This is one of my all-time pet peeves, and it annoys me to no end that it’s still in use today as a valid method for programming games.
I’m playing Burnout 3: takedown, which is a really fun game. But it annoys me hugely that a rival can give me a tiny love tap and send me flying across 3 lanes of traffic, but if I hit him as hard as I can (from across 3 lanes of traffic) it’s like I hit a brick wall.
I’m also annoyed that after I knockout an opponent, he’s back online 2 - 3 seconds faster than I would be were I knocked out. If I get taken out, I’m often 4 - 5 seconds behind my oponent, and he’s losing me rapidly. If I take him out, he’s back up in about 2 seconds and already closing in on me.
There are so many other ways the game could even this out without resorting to illegal physics and stuff that it’s sad to me that they had to go this route. Why not simply increase traffic once an opponent gets more than X seconds ahead? I mean, once I have wrecked a few times and I see I’m 45 seconds behind my rival on the last lap of the race (where avg lap times are 2 minutes), I’m going to restart the race…(again and again and again…)
Still, as much as it annoys me in this game, it’s much much worse in other games. What are your (least) favorite AI cheats?
Civilization has always had an AI that fights dirty. It’s not as bad in the most recent one, but it used to be that everybody else can wander your territory at leisure but if you even think about stepping one toe over the line, Ghandi is going to open up a can of whoop-ass. They’d build little tiny cities between yours and screw you all up.
You can do that to the enemy civs, though. It’s not necessarily smart play but that’s not a cheat.
What IS a cheat is that in most Civ situations the computer civs simply don’t abide by the same rules of the game as you do.
The original “Age of Empires” was the worst game I’ve ever seen for this; the computer enemies didn’t actually play the game, but were simply given stuff at a predetermined rate. Regrettably, it was at a rate much faster than a human player could even theoretically match.
Back when Atari was building computers, a friend of mine had a game, which I think was called “Seven Cities of Gold.” The idea was that you were a Christopher Columbus type and discovering the new world. You’d set up colonies, get treasure, then head back to Europe to buy some more supplies, before sailing back to the new world. Once you got in the new world, you’d find out that no matter how well equipped you’d left your colonies, or how nice you’d been to the natives, something would have happened and most of your colonies would have been wiped out by angry natives. When the queen found about this, she’d be royally pissed. Eventually, you’d just resort to wiping out all the natives you encountered since that lessened the chances that your colonies would be destroyed (the natives also made a hysterical popping sound when you killed them).
In every RTS game I have played (mostly the C&C series, but also some Warcraft and Age of Mythology,) the AI cheats like a mofo. It builds units and buildings faster than you, and has a seemingly infinite amount of credits/ore/oil/wood/whatever resource it uses to buy/make the units and buildings. We’re talking me sending ground units, air strikes, and ion cannon blasts, destroying 80% of the base, and then two minutes later they have all their buildings back and more units than me.
Mortal Kombat Trilogy, anything over it’s medium level.
The computer knows just how to get at the right angle so the player uppercuts and misses but the computer does it right after and it contacts and hits. Jumping in the air is automatically followed by the computer player angrily running towards the player, jumping up, and connecting with a jump kick. Always.
Whenever we have a computer game that is blatently cheating or impossible to win, my friends and I joke that it has the Mortal Kombat Syndrome.
I can’t think of ANY rts that I’ve played where the enemy didn’t know exactly where I was at all times. So while I’m exploring through the “fog of war”, they’re building up for a major assault on my command post. :mad:
Actually, the original Homeworld was really great at putting you and the AI on an equal playing field. One of the lead programmers claimed that the AI had the exact same information and capabilities that you did, and this seems to be the case. You can use cloaked fighters to monitor the enemy, and they don’t even know where you are unless one of their scouts happens upon your fleet.
(this is actually one big reason why cloaked fighters and interdictors are invaluable even in the endgame; if you can get enough resources you can run three seperate carrier fleets with interdictors and cloaked ships on the periphery. Every time an enemy happens upon your fleet you can disable his ship and leisurely blow it up before he reports back, or at the very least you can blow the s**t out of him with a cloaked vessel that makes it tough to determine the main fleet’s vector.)
Actually, I think I’m going to reinstall Homeworld tomorrow; once you get past the sadistically difficult fourth mission, it’s wonderful fun!
It wasn’t until I saw an article about the Madden series that I found out my experiences weren’t unique. The article coined a common, well described experience…the NOT A CHANCE IN HELL GAME.
So you have been sailing through the season. Beating your opponents soundly by 30-40 points a game. Then the computer decides it’s sick of you winning and your team falls apart. Your 100-yard running back has 4 fumbles. Your All-pro tight end has 7 drops. The opposing running back runs with the power of a mac truck, breaking 8 tackles every play. Your DBs have hands of lead.
Also as fun is the No Fucking Way" drive. You’re either cruising along to a win or it’s close. You pin them waaaay back deep in their own territory. They drive. And it’s a slow, painful one, too. You can’t stop it. You blitz, you play zone, you throw a blitz out there that you never use, you start messing with the playmaker controls trying to throw a wrench in their matchups, but nothing works. They just take it down the field and score on you like you weren’t even playing.
I’m convinced that Chessmaster cheats sometimes. I am not the greatest chess player so sometimes I use the hints to help me make a move in order to help me learn the game. But whenever I use the games suggested moves I often lose a piece right away and I always lose quite quickly. I’ve only managed to beat it a couple times even on easy level but only as long as I never use the computers suggested moves. So far the game has helped me to learn not to trust it.