RC Pro-Am-You know what I hated? That peach-colored car in RC pro-am for Nintendo. That car was a dirty, dirty cheater. You’d be in the lead, and omfg it would come barreling out of nowhere and rob you of a win. I hated that car with a fury of a thousand suns. I’d spent the whole race stocking up on missiles just to wreck his sorry behind an inch from the finish line. I blame my failure at RC Pro-Am as being due to that peach-colored car. Oh yeah, and for making me impotent. :mad: (ok just kidding there 
)
Madden Games- I swear that Madden games have this annoying quirk to make up for bad AI or something. basically, if you get ahead of the computer by a certain margin, suddenly the computer will become outrageously good- intercepting all your passes, sacking like crazy, blocking kicks, etc while performing insane plays once they get the ball. I’ve heard stories of pretty horrific upsets from Madden games due to the bipolar AI they seem to have.
Street Fighter II- The computer wasn’t obligated to go through the motions required to perform a special move. Therefore, a computer-controlled Blanka could smack you with a ball attack while moving forward the entire time ditto with Guile using sonic booms, or Ryu/Ken throwing dragon punches from a crouched position. Not to mention that the computer was obscenely good at breaking holds, it would get out of the hold before you could even land a hit.
Any and all racing games. You will be in the lead for every single lead and then out of nowhere in the last lap just before the finish line the computer controlled car in 2nd place will just come from behind and cross the finish line 0.001 seconds ahead of you. I hate video racing games.
I hate it in Mario Kart 64 when you get a Mushroom, use it, and the 2nd place person is right behind you, going as fast. This happens even when you get one of those power mushrooms that let you go fast for a small amount of time.
I hate Princess Peach.
Epyx’s Summer Games, from my Commodore 64 days. I could do the exact same thing on the platform dive, and end up with a 4 and a 10.
The Mario Kart series and pretty much any modern EA sports game are the worst offenders. Maybe they changed it up in V3, but NBA Street V2 is probably the worst offender of all time. NFL Street 2 seemed to be an improvement over the first, though.
The Mario Party series of games are blatant cheaters, too. Mini-games that require you to punch a block spinning at 45,000 miles an hour and hope for a good result? The computer characters can do it, piece of cake. Whatever result they need, they get.
I’m rather ashamed to even admit that I know this, but:
Pokemon Stadium. The cheating at the higher levels is just disgustingly blatant. The computer would get “Critical Hits”(which removed defensive modifiers and doubled the damaged dealt) at ridiculous rates. Ridiculously inaccurate attacks would hardly miss for the computer, while the human player would miss with attacks with an accuracy of 99.6%. All this was to make up for the computer’s terrible AI.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory spoiler…
On the second to last level, the one where you have to diffuse three bombs before the time runs out, and the villain talks to you while you do it.
Well there I go, after him when a hencheman barges through the door and kills me.
On my next go I spot that I’ve got a wallmine from earlier, so I decide to put it neer the door to kill henchman. I do that, and as I am diffusing the bomb I realise the main baddie is going to run right past it and set it off - bonus! Sure enough he runs right past it and sets it off…
… and keeps on running, apparently unhurt.
And I feel cheated by the sheer bloody annoyance of that damn hack screen and the slight delay on the mouse pointer that makes it slightly more annoying to use.
Oh and I found a bug.
If you aim (‘e’) and then press right-alt you get a gun with the appearance of the rifle, but the properties of the handgun. The game as switched everything (including the way sam holds it) except the model.
‘as’ and ‘neer’?
I’m starting to sound like a 6 year old!
This is known as “catch up” and it generally works both ways. You can be in last place, crash 4 times in a row, get stuck behind a wall, and still make it to 1st place in about half-a-lap. Any good racing game will allow you to turn this feature off.
Mario Kart was pretty funny too. The whole slot maching look to “randomly” pick a weapon that you pickup. But everyone knows that if you’re in first place, you NEVER get the red shells, stars, or powerful items. Why make it look random?
National Lampoon’s Chess Maniac 5 Billion and One - your maniacal opponent will try to remove your pieces while you’re contemplating your next move.
Single player Starcraft used to drive me up a wall because of the computer’s uncanny ability to know where all your bases are, even through the fog of war. One particularly egregious example was when I was building up my main base, then sent a drone off to establish another one early in the game at another resource center. I know good and well that the computer has not sent any spies over to either of my bases. Now, it’s reasonable that the PC could guess where my main base was, but no way it should have known I had a secondary one going.
But sure enough, the computer sent an invading army over…and it beelined to my weak, secondary base first, took it out, then proceeded over to the main one. I was forced to fort up, and every single time I would try to establish a secondary base again, the computer would “just know” where and when to strike.
I lost that one because I ran out of resources. Bastard cheating computer.
I’ve always thought that if sports games had any integrity, they’d allow you to overrule the computer.
I’m playing NHL 2005, and it’s plain to see that my shot goes into the goal. Right by the goalies glove and clearly over the line of the goal. The computer “glitches” and doesn’t record it. Screw that!
Actually, the more commonly used term is “rubber-band AI.”
/Geek
Secondly, while Mario Kart 64 was pretty blatent about the cheating, the original had none at all (aside from that huge ass jump the computer could do to avoid items), while Double Dash had a decent compromise between the two.
The Civ games. Bah. The difficulty levels were just a slider that controlled how much the computer controlled civs were allowed to cheat. I’d be going along full steam, doing great, building cities like crazy, building, harvesting, researching, etc, etc, and I’d be all proud of my brand new knights, and I’d suddenly run into a computer controlled stealth fighter or something.
So here I am taking my beloved Blues to the Cup in a 7 game playoff series on NHLPA 93 for the Genesis. Not the strongest team in the game at all, but they’re my guys. Conference Finals game against Dallas, and my strongest player (Brett Hull) gets run over and his head bleeds…and he’s out for 27 games. 27 Games!! And who delivered this crushing blow you ask? Mike fucking Modano. The real Modano couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a fucking boat. And then their goalie turns into Terry Sawchuck and they start scoring goals by passing the puck so fast I can’t even select the player closest to the puck before they score. Then Modano goes after Jeff Brown and they fight…and Modano kicks the holy shit out of him before I can even land a punch. Bastards.
Birdie King 2. Get about 5 under and they decide to have your shots deflect off a passing seagull. Yeah, that happens all the time. :mad:
Gran Turismo 4, specifically the rallies. You go barrelling into the back of someone, you get a 5 second slow-down penalty. Fair enough, that’s cheating, you deserve to be punished.
However if they go barrelling into the back of you, forcing you into the wall in the process, you get a 5 second slow-down penalty and they go waltzing off into the distance. Whiskey Tango Frickin’ Foxtrot?
There’s a serious lack of intelligence in that game’s AI.
While I have heard that term before, I’ve never gone into the game options menu screen and turned off “rubber-band AI”. OTOH, I generally disable catch-up before even creating a profile!
I used the catch-up to my advantage once.
An arcade I used to go to was having a Daytona USA tournament. (This was about 10 years ago, now that I think about it. I think they called catch-up “gravity”.) I wasn’t the absolute best at that game, but pretty good. And I’d played it enough to see that lap times went way down for drivers who weren’t in the lead. I’m pretty sure it also modeled damage, and maybe even tire wear.
I got there early enough to talk to one of the guys who was setting up for the tournament. He said they usually turned off the ‘gravity’ on some other racing game, but this one didn’t have that option. They were using the simplest track for this tournament (kind of a tri-oval, if anyone even remembers that game), and the heats were 20 laps and the final was 80. I won my first round heat, and the second round. In the final, I raced for about the first 40 laps, then made a pit stop. That fixed all the damage and put on new tires. After that, I lingered about a half-lap behind. (One other guy was even farther behind, but he was getting the catch-up bonus too and even rammed into me on the straightaway when he passed me. I wanted to just tell him to relax and I was letting him by anyway.) The others were racing as hard as they could, crashing into each other and bouncing off the walls. I stayed that way until about 5 laps from the end. Then I caught up, passed everybody with about a lap to go, stayed in front and won by a quarter lap.
It was no really big deal. I won a t-shirt and they put my name up on the wall. In regular races, a good lap on that track was around 18 seconds. If you were far enough behind, you could drop that down to about 15. It’s not like it was a subtle difference. I won by playing it smart, but I was just amazed that no one else seemed to put any thought, or take any notice of how the game really worked.