Someone back me up! It cant be coincidence, that every time on the last lap of a Mario Kart race, some driver that I left with a red shell up his arse half an hour ago comes screaming from the back of the pack to pip me at the post. Which Mario Kart? Just every one I’ve ever played, on GC, N64, SNES… Not just Mario Kart, either, oh no; F-Zero too. Especially F-Zero GX, the hardest game I’ve played in years. Just when you think you have a race sewn up, a computer opponnent scrams by on the final stretch. My hatred of this goes all the way back to Super R.C. Pro-Am on the game boy years upon years ago. You could actually see on the on-screen map a rival suddenly getting an incredible burst of speed on the last lap! Surely I cant be the only person this has happened to, right? This kind of bug must be well documented right? Come the next generation, if Nintendo want to start a Revolution, the should look to the A.I. in their top-tier racing games, or I can see plenty of those new controllers being smashed in rage!
Oh, I’m in full agreement. In fact, it’s been mentioned here several times that the computer in MarioKart is a dirty cheater. We should form a support group.
Computer game opponents always cheat. More interesting would be to find games in which the computer-controlled opponent doesn’t cheat. Chess, checkers, stuff with established rules enforced equally: not many computer opponents for other games are remotely so fair.
It’s why I occasionally don’t mind “turning off” damage or turning on “Infinite ammo” If the Gorram computer is going to cheat, I don’t see why I can’t either.
Most racing games use some form of “rubber band” AI. Cars that are ahead of you slow down proportional to their distance from you, and cars that are behind you speed up the same way. Tuned properly it’s hard to notice unless you look for it. Tuned poorly like in Mario Kart and you get weird slingshot effects.
Sometimes its worthwhile to try to game the algorithm by not getting too far ahead of the second place car or even running the race in second place until the home stretch.
Yup, the classic example is that damn yellow car in RC Pro-Am.
Damn you, you mustard colored, amphetamine popping freak!
Why, yes, I was emulating this a few nights ago. Why do you ask?
Or how about just a support group for victims of RC pro-am?
I hated that little yellow car. I can’t count how many races it robbed me of the gold.
For those unfamiliar, it was always the yellow car that did this- If you were winning by about a half a lap and getting near the finish line, the yellow car would get an incredible burst of speed. It would also usually become invincible (there was a powerup to make the cars invincible, but i swear that yellow car could just have it activate on command. It also made this distinctive ‘voop voop VOOOOP’ sound as it was coming up behind you.
Though one particularly gratify race involved me in second place, coming to the finish. Old yeller was in first. I got the invincibility powerup and sideswiped that son of a bitch off the road. Because I was now ahead of him, and because I was so close to finishing, the AI activated the yellow car’s “Accelerate to 10000 miles an hor” mode. Unfortunately for yeller there was an oil slick (or something) in his path, which caused him to spin out and crash just shy of the finish line.
In Double Dash! it’s pretty awful, but my wife and I managed to score 160 points (16 perfect races) on all of the All Cup Tour events. It took a loooong time, but it is possible to beat the computer on every track. The “cheating” effect was frustrating, but it also presented a really fun challenge.
…except that one time my Wavebird ran out of batteries on the last lap of the 14th race.
It’s not limited to Nintendo games, that’s for sure. I was watching a friend play Burnout 2. He was very good, and would get very far ahead of the computer player…only to have it gain a shit ton of speed and catch up, then ever so lightly tap him, causing him to crash. The worst part? if he were to tap that driver in the same way, he qould still crash.
The Heroes of Might & Magic series could be considered a very advanced form of chess, but the manual even admits that the computer cheats! Apparently New World Computing couldn’t figure out a good way to prevent the computer from taking advantage of its know-all ability, and so handicaps the game in the player’s favor to make up for it. You can turn this option off by playing in “Impossible” mode, which really lives up to its name!
Grrr! How about the blinking dune buggies of doom in F-Zero? Rolling suicide bombs they were.
You know the pain of a couple well-placed red shells in 64 when playing a real opponent. The one hit is quite behind at that point. The cheating of the system is quite obvious when you shell another player only to have him (or her, in the case of Peach) catch up again in 3 seconds.
Though not cheating per se, I don’t like when the heavy karts (i.e. Warrio) are the fastest and most nimble when Nintendo is behind the wheel.
Or Bowser. When I use that car? 0-60 in three days. When the computer uses it–“Activate NOS, leave her in the dust!”
You know, I almost broke that damn game in half on Impossible. It’s not even funny how ridiculous it is.
I thought I was the only one playing RC Pro Am. 
I disagree about Double Dash, though. Even on 150cc, most of the courses are beatable with nary a worry about the cpu. You must master the power skid into blue turbo/afterburn technique (there’s a name for it, I’m drawing a blank right now). The only place it becomes difficult to use, imo, is the last stage.
GTA San Andreas has several races and race missions that are cheat free by the pc. its pretty entertaiining when you get a clear massive advantage waiting at the finish line for the others to catch up, some of the puter controled racers are near perfect though so you still have to be on your toes.
also when you perform a pit manuver on another car they (Gasp) actually spin out.
I always hated games that cheat like hell to make it harder, you would think theres got to be a more subtle way.