This Arcade Game is a SCAM (I have proof)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited in threads on rigged arcade machines and gambling-like games as the clearest demonstration that skill games can be tuned to be unwinnable.
What it is
Mark Rober builds a machine that plays the Cyclone arcade game with perfect timing and discovers the game is rigged so that perfect play still loses. The video explains the physics and electronics tricks behind carnival-style skill games.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends gowld · 2019-01 · on “YouTube Stars Are Pushing a Shady Gambling Site”
Back in the legacy world of arcades and carnivals, Mark Rober did some nice videos about the analog/physic and electronic tricks of scam games: [LINK] [this video] It's quite a problem that all these gambling scams are (to more or lesser extent) regulated in geographic jurisdictions, but Internet-bsaed systems bypass all local sovereignty. How long before the governments step up and demand that all Internet businesses get import licenses and traffic must pass through "customs" at each ISP "port of entry" for their goods and services?
Recommends pavel_lishin · 2019-03 · on “The Elaborate, Dying Art of Hustling for Money at Dave and Buster's”
> You aren't just using skills and competing with physics. You are competing with software that is affecting the outcome. Mark Rober covered this in a pretty decent YouTube video: [this video]
Cites sethammons · 2021-07 · on “Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine”
Reminds me of this one: [this video] Guy builds a robot to time pressing the button to get the light to land on the winning sections and demonstrates it is not skill but a random number generator.
Cites ericpruitt · 2021-07 · on “Sega sued for ‘rigged’ arcade machine”
Mark Rober also made a video about this for a machine that works similarly. Rober built a machine to play the game perfectly, and it still lost: [this video]
Cites kbenson · 2021-07 · on “One Tenth of a Second”
Yeah, that's also along what I was thinking (as noted later), but also I think you can also get close or achieve if you can prime yourself because you know the event is coming, and get the timing down. Sort of like the cyclone arcade game (if it wasn't a scam[1]). I think there's a huge difference between hitting a random 100ms time and hitting a 100ms time that's coming at a set time that you can see and judge. That's what I meant by "planned", even if it poorly encapsulates that. 1: [this video]
Cites AlexandrB · 2023-09 · on “The Casino in Your Pocket”
Also applies to other supposedly skill based games at arcades, like "Cyclone"[1]. Interesting to contrast this to how pinball machines were considered gambling for a while, even though they were not[2]. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]