The computer cheats on Monopoly: Wii are not amused.

So my family got a Wii for Christmas. My wife (the lovely and talented Aries28) and I bought it for the kids. Naturally, the kids have played with it for maybe five hours, total, in the past eight weeks.

It’s not that they don’t WANT to play; they’d play all day if we let them. It’s that my wife and I hog the thing shamelessly.

She is hooked on the Wii Fit, which as you know is a tool of the devil. It’s a little fitness program that tells you your body mass index and weight and such, and lets you do various exercises. According to the Wii Fit program, I should be about 13 feet tall to have a decent BMI. Aries28 likes to do yoga with the Wii Fit, although she gets angry at the on-screen trainer sometimes. “It’s been 30 seconds already for the Tree Pose, you Nazi bitch!”

But the Wii’s apparent inability to tell time is not what frustrates me. No, my disgust centers around the game Monopoly.

Monopoly on the Wii is strikingly like real-life Monopoly – you shake the dice, move around the board, pay rent, etc. It even lets you set your own rules for the game, like if you land directly on “Go” you double your salary, or if you land on Free Parking you get $500. I’ve looked for the option where you can steal money directly from the bank when you need it (or even when you don’t), which is how I remember playing Monopoly when I was a kid. Apparently that’s only available in the expansion pack, though.

One nice thing is that you can play Monopoly by yourself – the Wii will create up to three other players to play against. And this is the crux of my frustration, because the Wii, technological marvel that it is, cheats like a baboon-licking mother.

I mean, sure, the roll of the dice brings an element of chance to the game. I understand that. There’s no guarantee that the little computer iron, or the little computer shoe, or the little computer thimble, will land on my properties. It’s when they consistently avoid my properties for forty-seven consecutive trips around the board that I call foul.

Take, for example, the orange properties. They’re at the end of the row, close to Free Parking. I love to get these properties if at all possible, because players wind up in jail a fair amount during Monopoly, and once you leave jail you’re staring right down the barrel of my orange real-estate Derringer of Doom.

Except EVERY SINGLE ONE of the computer players can happily avoid my orange properties with no effort whatsoever. They’ll roll a seven, which puts them on Community Chest (Bank error in your favor! Collect $200!) or a ten, which puts them on Free Parking and gives them $500. I want them to roll a six, eight or nine, which would create financial ruin for them and possibly cause them to commit suWiicide.

Conversely, if one of my computer opponents has a monopoly, I’m guaranteed to hit it on each and every trip around the board. If, by some miracle, I manage to miss their properties, I’ll land on Chance and get sent there anyway. I swear, there must be about 30 different cards in the Chance deck that say “Advance to Illinois Avenue” or “Advance to St. Charles Place” or “Advance to Boardwalk”. Somehow, these cards get lost in the electronic ether when I own those properties, because they never seem to show up then.

And don’t even get me started on the boneheaded trades the computer players will make with each other. Trading Baltic Avenue for Boardwalk? Sure! Trading Oriental Avenue for North Carolina Avenue? That makes perfect financial sense … if you have the intellect of an iron, or a thimble.

It’s gotten to where I’ll talk to the little pieces as they move around the board. “Oh, you think you’re so smart, don’t you, Car? Wipe that smirk off your face, Shoe! I’m gonna get you this time … and the little Dog, too!” And they just smile knowingly amongst themselves, because they know that the next time I come around the board, I’ll roll doubles and land on Pacific Avenue and have to sell all my houses and mortgage all my properties to pay the stupid rent. And once I do that, against all the odds on my very next roll I’ll get a three, and land on North Carolina Avenue and go bankrupt, having been beaten by a shoe, and a car, and a dog.

Bravo! I don’t have the Wii, but I’ve been playing a lot of Monopoly on the original NES, and if it decides you’re going to lose, then buddy, you’ll lose.

I’ve lost games where I held the Boardwalk monopoly and all the railroads (the jerko always lands on the Luxury Tax!), and when I owned entire sides of the board, railroads and utilities included. They’ll have the Baltic set or the St. Charles one, and bankrupt me, because I’ll land on them every trip around the board, plus be taxed to death and go to jail every other turn without passing Go and getting my money. One infuriating turn, I landed on the Income Tax (pay $200!), then rolled a three, landing on Chance. The bastard sent me back three spaces! ARRRGGGGHHHH!!!

Sauron,

Dude, here is the way to beat that glitch. Get some real live human friends to play with. Steal from the bank, WIN.

babygirl used to get pissed that she could never win at Scrabble. She still has not beat me, but at least she knows her vocabulary is smaller than mine.

SSG Schwartz

That is really the root of the problem, now isn’t it?

I haven’t played Wii Monopoly but when I was recently playing through Clubhouse Games stamp collecting mode I had to play Ludo (Parcheesi essentially) on its hard setting. I either had to win or play three games of this very long, completely random, and boring game to continue. It became immediately apparent in the first game that the way hard mode worked was the computer was cheating on the dice rolls. I mean really apparent. It was so bad that to prove to myself I wasn’t looking at confirmation bias or just some really bad luck that I started tracking the rolls. From the results it looked like the PC rolled twice for itself and selected the better roll in most situations.

This is remarkably similar to a rant I had in mind a few months ago, when I was trying to get star ratings on all the Mario Kart Wii Grand Prix races (So as to open up all the characters and carts)… which pretty much means you have to get first place on every track.

50cc breeze… 100cc, piece of cake. 150cc… you god damn piece of crap stupid crummy machine. i hate you i hate you i hate you. you go to hell. you go to hell and you die!

It’s not that I don’t enjoy running a perfect race only to, within site of the finishing line, get hit by a blue spiny shell, followed immediately by a red shell (which inexplicably avoids the trio of banana’s still sitting behind me that i was using as “protection”), followed immediately by a lightning strike, followed by 3 or 5 characters passing me… one knocking me off the track and into the grass so… through absolutely no fault of my own- despite being 2 seconds away from an uncontested first place finish, I now finish in 9th place. But when this happens consistently… race after race after race after race… especially repeatedly on the fourth race after 3 first’s as if the game just decides- no, I want to win one thank you very much. You start to get a mite frustrated.

It used to be, on games like, say… Super Tecmo Bowl- there would be a game or two where the computer just decided- Yes, I am going to win this one. But it happened occasionally, and didn’t ruin your chances of winning the Super Bowl. So you just took your lumps when they happened and continued.

However, it seems game manufacturers have discovered the profitability of selling controllers to those of us who need replacements for the ones were threw into our brick wall and smashed into a thousand pieces.

So, Sauron- I feel your pain!

Be sure to buy some spare Wiimotes.

Which expansion pack has those?

As far as I can tell, the only way to succeed is to lull the AI into a false sense of security. Stay in second or even third place throughout most of the race, and when the blue shells start attacking the first place sucker near the end, that’s when you make your move. You have to count on being able to get out in front when there’s not quite enough time left in the race for someone else to pick up a blue shell.

Still, I’d much prefer games where the winning strategy isn’t “figure out where the holes in the AI are and exploit the hell out of them.”

I did try this. But even getting first place each race this way, I would fail to get the “Star” rating at the end. (Which was required to open up Dry Bowser and… I forget- one of the carts)

I think it’s because the game probably factors “amount of time spent in 1st place” into the star rating equation. The best strategy, in my opinion, is to get into first place as soon as you can with a nice, fast vehicle. The farther ahead you are, the less of a chance there is of other racers overtaking you when the inevitable lightning or blue shell knocks you on your ass. Slipping down into the mass of other racers only brings a relentless chain of damage to you, and it’s almost impossible to climb back into a comfortable lead.

So video games have started cheating now? I am shocked, totally shocked.

Why, this sounds like me this weekend! I spent about half an hour this weekend on “Super Mario Galaxy” trying to beat the level with the stupid burrowing gopher. I wound up throwing my Wii remote in disgust – but at least I threw it at the nice soft cushy chair.

Of course then I get to hear my wife chide me with “That’s a nice example you’re setting…”

This is pretty much how it ended up working out for me, too. I did eventually get it done… it was just a frustratingly long amount of time, that led me to identify with the OP.

Shoeless- I have three words for you… Luigi’s Purple Coins. It’s coming, oh… it’s coming.

Oh yes wee are. You play a game on your TV and I laugh from three states away. This economic stimulus… it’s working.

A most excellent post, Sauron. Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

ETA: Carbs are the enemy.

I have nothing to add except that the Dark Lord’s OP was enough to sway me to his side. I shall forthwith track down the Frippery of Funk and return it to its creator.

I would suggest that you be in a padded room when you try the purple coin level in the Toy Time galaxy.

ETA: Sorry, I somehow missed The Tof’s comment, but anyway, I agree.