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

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Manny Biggz

I guess I'll jump on the whole fighting game cheapness bandwagon.

NeoGeo Battle Coliseum - King Leo: SNK is notorious for programming their bosses to take full advantage of the whole "computer knows what you're gonna do" thing. This fucker has King Upper. A insanely high priority super that does half life on counter hit (which he will probably get because he only does it when you try to jump at him). Jumping at him when he doesn't have a super doesn't help much either since he has a godlike counter move. Then he has Beast Blow "DYNAMITE!" to hit you when you try to stand still and block. Nice chunk of damage for a low hitting move that also has crazy priority. Think you can block low? He'll do that mid hitting kick move that he will just about always super cancel into King Straight. That's another half life right there. This is one of the only SNK bosses where I couldn't find a consistent winning strategy. Most of the time he might fall for a quick low into a combo on wake up, but not always. SNK bosses having three health bars in one didn't help much either.

Yeah, out of all the Battle Coliseum bosses, King Lion was the most annoying for me as well. There I was happily Haohmaru C+D spamming to easy victory until this fool ruined it. Mizuchi and NeoDio were nowhere near as scary even with their projectile spam and speed, respectively.


Before, I would be tempted to add Magaki from King of Fighters XI to the list, but apparently he is consistently beatable, despite SNK endboss syndrome. He can fill the screen with a slow moving blue sphere, a fast moving pink sphere that comes from awkward angles, and use his anti-air exploding sphere which does massive stun damage. If Magaki evens starts up one of these things, then he can fill the screen with the other two very quickly forcing you to just sit and block for entire rounds. You can't jump anywhere or one of these things hits you and pushes you all the way back. You can't block or you'll be guard crushed in less than 3 seconds. While you are in blockstun (which can be very long against Magaki), he can teleport behind you and make you drop your guard to take full damage. In addition to this, he has an instant LDM that hits you anywhere on the screen and can be chained from a sweep of all things -_-; Sometimes it was just not feasible to beat Magaki.

How ya doing, buddy?