Doesn't Akuma have abilities he doesn't have when he's selected as a secret character in Street Fighter?
I'd say it's very uncommon for a fighting game boss character to not get nerfed when they become playable. It does happen, but usually the boss gets advantages in damage dealt/received and may have special moves that the player simply can't access.
Fighting game bosses can also be guilty of reading the player's controller input, which means they can e.g. always know which way you'll go with a fakeout move, or react to you starting a move before your sprite even updates. And they can sometimes do things that are physically impossible with a controller, like performing a move that requires you to hold backwards on the controller, while walking forwards.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
DarkKobold, now that you mention it, GTA IV has quite a few missions where it seems like it would be so easy to just shoot the driver from a standing position and clear the mission right away, but the shots never do them any damage. Essentially, it forces you to wreck their cars in order to pass the mission. I agree, I would call that unfair.
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Mario Kart Wii. 20+ Second lead? How about a blue shell? Not good enough? How about Two MORE! There we go. Now, you suck again. That's on 50CC (Easy). 100CC is "We go way fast!" I don't even want to know what 150CC is like.
The game is SO bad, third place can get a blue shell.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war.
The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
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The slots game in Dragon Warrior 2 seems like it should be possible to stop at the right place when you hit the button. But it tends to skip past the rarer prize crests and sometimes you can't hit one at all.
Civilization is big on cheating at higher difficulties. Ships will cross an entire ocean in one turn, wonders build instantly, they know where everything is, etc.
In Mario Kart 64, Toad's Turnpike, the only item boxes available are on sidetracks which you need to deviate into. You never see the computer players ever leave the main road, yet they mysteriously get items anyway.
Joined: 3/31/2010
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Location: Not playing Puyo Tetris
2020 Super Baseball's AI will play REAL good if your leading. If your not, the AI won't try so hard. Windjammers does this as well.
Is that cheating or just balance issues?
For fun, use Mame and cheat in those games to get high scores, then watch the AI go crazy.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war.
The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
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In the Japanese version of A Link to the Past. If you play the chest minigame where you can win a heart piece, it is impossible to get the heart on the first chest you open (You get two chances).
In Oracle of Ages, you have to visit a house to get a nut from a guy. The guy is always in the second house you check.
Rubber banding might not quite qualify for what this thread is intended for, but if we're on the subject I remember a variation. This is all from memory. There's a realistic racing game video I saw on youtube where everyone was driving crappy little cars (I want to say Fiat 500) and when they got to this steep hill nobody was able to actually climb it. The player started weaving back and forth in order to effectively reduce the slope and made slow forward progress. Suddenly the AI cars from behind were able to climb up the hill straight up. :/ Rubber banding blatantly giving the CPU better engines when they need it.
One of the things I liked about redline racer (I had it for PC, don't know if it's on others) is that it didn't do rubber banding. There are some maps that are (apparently) impossible to complete on some bikes, and if the AI has that bike they get stuck for the duration of the race :)
Oh, and back on topic - Double Dribble for the arcade lets you hit half-court shots if you are down by 10 or more points. If you are up, good luck hitting any shots at all.
As also heavily featured in NBA Jam [Normal, TE and Extreme], NBA on NBC, NFL Blitz....
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin
Mr. Kelly R. Flewin
Just another random gamer
----
<OmnipotentEntity> How do you people get bored in the span of 10 seconds? Worst ADD ever.
In several Command and Conquer games, the computer can simultaneously give orders to units at far-flung locations in a way that a human player could never do because, ultimately, he's limited by the map's scrolling speed.
You can move your view of the map using the minimap if you have a radar though, so once you have a radar it's not that unfair anymore.
And like many RTS' games, you can quickly jump to where a Squad was located by double tapping the Squad Group hotkey. You can have multiple groups of units assigned to multiple squads making it possible to quickly manage multiple squads of units if the frequent sudden camera jumping didn't make you vomit.
Something I liked about Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun was that the camera coasted to a stop when scrolling, most games these days forgo that nicety or make it extremely subtle :/
Rubber banding might not quite qualify for what this thread is intended for, but if we're on the subject I remember a variation. This is all from memory. There's a realistic racing game video I saw on youtube where everyone was driving crappy little cars (I want to say Fiat 500) and when they got to this steep hill nobody was able to actually climb it. The player started weaving back and forth in order to effectively reduce the slope and made slow forward progress. Suddenly the AI cars from behind were able to climb up the hill straight up. :/ Rubber banding blatantly giving the CPU better engines when they need it.
The most blatant example of rubber-banding I know in racing games is F-Zero: GP Legend (for the GBA). Apart from your vehicle and the three nearest vehicles (if they're nearby), enemies don't have their positions calculated at all; the game simply records them as "5 positions behind you" or "2 positions ahead of you" or whatever. Even more so than normal rubber-banding, this definitely counts as cheating, in that you can skip forwards an entire lap via glitches and you will only ever gain 3 places. It also leads to absurd situations; for instance, you can watch all 29 opponents cross the finish line, then race backwards round the track for many laps, then race forwards again, overtake them all, and finish in first.
In Mirror's Edge, when you are chasing Jacknife, no matter how fast you go, you cannot catch him. Every time you are about to catch him, the game teleports him forward by some distance, if he wasn't fast enough to parkour there by himself by then.
Also, the slots game in Final Fantasy VI counts, I guess. There are a few conditions that determine which symbols the slots can stop at. No matter how good your timing is, if those conditions are wrong, the slots do not stop at the symbol you want.
In Arkanoid on NES, the computer player in the demo cheats. When you play the game on a controller, there is a limit to how fast the paddle can move. However, when the computer plays it, the paddle is _always_ centered right below the ball no matter how fast it is moving.
NES Arkanoid comes with a paddle controller that allows you to do the same. :)
But yeah confirmed cheating. The slots on the pokemon games are known to slip, just like the real pachislots they are based on.
And yeah quite a few games implement "random" as "the last place you look". this is no obstacle to speedrunning as then the tactic is to find the most efficient order to visit them in.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Currently FCEUX supports the arkanoid paddle and movie rerecording with it.
Bizhawk supports the arkanoid paddle but not currently rerecording (but I"m currently working on support for these kinds of things)
Age of Empires flat out documents the AI cheats, a few dedicated commands will ignore visibility rules to retrieve data, like unit counts. The commands even have the word "cheat" in the name.
Another RTS (whose name I've forgotten) peeks at your unit groups. The ones that franpa mentioned.
Starcraft has AI commands that flat out gives the AI free resources.
Several pinball games are known to fudge the randomness for the match animation. In both directions I might add. The game shows several possible match numbers? Flat out lie.
