Damn you, Midway cheating AI!

[SuperGunGuru]

Yeah MK II used to piss me off because I could rarely get Sub Zero's freeze move to hit the CPU fighter. The only good thing about the way they have it programmed to react is that you can often sucker the AI into coming at you to unleash a roundhouse kick or something like Baraka's "shredder" move..

 

[Tripredacus]

I know quite a few games where the AI cheats. And it is in such a way that you just want to quit playing, and for some of them, I have. These aren't arcade games but maybe it will bring up some ideas.

1. Command & Conquer: It was a known fact that you can't place buildings wherever you wanted. You can't put a building down on certain tiles like mountains, BUT the CPU could and would!

2. HOMM and other RTS/TBS: Any strategery game with Fog of War, the CPU didn't really respect that it wasn't supposed to know where you are. In all the HOMM games (on all difficulties) there is a distinct pattern of how the CPU players would operate. The CPU didn't necessarily know where your units were but it ALWAYS knew where your castles were. Even in HOMM V it was especially annoying because the CPU would build rush up to level 3 units and then bee-line to the closest castle. I did some testing and found some definate patterns, some of them are like this:
- On Easy, CPU would go after other CPU players before going for Human players. Or there would be a period of game time before it went after you. And it always would go straight for your castle, even if you could tell that it was well hidden by FoW.
- On Medium it would wait a shorter period before doing that.
- On Hard it would go after you right away and only attack other CPU if it was "in the way."
However, if you did something like use a money cheat at the beginning of the game, the CPU wouldn't come after you. Most of the time the CPU players do not "explore" the landscape to find other castles or other things and this was very annoying.

No I remember it now. Any Hockey game. Some notable examples would be any NHL up to NHL06 (the last one I played) where you can score goals up to 5-6 in the first period, and the CPU would replace their goalie. Then the backup goalie you could get another 15-25 goals on depending on which version of the game. Then magically, the goalie becomes a god and it is impossible to score on them again! Seems kinda lame. I remember it was impossible to score 40 goals on a team in NHL 2003 (which is notoriously easy) but scoring 35 was every game. Go figure.

 

[DLP]

Some other games that I remember would "cheat" were Champion Baseball and also Hat Trick. Whenever you got a decent lead in either of these games, the computer would strike back with a vengence and you would usually lose!

Some games that would cheat TO YOUR advantage, were most driving games, like Rush, Daytona, etc., etc. If you are playing someone and crash, you would miraculously make it right back near the pack of cars even if your opponents did not crash at all. The only racing game that did not do this was Hard Drivin / Race Drivin, which in my opinion were the best driving/racing games ever created.

 

[kcfreeloader]

Not an arcade game (unless release on vs.) but R.C. Pro-Am. Remember that yellow car that would occasionally take off at twice the speed of your car?

 

[Broodwich]

as per the rules

eat it midway AI