MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: is it possible to reprogram the ai in arcade fighting games?

> > it would be cool at some point to play older arcade fighters without a cpu that
> > resorts to cheating. it's literally the equivalent of an ai wanting to have fun
> with
> > a game, and a human just pulling the power cord to the machine. #fuckyou
>
> At the end of the day, if you want to get good at fighting games, you will have to
> put in time and effort.
>
> In the case of games with cheap AI, you'll also have to learn their patterns, what
> they react to, and what their actual strengths / weaknesses are.
>
> Complaining about it on this forum is pointless and annoys people.

Getting good at fighting games is not the same as getting good at kicking the CPU's ass though. Case in point, a "cheating" CPU in UMK3 will wipe the floor with its human opponent (usually "cheat mode" AI sets in by the third or fourth stage), yet if you somehow do manage to hit the CPU you can sometimes spam LP for the whole round and win in about five seconds while it endlessly tries to run up to combo/throw you and gets hit over and over. Try using an AI breaker like that against a human player and you'll be beaten in five seconds instead of your opponent. On the flip side, what works against some human players sometimes never works against a CPU player. Even worse, the AI sometimes changes between arcade revisions, and then there's several home versions which are different still (for example, if you were a kid/teenager in a first world country in 1994 and played SF/MK at the arcade, chances are you had a SNES/SFC or Genesis/Mega Drive rather than a brand new $2000 arcade cabinet in your house).

That said, with CPU opponents, there's "cheating" like the above, and then there's flat out cheating. Street Fighter II literally cheats, it generates moves out of thin air rather than actually going through the input motions like Tekken for example. That's why Guile can spam Sonic Booms while ducking and without ever charging the move up (e.g. holding back for a second or so before pressing forward+punch like the human has to), you can get yoga'd by Dhalsim fifteen or so times in a row instead of six, and fireball throwers can also have more than one on screen as well while you have to wait for yours to hit something or fly off-screen.

I don't even think the 2D Mortal Kombats cheat like that (although I swear I've seen Cyrax spam two nets on screen at the same time, so maybe I'm wrong); MK and Tekken seem to be a classic case of the CPU just reading your inputs the instant you press them and countering whatever you're doing with something that works against your move in a rock-paper-scissors manner (and throwing you when you're idle) - "cheating" by simply being too good (the tropes being Computers Are Fast, mixed with Perfect Play AI) rather than the CPU cheating by doing what it wants when it wants like SF2.