Good AI makes the game more believable and adds to the difficulty level, but, well, while it’s the ideal situation, it’s not always what we get. Sometimes to make the game more difficult, we deal with underhanded dirty video game tricks.
Hi, folks, today on gamezBook, 10 dirty video game tricks tricks Video games Do to Stop Us.
Starting off at number 10, it’s FIFA’s scripting. So video games pull a lot of dirty video game tricks on you.
They either give the AI an advantage, but most of the time, these kinds of things are relegated as single player only. Most of the time, it’s about giving the AI some kind of secret advantage, but here in the FIFA games, it’s allegedly actually quite a bit worse. Instead of simply boosting the AI of computer opponents, in this series they will instead arbitrarily weaken your own teams to make things more quote, unquote, “fair” in online play.
Even now people still argue about whether this scripting is real or not, but there’s a big enough section of players who think it is, and what they say seems to make sense. Basically as momentum shifts over the course of a regular game, depending on how well one player is doing, their are AI players will either play the game supernaturally well, or just become totally useless.
Because a big part of this game is trying to acquire the best players for your team, the whole mechanic is really frustrating to those people who put the time and effort into building up a good team. This Reddit post by seedsrevolution has a deep dive into the whole alleged scripting situation, and even offers tips on how to get around it. Now we’re mostly FIFA neophytes here. We enjoy it but we can’t say for certain how much of this is actually true.
According to the comments, this sort of thing happens in all of EA Sports games though, and it is annoying in all of them.
I can’t imagine one game it being tolerable though. But in a game like FIFA, you really got to rely on the AI of your team to win. And if you got your teams stocked with highly ranked players who are weirdly missing passes and shots that an even an amateur could make, you’re kinda like, ah, something very dirty video game tricks is going on here.
At number nine is racing game rubber banding. And if you’ve ever played a racing game you have experienced this.
In an effort to make races more competitive and exciting, most racing games incorporate some kind of rubber banding, where the AI gets a huge boost in speed so they can catch up with you no matter how far ahead your car is. Depending on the game, it’s either a slight annoyance, or like the worst thing of all time. Some games do it well, where the AI gets a slight boost just to make things more interesting, and others go way overboard.
It’s especially bad when the rubber banding rarely goes the other way. In theory, this mechanic is supposed to make it so the AI will slow down so you catch up if you’re losing badly, but sometimes that doesn’t happen, and an AI racer gets into a dominant position and you’re not able to get anywhere near them.
“Mario Kart” games are kind of infamous for this, like, in combination with the special weapons, most of the time the worst position a player can be in is first, because you’re just gonna get pelted with annoying weapons, like the screen obscuring ink, the lightning bolt that shrinks you, or the dreaded blue shell, which always locks on and hit you every single time.
At number eight, when fighting game bosses can just hit you while you’re hitting them.
There’s so many ways that the bosses at the ends fighting games can screw you over. This is obviously the most dirty video game tricks. With fighting games, all the characters are, in theory, supposed to be balanced against each other, but that just goes out the window with most bosses.
These guys will fight you at the end of arcade mode, and they usually get some kind of totally unfair boost that makes them way more frustrating in a fight. They get new moves, they get overpowered abilities, and a lot of the time they get the ability to just absorb your attacks. And the last one’s the obvious worst. Instead of getting stunned when you hit them, like basically any other character, they can just keep hitting you. You of course get stunned every time, but they don’t.
They just ignore it. Probably the king of this BS is Shao Khan from “Mortal Kombat,” especially on K9, where he gets super armor for all his moves. He’s just the tip of the iceberg for fighting game bosses. There’s so many out there that pull this exact same crap, and every single time it is dirty video game tricks as hell.
At number seven is first-person shooter games that spawn grenades on top of you.
If you’ve ever played an FPS game, especially a war one, you know the pain of grenade spam. It’s bad in multiplayer, but in some single player games, it’s straight up unbearable. You’re just walking around, having fun, blasting bad guys, it’s war game, man, and then an annoying grenade warning pops up and now you’re dead. Welcome to grenade spam.
And it can be incredibly annoying to have to contend with this crap.
One of the worst games about it was, “Call of Duty: World of War,” which for whatever reason had the most grenade spammy enemies of all time. It’d be annoying enough that the enemies just had an infinite supply of grenades to throw at you, but of course, they’ve got pin perfect accuracy, and dropped it right in your lap every single time they threw them. Wow. game, didn’t stop there with the dirty video game tricks though, to make things even more annoying, sometimes if you stood in one spot for too long, they just flat out spawn a grenade next to you. Nobody threw it, it’s just there.
Eh, I guess the mechanics supposed to be there to keep the player moving, but it makes no sense. It’s just frustrating. Later, “Call of Duty” has got way less annoying about the grenade chucking, but there’s still some pretty ridiculously accurate throws, even now.
At number six, the traps in “Dark Souls” games. In most games, the enemies are the most dangerous part of the environment, but in “Dark Souls” games, the environment itself is almost as dangerous as the characters and creatures that inhabit it.
There is so many “Dark Souls” traps it’s hard to know exactly where to start. Like the cannonball trap in one “Demon Souls,” dragon ambush in “Dark Souls” one, any part with deep water looks safe to walk on, but isn’t, you know what I’m talking about. Crumbling floors, aero traps, the armor destroying acid spitting traps in the castle in “Dark Souls II.” When we made this list, we were like, “There’s no way to do this.” Yes, the games are fair for the most part, but there are a lot of traps.
There are little underhanded.
Even the chests aren’t necessarily safe to open. There’s not much you can do with these things except know about them ahead of time, which is the first time you’re playing the game, you don’t. There’s plenty of other games with environmental traps like this, but the “Dark Souls” series seems to just love them. And they are everywhere in these games.
At number five, you know, games that make you have a guide, you know what I’m talking about? If there’s one nasty thing some games like to do it’s put in sections just impossible to get through without knowing what to do first. Basically, I need to look up a strategy guide online, or have a guide open, if indeed you still purchase those things at some establishment that theoretically still has them, and you got no chance without it. Like, how is anybody supposed to know the first time playing “Dark Souls” the skeletons in the catacombs will constantly respawn unless you’ve got a divine weapon, or that the New Londo ghosts can be killed using either a special item or finding a rare weapon, or like Chocobo breeding in “Final Fantasy 7,” the Zodiac Spear in 12, or avoiding the bad ending in “Persona 4?” The first time I beat that game, I was like, “Really?
” And I put it down for, I’m not even joking, like a month.
Somebody had to tell me, “No, no, that’s not the real ending of the game.” I was like, oh. There’s a metric ton of games out there that pull this stuff on you. And it’s not the worst thing these days or anything.
Finding a full game for a guide is a few taps or clicks away from most people. So I mean, it doesn’t ruin the game or anything, but it’s still some dirty video game tricks, especially for players going into any of these games blind.
At number four is when there’s no auto saves, no checkpoints and no chance. It’s less of a problem in these games, but one of the dirtiest moves a game can pull is have some really spaced out checkpoints and save points.
“Dark Souls” games obviously love this trick.
Sometimes you have to play through an entire level over again if you die at the boss, like in Dead Man’s Wharf in II. There’s no bonfire in this place other than the one of the very start, which, oof. The GTA trilogy games never had any checkpoints in them originally. A lot of the missions were super long, they were really tough, and if you’re lost, you’d lose all your weapons and armor, and you’d have to drive back and start them up again. In most cases it was just easier to reset the game than to continue where you left off.
But either way it could be incredibly frustrating. Depending on the mission, you could lose 10, 15, even 30 minutes of progress every time you died. It could really suck. A recent example was “NieR: Automata,” a game that for whatever reason, just doesn’t have any auto saves at all during the very long and actually not easy prologue section.
You die at any point in the whole part, it started the game from the start, the beginning.
And remember, it’s the first thing you do in the entire game, so players aren’t used to the controls yet, so it’s highly likely they’ll die at least once, unless they’re like intimately familiar with platinum game stuff, and even then, there’s still some adjustments, and it’s not a short prologue either.
At number three is strategy game AI that doesn’t play by the rules you have to play by.
So the thing about 4X strategy games is that very few of them just outright have the AI play by the same rule set that you do. They always have an advantage. The house wins, so to speak.
They can do stuff you can’t. They know stuff that’s impossible to know, et cetera, et cetera. But probably one of the more egregious examples is “Civ V,” ’cause this sort of exception to the rules is really an advantage.
Like a huge, huge advantage. Enemy civs can place new cities within four hexes of preexisting ones.
You can’t do that. You are very bound by very specific grid rules. And while you have to worry about stuff like happiness and maintenance, the computer doesn’t. The computer can act like a computer, emotionless, uncaring, and it doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, you have to go out and kiss every single baby.
It’s like an endless political campaign. Just keep everybody happy. And then you have to take care of stuff too. Yeah, the games can be really unfair.
At number two, when artificial intelligence can see through walls.
You could call it wall hacking AI. You could call it wall neutral vision or wall exclusion. I don’t know. There’s probably a term in there that sounds official enough to categorize this nonsense. But what we’re talking about is when an FPS has enemies in it that are not bound by vision requirements that you are.
You can’t see through a wall unless you’re in “Dishonored” and have a special power, which is a very specific situation in one specific game.
I understand some other games had heat vision-type goggle devices, but there’s not a lot, and obviously it’s only applicable when you have the item and are using it. We’re talking about AI enemies that you can just flat out see you, no matter where you are on the map, regardless of the surroundings, what you’re behind, what walls are in front of you, in between them and you, it’s honestly one of the most ridiculous types of cheating that they allow AI to engage in.
Because there’s just no, even tenuous explanation for it, that could make it make sense. This goes back to even the original “Doom.
” If an enemy was alerted to your presence, they would just continually come towards you. Walls be damned. Although you were at, at least some kind of advantage with them, in that they had no pathfinding. But like this is something you see in “Call of Duty” games, in early “Far Crys,” early “Halos,” but I’d call it particularly egregious in “Rainbow Six,” which is, I mean, supposed to be realistic. And I get that if you make a sound with an unsilenced weapon, it’s going to give like a generalized position that you could be in, but if you do that, they know where you are and will pursue you, regardless of walls.
And finally, at number one, when the computer gives you incorrect information, and this isn’t even always on purpose, but when it is, it is most certainly one of those dirty video game tricks move, an underhanded trick, something that I certainly do not like.
Imagine a situation where a game tells you how to progress, where to go, what you need, et cetera, but their advice is either stupid or just outright untrue. And a lot of the time, this is something, that yes, is done on purpose and is there to kind of mess with you, or create an unreliable narrator-type situation, or even just to up the difficulty in some way, but a lot of the time it’s just ’cause somebody has no idea what they’re doing, whether it be a programmer or somebody localizing a game, or what have you. A famous one is back in “Castlevania II,” where a lot of hints where really vital items were, were either incorrect or gibberish. Now the interesting thing about this is, they wanted their NPCs to be unreliable.
And in the original Japanese version, you can actually sort of decipher whether they were lying or not, because they would phrase things like, “I heard,” or “This is just a rumor but,” however these did not translate well.
I remember that pretty specifically because I enjoy “Castlevania,” particularly the earlier ones quite a bit, despite that incredibly frustrating thing, was something very memorable from earlier in my life. Slightly more recent, but still kind of old one I want to mention, is “Mass Effect II,” where there was a free DLC. And the keyboard was very clearly changed, and the instructions just have none of the changes in them. There’ll be pop-ups that give you some kind of instruction and give you a key stroke to press, doesn’t do anything, or doesn’t do the thing it’s supposed to at very least.
Frustrating and weird. And this is another one. And incorrect information gets through games all the time. It’s probably something that will never change. It’s a human error.
As a mistake, it’s unavoidable. And as a cruel trick, I mean, there’s just some sadists out there who are making games.
So you see this in pretty much every era of gaming, and will probably continue to see it. That’s all for today. Leave us a comment let us know what you think.
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