[General Discussion] Cheap, cheating games. ARGALJKAGE RUBBERBANDING BULLSHIT

I'm currently having to calm myself down and resist the urge to throw something across the room, for I am that pissed off. "Why so angry you fine English gentleman?" you ask, to which my response would be: Sega Rally (add a Revo to that title if you live somewhere silly).

The game starts of fine, the AI is pretty retarded and you can almost guarantee that the order the cars start in off the grid will be the order they finish in too. It's good dumb fun, for a while. Then you start getting onto the harder championships and some sort of transformation starts to occur in your opposition. Their cars gain magic abilities to go magically turbo-boost past you, and to take corners faster than is ever possible. Even when you have exactly the same car, and follow exactly the same driving line, you'll go flying into a wall as they cruise around the corner.

The other trait they start to exhibit more and more is a desire to hit your car. They will actively leave their driving line to ram into you. This wouldn't be too much of a problem except for the rules of collisions always work against you. You hit an AI car, you will slow down. AI car hits you, you will slow down (whilst they use their magic turbo boost to rocket away).

As such the only difficultly comes in passing other cars in an effort to get to the front of the pack, because they will do everything in their power to block you. My levels of anger reached breaking point when, for the third time in consecutive races, I'd been hit into the side of the track by an AI car, which managed to spin me 90º and leave me at a near stand-still, killing any chance of doing well.

This isn't the first time a game has made me so angry either, I can think of other instances where the game flat out cheats to make things tough for the player. Now I don't mind a game being difficult because it genuinely is hard, if the difficulty is an emergent property that comes about from the rules and mechanics of the game. But when a game so obviously cheats, that pisses me off something rotten. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

So, it's time to name and shame: what games and their cheap, cheating ways have annoyed you? And by doing what?

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Hahah, sorry man. Racing games seem to pull that kinda stuff all the time. It truly is the cheapest genre I can think of. Anyway, I seem to encounter win.exe in a lot of the older games I play, but I can't think of a better example than Mortal Kombat II. I'll just copypasta from the old thread since I'm lazy.

Originally Posted by Max Biggs

I wasn't very good at the game at a young age, so I spammed Scorpion's harpoon move on Very Easy. It seemed to work most of the time, but when I was fighting Jax, he kept ducking the harpoon for the whole match. After a while, the executable was triggered, and Jax CRAWLED (and by that, I mean magically came over while in his ducking stance) from the other side of the stage, all the while I was still harpooning, and uppercutted me. To this day, that still tops anything a game has ever thrown at me.

It can be frustrating, but it's a fact of life. Every game relies on win.exe at least a little, even newer games that have great AI. Like, I don't doubt that the computers in Smash Bros. Brawl are smart, but that doesn't stop them from reflect-shielding every projectile and catching every item on Intense now does it?

How ya doing, buddy?

I was having too much fun doing burnouts in the mud to notice the AI lapping me in SEGA Rally! ='D But having just spent the last few days playing through the frown-worthy Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity, I'd say SEGA must share their dirty coding around the different teams. The computer players blatantly cheat in the old Mario Kart kind of way to keep up. You even see their little icons on the mini-map warp closer to you. ;__;

Doesn't matter if you take every possible shortcut and you've got the fastest shit. They'll always be there. Up your arse!

I remember Street Fighter II pissing me off, too. That's bullshit, CPU Guile! You're cheating, you need to hold down on the dpad for two seconds before you can do that! Why are you doing it over and over and over and over again, SEE PEE YOU GUUUIIILLEEEE!

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Not that it's a horrible game but I think NHL Hitz or something like that with getting checked by no one. I was playing once against a friend, had a break away, was going towards the goal when BAM, I got knocked down and my friend got the puck. Even he said that was garbage.

Another game that was just so annoying that I have refused to play any of it's sequels MUST be Mario Party. Yes, I can take randomness. Yes, I can take set-backs. But seriously, what the heck with playing the game, having like ten stars, my dad having two, and the second to last round hitting a bowser block that will ultimately SWAP OUR STARS.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Monster Hunter Freedom games to the PSP. Although the games are pretty well made in general and I love playing them there are some things that pisses me off and the first is when the monsters skip animation. A very good example of that is the Rathalos, who has this charge attack that he uses very often. Anyway, sometimes when you hit the monsters and he staggers, what he should be doing is finishing the staggering animation, which in during is a great time to open a can of whoop ass. HOWEVER, sometimes he will in mid-animation suddenly jump into the charge attack and you will have no time to prepare for this at all. I call this the cheat charge, and it pisses me off every time it happens (which is too often).

The second is the monsters hit boxes (that you get hit by) which sometimes are absolutely ridiculous. When you're thinking you should be out of the monsters way it somehow manages to hit you with a charge or whatever, even when you're obviously standing next to it and you shouldn't be hurt by it at all. Sometimes it's almost like an invincible wall hit you from nowhere and sends you flying. If you're walking under a monsters legs you can be stopped by the monster TURNING, making you fall down on your bum and very vulnerable to a coming attack.

And yes, racing games are the kings of cheating. If they weren't cheating the games would be too easy. At least the old games.

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In at least the SNES version of Mortal Kombat 3, the game was very interesting that even on the very easy difficulty level and the Novice ladder, if I won the first two matches in a row, the next guy would be impossible to beat. He would parry every attack, use the extremely cheap duck-and-uppercut counter when I would try to uppercut him, and was just plain annoying. This was all done of course to force me to use a continue so that the game could try to prevent me from getting to Shao Khan. Of course if I did continue, then the same guy who just completely owned me, would act like an idiot on our subsequent rematch. That level of "difficulty" really pissed me off sometimes.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Pretty much every racing game I've ever played had some sort of catch-up AI (hi Super Mario Kart), but only in Need For Speed: Underground was it devastating. If you were at any point ahead by 10 seconds it was not a safe lead because you could either clip something and be irreversibly stuck spinning out or you could hit something head on that would not flip you or cause you to pinball but it would make you come to a dead stop and force you to back up and drive around it. By that point your foes will have caught up and at best made the race a little closer and at worst would put you 10 seconds behind without any chance of catching up for the rest of the race.

FELIPE NO

Cheating is blatantly obvious in fighting games, particularly SNK fighting games and numerous examples can be cited. The CPU reading your inputs is a given, and no matter if you're on the easiest level, or the hardest, the final boss will kick your ass unfairly. A couple of examples:


Power Instinct Matrimelee - Sissy the princess is the final boss (not joking) and she happens to have a variety of high priority moves with large hitboxes. That's fine and all but conducting an attempt to win took me 10-15 minutes of save states and reloading at safe-neutral positions. If I ever jumped towards her, she would summon Abubo and knock me away. If I jumped her in a corner, she would pull out the sword which has a small chance of missing compared to Abubo, or just use Abubo. If I was anywhere within her range to do so, she would use Abubo and push me back if I was blocking or not. At full screen's length she would use the unblockable frog, which leads to either a painful multihit saw combo (range) or some form of being knocked away again. Point being, she would use the absolute best move for each situation, evidenced through many, many save states. Nothing was safe to do because she had a counter for everything that would happen to be used at the right time, every time.

Rage of the Dragons - Uhhh, I think it says something when I can't even beat him with save states. Using Cassandra in particular, literally every single thing he did outprioritized any of my attacks and he would even stop blocking in the middle of my attacks and throw out a move that eats whatever I was doing at the time. The only way I could damage him was using air drills vs. wakeups, but he would just stop those whenever he felt like it. Something was clearly wrong here.


Some games are particularly funny and ramp up the difficulty to max when the comp is at low health. The most obvious example being Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, where you could be facing an idiot team until you get it down to the last half portion of life with one character remaining. If it's say, Storm/Magneto, for example then you could see (super jump-> air dash downwards-> 20+ hit combo w/ super finisher) cycle in place that would repeat within less than a second if the initial hit fails. Not only that, but even characters like servbot will pull out all stops and go combo crazy in a frantic steroid burst to destroy your team with the little health that is remaining.

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Def Jam: Icon did it for me. It started off nice and easy, and at first the difficulty rose gradually. But about halfway through the game it just gets insanely difficult, mainly because of cheating AI if you ask me. The computer starts blocking and reversing all of your moves, always uses the most harmful way to attack you (i.e. using the environmental damage aspect of the game constantly), and the cheapest thing of all, actually stops your moves mid-animation. How is this shit even possible? I'll be in the middle of kick (and they're not even blocking it) and all of sudden they'll do an attack that just overrides mine, despite the fact that I started mine first and mine is the more powerful of the two.

The sad thing is that they know they're doing it to. You're fighting a lot of the same people throughout the game, so it doesn't make sense that they're easy to beat the first time and then hard as fuck the second or third, despite the fact that you're on the same difficulty level. It would make sense if you were fighting gradually harder opponents, but no, you're fighting someone you easily beat at the beginning of the game and you're now losing to them. Ridiculous. I actually broke my TV remote in half with my bare hands while playing this game.

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The first thing that comes to mind is the AI in Wipeout Pure. To me, it doesn't cheat too badly for the majority of a race, but from the starting grid to the first few corners, the other crafts have some ridiculous thrust. Getting the boost start yourself does little to help, as they usually power past you either way.

Saying that, once they're all past you if does calm down. But it just makes the starting grid boost mostly useless.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Some of the AI in Goldeneye. Many times you were able to fool the AI by hiding and stealth, but there were many moments when the AI was simply scripted to know where you were. And I don't mean storming a room you're in, I'm taling about complete bullshit, telephatic, I-can-see-you-through-walls kind of know where you were.

This was most evident in that one trainyard level where completing one objective caused a number of guards to spawn outside of the warehouse you were in. Sometimes they wouldn't open the doors and would just stand against them, with their guns sticking through. As you moved about the room during this, you could see the barrels tracking you

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Mother. Effing. Soul Calibur 3. The first few fights or so in story mode are pathetically easy, then the game executes fuckshitassrape.exe and the enemies begin to guard impact every single fucking blow you throw at them from any angle, every single time. I played the crap out of SC2 and unlocked every bonus weapon and what-not. I've never even beaten single player in SC3 because the ridiculous AI disgusted me so much.

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Most recently some random stuff in Halo 3 has irritated me. Such as a a plasma grenade hitting someone in the head and rather then sticking like it's supposed to, it'll bounce off and they'll walk away like nothing happened. I've also had spiker grenades go right through people. I've also gotten splattered by ghosts when I jumped over them and they only clipped my foot.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Another game I thought about, while it was intentional for this, is WWEoR1 when facing Flair/Show at one part of the storymode, depending on which brand you'll go with. They will block just about EVERYTHING, counter just about EVERYTHING, and if you do have your finisher ready, you can use it only to have them pop right back up. You're only hope to win is to get a ring bell or something and let them hit you with it for a DQ.

As another wrestling game, probably the old SNES Raw game, Royal Rumble style. It always seemed that if you and a friend demolished the computer by throwing them out repeatedly that someone like Doink would suddenly go crazy and win every grapple including the one that throws you out. I dunno how many times I have seen us doing fine, then in comes Doink, and within four seconds winning a grapple against each of us and throwing us out.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Elmoogle

Mother. Effing. Soul Calibur 3. The first few fights or so in story mode are pathetically easy, then the game executes fuckshitassrape.exe and the enemies begin to guard impact every single fucking blow you throw at them from any angle, every single time. I played the crap out of SC2 and unlocked every bonus weapon and what-not. I've never even beaten single player in SC3 because the ridiculous AI disgusted me so much.

In fact a few recent fighters have been like that, Dead or Alive 4 comes to mind. The first few fights are easy enough, then the bullshit begins and the computer becomes ridiculously adept at pulling off exactly the right block and counter whenever you attack. It gets bloody annoying very quickly.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

In fact a few recent fighters have been like that, Dead or Alive 4 comes to mind. The first few fights are easy enough, then the bullshit begins and the computer becomes ridiculously adept at pulling off exactly the right block and counter whenever you attack. It gets bloody annoying very quickly.

It's not even a recent thing. Street Fighter 2 had complete bullshit AI later on, with characters like Guile pulling off charge moves without charging. For instance, he'd walk up to you and pull off an instant Sonic Kick as if it was a Dragon Punch, whereas you need to hold down for a moment before pressing up and kick to activate the move.

Zangief's hyper fast machinegun light punching and low kicking were other particular "Oh come ON" moments I remember.

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Originally Posted by OmagnusPrime

In fact a few recent fighters have been like that, Dead or Alive 4 comes to mind. The first few fights are easy enough, then the bullshit begins and the computer becomes ridiculously adept at pulling off exactly the right block and counter whenever you attack. It gets bloody annoying very quickly.

Don't you mean the whole Dead or Alive series? The boss fights in those games are incredibly cheap, which I would find annoying if I didn't already hate the games anyway.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by Soluzar

Don't you mean the whole Dead or Alive series? The boss fights in those games are incredibly cheap, which I would find annoying if I didn't already hate the games anyway.

Only other DoA game I've played was DoA2 on the Dreamcast. But now you mention it, yes the boss fights on that were stupid at times.

I think as Q says, it's something that has plagued fighting games for many a year (Street Fighter 2 on XBLA still pulls the same cheap shit, and is highly annoying as a result). So it seems fighting and racing games are established genres prone to cheap, cheating ways.

I think first-person shooters would have to be another. Q pointed out Goldeneye, but even recent FPSs start to show their robotic computer-powered ways at times. Call of Duty 4, as much as I love that game, even slips when - on Veteran difficulty certainly - the enemy AI can throw grenades with such pinpoint precision. It doesn't matter where you're hiding or how difficult the throw would be, all of sudden about 5 grenades land at your feet.

Whoever cited Halo 3 though, really? I find the AI in Halo 3 to be OK. A bit dumb actually. The difficulty only ever comes in the numbers overwhelming you, or getting caught off guard by a sniper, etc.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

He was more listing glitches instead of AI behavior.

I love the AI in Halo 1. It was a huge part of why the difficulties were so brilliantly made. Smarter, faster firing enemies that forced you to play the game and approach each battle in different ways. The later games fell into that "laser fire eats away your shield really fucking fast" cheapness.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Soluzar

Don't you mean the whole Dead or Alive series? The boss fights in those games are incredibly cheap, which I would find annoying if I didn't already hate the games anyway.

I dunno, the boss fights in the first couple of DoA games were cheap but you could sometimes win them by spamming the same move over and over at them. I never finished Wu-Tang Taste the Pain though. I filled pretty much every character's chamber board up with not too much difficulty but could never beat the motherfucker in the straw hat (Second to last boss). The one time I almost did it, getting him down to his last energy bar having only lost one myself, he suddenly went apeshit and basically fucked me with one long combo and endless cheap power moves. I used to love that game but damn was it unbeatable.

I never had a problem with NFS Underground though. I always felt that if you lost that it was because you'd fucked uop by hitting something, not because the computer was using magic catch-up powers.

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Originally Posted by Dennis Franz

I dunno, the boss fights in the first couple of DoA games were cheap but you could sometimes win them by spamming the same move over and over at them.

I take your point. I think at least once I did exactly that in desperation. I was so surprised to finally land a kick combo that I just kept spamming it for the rest of the match. What annoys me is that the perfectly good tactics for every other fight in the game are no good against the boss.

I was speaking idiomatically.

The thing about the computer cheating in fighting games is that it's possible to fake out the computer by putting in fireball motions then not following through. Likewise, instead of opening yourself up to attacks that the computer is just going to anticipate before your character has even started the animations, it's better to just play a pure punishing game and poke all their vulnerable attacks.

This still blows, though, because you're forced to adopt completely illogical fighting strategies because the computer doesn't fight even remotely like another player. We should be well past the point of having to let the computer cheat so much due to crappy AI, and I really don't think fighting game players should have to develop two different skills sets.

The best cheating computer example I've seen, though? I believe it's King of Fighters 2002, where the second to last opponent is the last boss from 2001 whose name I forget, the guy with the bladed coat. He has no super combo bar; he can use them at will. Worse, when he's winding up his black hole thing, he goes invincible from the very start of the animation and the cheap ass computer even uses it to escape damage. At that point, the only way to win is literally if the computer deigns to LET you, because otherwise it can just spam supers all day long.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Super Smash Brothers Melee and Brawl computers annoy me with some of the crap they pull off on you. It's not so much "cheating" as it is "Ok, I know that no human player--not even someone from SmashBoards--is capable of doing that". This is stuff like catching you in a throw out of practically any attack of yours, putting up their shield just in time to reflect whatever's thrown/shot at them CONSECUTIVELY (in Melee anyway, it'd be powershielding everything in Brawl), etc.

And come on, they air-dodge the second kick from Ganondorf's down-smash after getting hit by the first? I don't care what people think of Ganondorf as a character in Brawl, that's just total BS there.

FELIPE NO

Originally Posted by Monkey King

The thing about the computer cheating in fighting games is that it's possible to fake out the computer by putting in fireball motions then not following through. Likewise, instead of opening yourself up to attacks that the computer is just going to anticipate before your character has even started the animations, it's better to just play a pure punishing game and poke all their vulnerable attacks.

This still blows, though, because you're forced to adopt completely illogical fighting strategies because the computer doesn't fight even remotely like another player. We should be well past the point of having to let the computer cheat so much due to crappy AI, and I really don't think fighting game players should have to develop two different skills sets.

The best cheating computer example I've seen, though? I believe it's King of Fighters 2002, where the second to last opponent is the last boss from 2001 whose name I forget, the guy with the bladed coat. He has no super combo bar; he can use them at will. Worse, when he's winding up his black hole thing, he goes invincible from the very start of the animation and the cheap ass computer even uses it to escape damage. At that point, the only way to win is literally if the computer deigns to LET you, because otherwise it can just spam supers all day long.

Indeed. Facing Zero, Rugal, and the likes is a very trying exercise which I also feel like the computer lets you win randomly at whim. They even give you the continue service, and even with infinite super, or cpu at 1/4 health, it just won't happen sometimes. You'll be eating cape twirls or genocide kicks and there's not much you can do against the timing of them :x

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Elmoogle

Mother. Effing. Soul Calibur 3. The first few fights or so in story mode are pathetically easy, then the game executes fuckshitassrape.exe and the enemies begin to guard impact every single fucking blow you throw at them from any angle, every single time. I played the crap out of SC2 and unlocked every bonus weapon and what-not. I've never even beaten single player in SC3 because the ridiculous AI disgusted me so much.

Quoted for absolute truth. They nerfed many fan favorites, mine included (Talim), and everyone was, when controlled by the AI, a bunch of spam-blocking faggots. Now, I did manage to beat single-player, but only with the characters I was really good with. Spam-blocking begets spam-throwing. And even then that didn't always work.

So fighting games seem to be a popular genre in this thread, but both Virtua Fighter 4 and 5 are kinda the antithesis here. They've got great balance, and I've never felt like the computer just blatantly cheated. Maybe the endboss (that weird almagation of fighters all wrapped up in a single, shiny robot-thing) was overly difficult, but it wasn't a cheater.

How ya doing, buddy?