I've recently been playing through the NES Legend of Zelda; a game I played a lot as a kid. In the preinternet era I somehow spent enough time in this game to know every secret, every hidden door, and could beat the game in a single play through.
However, one aspect never really spent much time on was the "money making game" aka, the basic gambling game where you choose one of three options and randomly either won or lost rupees. I didn't spend much time playing it as a kid, because I had the distinct memory that it wasn't a good choice, ie, it had a negative expected value (I'm not sure I would have phrased it quite like that as an 8 year old, but I digress). Another side note, while I didn't play it much, the idea of a random gambling minigame inside an unrelated game always stuck with me, and directly sparked the inclusion of a similar concept in the game pirate2, which you're undoubtedly familiar with.
Anyway, this is turning into a long post which is just a couple links, but I was wondering if the MMG was in fact a bad value or if there was any secrets there I didn't know about. So, I started search for the answer, and came across these two very labor intensive analyses of the game, which come from totally different angles.
The first is a look at the assembly code of the game itself to see how the RNG worked, and what exactly the distribution of negative and positive payoffs was.
The second was just a guy who played the game 500 times and kept track of the outcomes.
They both reached the same conclusion: The right rupee is the worst choice and the middle rupee is the best choice. In fact, the middle rupee does have a positive expected value, and so you can expect to make money playing it, in the long run.
