 meters per second - over 609 miles per hour!
The dude is barely onscreen for enough frames to measure, where's his nose? I can't find his frickin nose!
Who's got your nose little buddy?
At this speed Mario would be
experiencing 16,338 meters per second squared of acceleration
or over 16...
*BURP*
or over 1,600 G's.
This guy, this FREAKING guy is a human baseball. Forget broken bones and shattered blood vessels,
this guy would be split into
PIECES as he flew through the air like a human shotgun shell!
Getting hit with this baseball bat would be like getting hit with a 25 millimetre anti-aircraft shell!
And then there's a person swinging the bat - remember Newton's third law of motion, says
Exactly: "Actioni contrariam semper et æqualem esse reactionem: sive corporum duorum actiones
in se mutuo semper esse æquales et in partes
contrarias dirigi." What, no Latin scholars in here? *sigh*
Fine! "To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction: or the mutual
actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts."
This means that the person
swinging the bat is just as screwed, as the same level of
energy travels down the length of the bat into their hands shattering every bone
it comes into contact with. Up the arms, down the muscles, dissipating as it goes (probably not killing them, but definitely
dislocating both shoulders) causing severe bruising, infection risk from internal bone damage and microfractures and either snapped tendons and muscles or
dislocated hips. Pick your poison! They both suck!
So yeah, this thing makes no freaking sense.
I guess that means that when you respawn you're not actually the same character. You are DEAD.
Someone just switched on a cloning machine and sent down a new pile of meat for the fight.
Super! Just never say this game is less violent than Mortal Kombat
It's got a death bat. And don't think I've forgotten about the hammer either! They may be cartoon violence
but it's cartoon violence that would destroy you and everything you love in real life.
You know, while I was at VidCon people kept asking me what I do on YouTube.
Uhhh I uhhh...
THIS here is what I do, but I realised something. There's a reason why I do this.
It's not just fun to tear things apart using numbers,
(although it is) but it's because I find research and math fun!
I love it. And I think in school, especially public schools we get these tools, these
amazing tools that can be used to answer
amazing questions from how deadly would the home run bat be in real life to how do we send scientists to the moon?
Math and science are tools to answer questions
I think that's something that's lost a lot in the classroom,
when you're forced to work on problems over and over and over and over and
over again! Don't even get me started on word problems. "If a train is moving west at 50 miles per hour
And another train is moving east at 20 miles per hour. The track is 300 miles long.
How long until" - they fall asleep from BOREDOM!
Dear Lord! Word problems should be the best part of math, but they're the WORST!
Boooo!
Boooo School!
YEAH DEAD MARIOS!!
Math is fun when you're killing Nintendo characters. Class dismissed!
Sincerely, Austin.
Oh, yeah, and uh.. don't forget to subscribe to the Game Theorists right here
and if you're already subscribed, hit the little bell down there to get notifications, when it happens
DO IT CAUSE I SAID SO!
*Deep Inhale*