How Mortal Kombat 2 cheats against you | MVG
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- Опубликовано: 10 апр 2022
- Mortal Kombat 2 released in the arcades in 1993. It was a smash hit generating over $600 million in sales and threw down a challenge to Capcom and Street Fighter 2 to be the most influential fighting game in history. There was one problem though, the CPU AI downright cheats its way to winning. In this episode we take a closer look at how the CPU AI worked.
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#MK2 #InputReading #Cheating 
Игры
Me: I swear the CPU is reading my inputs.
Others : No you’re just bad at the game.
Me now: Vindicated at last.
20+ years later and no-one cares
@@CaptainCook83
Oof
Read this: *Kicks the computer in real life*
@@CaptainCook83 no one cares just as no one cares about that dead persons grave on your "channel"
@@CaptainCook83 because they aren’t gamers.
This is the calmest, most scientific post rage-quit rant I've ever witnessed.
LMAO
I made this 69 likes
🤣🤣Everytime he says the game cheats I cry laughing
lmfao
take notes lowtiergod
Yo I was thinking the same thing when he was like “you might think you’re just a bad player, but the game is actually cheating.” In such a calm voice
Street Fighter II did something rather similar. Attacks that required complex button pressing on the player's part, AI would do that instantaneously. Heck, attacks that required holding an attack key or a direction to charge it, AI would perform it within mere nanoseconds.
true i am 99.6% sure that the 4 boss characters (balrog, vega, sagat and m.bison) are different between when you play them or the ai does
hell in SF2 world warrior they have different move sets if you force the game to make you play them (eg. vega cant block but will backflip meaning special moves wont do pinch damage, m. bison's scissor kicks were a basic move meaning you would have been able to use them on the fly)
SF2 Comp would also get Invincible frames on normal attacks
The AI would be walking forward while hitting moves that involve holding back, lmao.
AI Guile was a beast, insta-command Flash Kicks
right like A.I. m bison😂
that muther fucker could bicycle kick 10 times in a row 😂
where as we had to holdback for 2 seconds then forward to kick . i
always thought that was cheap as hell .
What is so infuriating about this to me is that the AI's difficulty doesn't affect the speed of it's actions, but simply how likely the AI perfectly counters your move. The unfair nature of the AI ends up being Tenfold against the Secret Characters due to their extended grab Range, fast walk speed, and projectile immunity (although this immunity is a double edged sword since the AI still *reacts* to projectiles, even if they shouldn't)
Add in the requirements for them to even show up and its a nightmarish scenario when the AI just decides you don't get to play ^^'
And then UMK3 gave Jade's AI the awareness to immediately just activate immunity then run up and cave your face in if you try projectiles
Unintentionally hilarious
From the video and your post I think the better solution, would be to add a delay on reactions so it imitates humans, and also have an adjuster for that delay that changes based on the diff value. Of course it could never be zero delay as thats just broken. I would also cap the max diff based on the adjustable difficulty on the dip switches, so the highest 9 is only possible if its set to very hard on the dip switches. So perhaps cap it to +4 over the configured difficulty, assuming very hard is 5. They would also need to fix the move priority problem as well, as we can see in the video a delay on its own might not work as the code seems to allow the AI move to take priority even when its actioned after the player.
Ultimately what stands out to me, is that if you need to cheese to beat a game, then the game is broken, the videos I seen this game being beaten, after first two rounds they cant play normally, instead they using repetitive cheese moves exploiting the AI.
First my wife...now MK2....when will the cheating stop?
Never my friend that's how life works
Wait for a patch-up and a patch, respectively.
At least you can show your wife's boyfriend the MK2 arcade version, so he will understand what you've been through..
Jump back and perform a high kick on her repeatedly. According to this video, it helps.
@@extradipboneless then his wife boyfriend will invite you to a party with a bunch of his friends and brag about how good his wife was in bed and might introduced you also hook you up with another girl that he knows and there you go you're in a other relationship
Impotant to note, is that some of the CPU's attacks have impossibly fast start up animations. Like when they uppercut, you don't see a single frame of the character starting the crouch animation, and when they do neutral jump kick to stop you from jumping, the airborne kick starts on frame 1. A human player can't do that, not even pressing the button ASAP. Kinda the same as Guile doing special moves without charging on SFII's AI.
nahh bro, guile got the hit box lol, no cheat. No cheap. 🤣😂😂🙃He WAS charging up.
I noticed that uppercut also!! I hated it.
**Casually performs full circle command grab while standing completely still**
Mileena’s Sai Throw in MK2 requires you to hold light punch for five seconds, but the AI can just spam Sais for what seems like forever… INSTANTANEOUSLY.
@@BrolyLSSJ01 Nah for the sai throw you only need to hold the HP button for some frames, I'd say it's even less than a second! No need to hold it for so long, give it a try :D
There were ways to cheat the AI back, I remember for example with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 on the PS1, the AI would always step back if you moved forward, and if you stepped back yourself, it would move forward. So basically all you had to do was land one quick hit at the start of the match, and the move forward for one second, and then back for one second, and repeat that for the whole match and the AI would never actually attack you. Doing this I was able to beat the hardest difficulty and all of the challenges at the end.
thats dirty dirty dirty. you need to take a shower. hehehe but yeah I can confim this. the same things the ai do to you you can do to her too. everytime she jumps to you can hit her with back kick. or i used to jump foward so she would cast something I would teleport and punch and cast the scorpion snake and combo. it works every time. ai doesnt cheat you can di same things to her too. thats how the game is.
@@karlostorres7745 lol, call me dirty mcnasty
I didn't know umk3 was on playstation 1. I played it a lot on Sega genesis
its not cheating your just that good
@@sayingnigromakesyoutubecry2647it wasn't. Vanilla MK3 and MK Trilogy were on the PS1.
This whole difficulty adjustment is something I've recently noticed in some fighting games, notably the recent MK and Injustice games. It was weird to me that I'd go from the computer effectively being a punching bag to tossing me around like a pro-gamer with a 40 hit juggle combo, and then on retry it would be back to a punching bag.
In the recent games AI doesn't work like that so you must have not been lucky on that 1 try
The AI in SF6 on diff 10 is insane
9:12 "In general if you spam jump back the cpu will jump towards you"
This is something that I learned very well back at the time where I was playing this game in the arcade. My favorite character was Baraka and I used this to basically trick the AI to jump towards me. Turns out that you can start inputting the commands for the "Chop Chop Blades" move while you are jumping backward in a way that the move immediately starts as soon as you land. So basically I simply repeated this technique over and over again where the AI just jumped toward me only to get sliced again and again and again.
So the game is cheating, by instantly reading your inputs, but you can turn it around and just exploit it to essentially make it do what you want and then punish it.
I would always win without much trouble... until Kintaro where that trick doesn't work.
Shao Khan totally falls for that, however, he just jumps/rushes into Baraka's Chop Chop Blades like an idiot. Never had a problem with him.
Kinataro and Sho Khan are easy but Kung Loi is a headache
I can still beat this in the arcade with one Kredit doing this with Subzero (ice on floor) or Kitana (fan blade lift thing). The game cheats so take advantage and make it do what you want to do!
what does kintaro do?
@@mrosskne It's more what he doesn't do. He doesn't jump toward you if you jump backward (unlike every other regular character controlled by the AI).
Shao Kahn is the easiest to beat if you can just execute front kicks when he walks towards you. I use Sub-Zero
I remember when doing uppercuts when the AI would insta-react and uppercut immediately after me, causing me to "miss" and I getting hit instead. Another one was Liu Kang's bicycle kick which takes input time before it can go off, but the AI can use it immediately when it wants.
I never bothered with the bicycle kick unless I knew for an absolute fact it wasnt gonna be blocked for that very reason lol the a.i lands it every time cant remember blocking it much but different on the other foot
I know eh! The bicycle kick takes a six second charge but the cpu has thrown them back to back at me. Just as soon as one lands, heres the second one.
@@robdoe8694 it takes me back like and I've got a terrible memory since my accident but I actually remember exactly what you are describing, bicycle kicks literally a second apart when it's meant to be 5 seconds if I remember correctly you needed to hold down the low kick for 5 secs but the a.i just fkin throws them at you like bricks in a fkin builders yard
Aw man even the recollection is infuriating but I still loved mk2 it was visually pleasing to look at and despite the cheating as fk nature of the a.i you still wanted to play it even if to te yourself 'This time I'm gonna a do it without losing all my credits' HAH 🤣
Precious memories eh mate
@@OdinSmilesRavensLaugh72051 I was going through MK2 move lists online, and it's all over the place for how long you hold it, some say 4secs some 5secs. I'm almost positive that the SNES manual said 6. Right? Hahaha!
@@robdoe8694 lol I can only imagine the misinformation out there man especially with the all the different Mugen versions of the game it's crazy.
You might be right mate but I am pretty sure the original mk2 manual for the snes said 5 seconds but I could be wrong 🤷♂️
Man we sound like a pair of old men eh buddy haha goes to show our age 😆
as both a programmer and a gamer this was immensely interesting and infuriating
@@juser-abuser 💀Really?
@@juser-abuserI feel your pain.
@@juser-abuserwhat does that have to do with MK II?
@@juser-abuserlmao
@@vibemasterkorosu2469you.
I remember playing as Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat 2. His ice blast would never work against the computer-controlled character. It would always duck it. However, using his ice puddle to slip up the character, jump over its head, kick it in the back, then throw another ice puddle worked to take out the AI no matter what level difficulty it was on.
The A.I ducks all projectiles in general though..
@@DIRTYSOUTHSHINOBI very true
Back in the day there was always that arcade employee that played for free and knew how to counter the cheating AI
That was me. I know how to counter the cheating AI. I remember visiting my friends home and started playing MK2. He saw me went and set the game to the hardest difficulty. His eyes almost pop out like a cartoon character. Then everyone got silent and watched me slaughtered the computer without losing a single match. They thought I was god or something. Lol.
@@MasterTactics this is the lamest and then everybody clapped ive ever heard..i believe you tho i was good at fighting games lol
@@fatfurie There's a certain trick to fooling the A.I. This game is one of the biggest cheating game there is. It's programmed to have all of the advantage if you cannot fool the A.I.
@@MasterTactics how did you do it? did the company give you guys a cheat sheet of what to do??
@@blackwaltz3135 Me and brother used to play it on the hardest difficulty on the Sega Genesis as a kid. After 5 months of getting our butts kicked by the AI. We discovered a way to fool the AI. But yeah, this game definitely is a cheating bastard. I will say out of all the characters in that game Liu Kang is the worst to use. His jump kick sucks and his leg sweep has no reach. Baraka got the best jump kick and leg sweep reach.
I always liked this game on Genesis but was so terrible at it. Finally some closure after 20+ years 🤣
Re play it on an emulator !
I don't think the CPU difficulty is that bad on consoles. I think he's talking about how the arcade version is way overtuned, and only the arcade version. XD
I win, muhahahahaha
@@ruggie.74 it is on the Genesis, auto-throws, blooks unblockable attacks, etc
same here
The shadow shows that the "reaction" starts one or two frames earlier, for example at 3:04. So the cheating is even more extreme than thought.
Essentially the AI is programmed to read your input and always counter according to a script. The difficulty adjuster just affects how often it will fail at this.
This means at the highest difficulty nine times out of ten it doesn't matter what you do, the AI will walk through your attack and hit you because that's the only situation that can happen in the script.
basically LAZY game developers not wanting to actually make a rules-based game that is fun to play.
Just imagine the game tester being told about the hidden bullshit
That’s comforting lol
nuh uh your just bad and need to practice more
@@NPC-bs3pmits not really lazy. These games should be played player vs player. There's no other way to balance computers
@@manleyfgc7981 How about making the input reading slower (enough to mimic that of the average player) and making them know harder combos and tech according to their difficulty?
You literally just confirmed my entire childhood. I would swear that game cheated and guess what? It does! But more interesting, my dad (who never played a video game in his life) would say that the computer would alter its play style to allow a win. I thought he was full of it, but my dad is a pretty smart guy.
Nothing would piss me off more than when it was cheating and after the 100th time, allow me to win. That pity from the computer caused a lot of broken controllers. I was determine to beat any cheat it throws at me.
When I used to tell my parents (with a little yelling at the console) that it was cheating, they didn't believe me. The sports games were just as blatant. Absolutely destroy CPU for first 3/4 of game, then computer goes insane mode and attempts to make the game more fair by cheating into unmissable shots/no run speed penalties...etc.etc.
@@krzyxb0rdr Not the computer's fault lol, it's the programmers. Actually garbage people IMO for making shit like this in video games. Lots of these programmers never played games themselves so they didn't care and along with game designers made it in a way to maximize profit out of Arcade cabinets.
Same here
@@jebril You just need to get good :)
When I was younger, this frustrated me in so many games. So many game devs made up for crappy AI by making it cheat but it did more than make the game harder: it made it so specific tactics that would easily work against human players, wouldn't work against AI. These games are basically teaching gamers to think wrongly if you catch my drift.
I'll give you an example: some RTS games used to cheat by giving the AI far more resources than the human player. Not only would the starting resources be way higher, but the amount they'd get per "tick" (by using peasants, ore harvesters or whatever) would be higher too, allowing them to build way more units. The logical thing to do, would be to reduce their access to resources but in many games this barely made a difference. Either the AI would get "free" resources without even needing to harvest them, or the AI just got way more resources by harvesting those it still had left, than the player would. This would lead to you being barely able to produce more units than the AI even though you controlled way more resource points.
It's stuff like this that kills enjoyment because the moment the player realizes the AI cheats, it just feels unfair and takes away the joy of outsmarting the game.
Yeah, beating the computer's not about doing what would make sense on the surface, but minimizing the consistent unique advantages it gets through cheating and exploiting holes in the AI.
It's like those mechanic games on the arcades which also are rigged. The claw machines only apply useful force 5% of the times, coin pushers have a secret storage where coins get pushed and stored.. And push the button to stop the roulette -games decide how much delay to add to your input, for sure . It's pretty sad and makes me wanna sue whoever made them, lol.
This makes me think of StarCraft, which gets just insanely difficult in campaign mode. My solution was to cheat like a mofo. I would turn on invincibility until I had built up my base and units, then turn it off for the clash.
Usually this made for a right-sized difficulty level, and made progressing through the scenarios possible and enjoyable. But every now and then, the initial rush was all the computer AI had. If you didn’t cheat, you got owned in less than 5 min. If you god-mode your way to a complete defense, the AI is a complete pushover. That felt kind of cheap, because there wasn’t really a good way to play those scenarios.
@@nickwallette6201 Yeah the original Star Craft AI was broke AF. SC2 AI at least was a little more balanced.
which explains why in Starcraft, the AI never needed that field of pylons in a corner to field a large army.
Getting "Mortal Kombated" is a term in my friend group we use when we get destroyed handily in a game after handily destroying everyone else in the previous game.
Those early Mortal Kombats were just so blatant with their difficulty slider that moves up on wins and downs on losses that it genuinely becomes unfun once one realizes what is happening. Which is unfortunate, because there exists a sweet spot of difficulty in there, but that requires trudging through the far too easy bits and then losing to the literally cheating bits to finally be able to get one fight that feels like a fair challenge before the next fight is either too easy or literal cheating again.
Another thing, it is gross to be wrecked by cheating AI, then have the difficulty go down on the retry, so it is not even really the same fight. It just robs the player from being able to overcome a tough fight through perseverance. And with the difficulty bobbing up and down on wins and losses, it actively hinders people from getting good (against the AI).
This is so well said and EXACTLY how I always feel when playing MKII. I've been playing this game for 30 years, and even with the best strategies there's no consistency anywhere. That bobbing difficulty is BS and you're absolutely right it kills any momentum you have.
Lol thank you for confirming an almost 20 year suspicion. I had a feeling of being cheated in that game lol
This brings back memories of being a kid in the arcade and feeling like MK II was impossibly hard and thus not much fun to play alone. I was robbed!
That made me move to KI insted, MK2 was imposible, nobady played it
The first guy was east
Then it got rough
absolutely true, I only play this game with my friends.
KI does it too and eventually will auto combo breaker 100% of the time. xD The Ai is definitely easier than MK2's though. I definitely knew it was happening at the time though because they were flat out doing things that were impossible. The throwing thing I'm pretty sure is a glitch and not even supposed to work that way because when real players try to do a similar thing the throw loses in all cases to a action of any other kind. Except air throws. For some reason air throws beat every other action.
@@keerobz yup all part of the grand plan to double revenue for the same amount of time the machine is in play!
I've reverse engineered some of the MK2 AI. I can tell you some of the details. It has difficulty based limits, per move, that can be executed successfully against the done before it will start doing "perfect counters" to those same moves. This prevents spamming a glitch.
Would you consider make a pc port at this point a massive work ?
It will be a dream.
@@Vulto166 There is a MS-dos port of MK 1-3 sold on Gog.
Besides i doubt he can " just release " a port out of nowhere, there are rights involved.
Running it on a Snes emulator works just fine and is how ive always played it. Try that.
@@Erikcleric
Thanks for the info.
I'll try the gog version.
Well the pc port is not impossible. Look at sm64 and zelda oot.
@@Vulto166 He wasn't saying it's impossible, just that OP can't just drop a port on a whim. That crap takes time
@@cybersilver5816
And i wasn't saying that he said it.
I know that it takes time, it can be more ease if made in group.
Every fighting game back in the 90s has the AI that cheated
Even SFII does this
But not nearly as badly and flagrantly as MK.
@@JackOfAllRAIDsidk man ST was on the same level as Mk2 and 3 imo in terms of bs
@@JackOfAllRAIDs It's just as bad, they can do absolutely anything that a human player cannot.
The speed run for this game is pure AI manipulation and is very impressive and satisfying to watch.
Yeah checkout playthrough of umk3 with only 1 credit on very hard under master tier. It is all manipulation.
@@TheSnoopyclone Yeah love UMK3 runs especially people doings runs on the actual cabinet not on Maime.
What do you "the" speedrun? There's lots of them out there. You need to be more specific.
@@notsyzagts7967 summoning salt just put out a video on it
@@notsyzagts7967 it's one run attempted by many players.
I remember putting about a dollar in quarters into this machine before giving up, knowing something was going on. Haven't played it since, you're welcome Midway.
It was fun owning it on sega and play it all day, then go to the arcade and show off to all the other virgins
@Milwaukee Mac Repair bruh I loved streets of rage 2, that shit was bomb
Thanks randy, your comment was revolutionary, it cured all know and future cancers, added more ice to the ice caps. Fixed the ozone layer, got ride of world hunger, droughts and all criminal activity, made people's debts vanish, and tax is now no longer a thing!
Well done rando! 🙃😘
Same!
@Milwaukee Mac Repair Sounds like fun bro
This and your NBA Jam video are very eye opening. I spent many hours being frustrated thinking it was my fault when the computer was tough. Thanks for the great video.
I KNEW IT! When my friends and I would be playing MK2 in the arcade, I kept saying the computer knew I was pushing up for a forward kick before my character moved. I even tested it a few times by watching carefully and as soon as I moved the joystick up, Baraka would start the cuisinart slashing and my character wasn't even in the air yet. Thanks for confirming!
I had this on megadrive and I could never beat Shang Tsung for this very reason. Even on “very easy” difficulty.
gman u lookin cute here in the comments today
Kintaro rocked me harder than I rocked your mom.
Gman just git gud, it wasn’t that damn hard.
@@kaikwonfu2633 This video literally shows that it was.
Those damn triple projectiles that come out as soon as you launch one.
I’ll never forget playing Mortal Kombat in the arcade. There was a machine in our local laser quest and a random cafe in town! The queues were huge and there was at least 15-20 people gathered around watching!
One of my fav arcade games of all time. Promised myself one day I would own a MK2 cabinet.... I spent hours as a teen at the
local arcade mastering it and worked out that if you let the ai follow , you could counter attack with devastating effect. Certainly was a big part of my youth lol
Great video! I already knew this but this level of analysis was brilliant. I still remember buying MK2. Such a masterpiece but it was also so unbelievably difficult. Now we know why. It is quite a sinister deception if you think about the arcade version where people are putting in money. No wonder it made massive profits!
This is probably the reason why, growing up, I'd never trust the difficulty system. I knew that this was a thing even then, like it was executing a move that would have been impossible if it was a human player. So since then, I always just play on easy because difficulty was always artificially cheapened and I didn't want to invest years in defeating the game.
I remember reading a Gamepro magazine article about arcade games cheating on players. The actual developers of SF2 stated that in order for the game to actually be challenging, it basically had to cheat. This was because even when a human player will eventually adjust and respond to the different fighters strategies, a CPU could not. Remember, this was back in the early 90’s. It was in response to fighters pulling moves automatically versus human players having to perform them with joystick and button combinations. He explained that the most notorious where Blanka’s spin ball while moving forward, Ken’s 3-4 Dragon punches in a row and Guile’s Sonic Kick without having to crouch. This has been going on for as long arcades have existed and also help in bringing in revenue, since losing to a cheap enemy pisses on off and makes you play again and again. Thanks for reading, this bought back memories from the arcade era.
Or Sagat...god was he annoying.
Kens dp's werent cheating afaik. but your other examples are correct. Desk did a good video showing how the cpu cheats in other ways such as input reading, changing frame data and downright being invincible in certain rare situations but unlike MK2 at least the different characters have different AI that all have weaknesses meaning the gameplay is varied and you can build unique strategies to the whole cast. MK2's jump back and uppercut technique is boring as hell and then you still end up with a throw of the dice against kintaro due to how unfair he can be if he wants to. Give me sf2 anyday :D
@@Podbod I agree with you on Ken's dp's, especially the soft punch ones. I was quick enough to continue a series of these over and over, basically making Ken invincible except for an extremely brief moment (e.g. start one as soon as you finish the last, so when he lands, he immediately does another, rinse, repeat.). This would confuse the hell out of the AI.
@@Drgluee yeah, his Light DP was always very strong in the sf2 series but hes still very beatable
But is it possible that the game is like pet battles in WoW. Normally the fastest pet goes first but if 2 pets have the same speed, a behind the scenes coin toss takes place each round to determine who goes first. So is it possible that that's happening with these moves here and he's only looking for the ones where he "loses" (aka confirmation bias or cherry picking)
I've been marathoning the old MKS and I found MK1 to be easier than I expected (Even Goro's not too bad once you know the tricks to it), but I've been having trouble with MKII. I honestly thought I sucked, and well I probably do, but good to know the game is cheating too💀💀
Thanks for making this👋
I noticed this a lot more in mk3 especially as you got higher up to harder characters like shaokhan (sorry for wrong spelling) by the time you got to the top 4 hard characters you could basically not touch them at all everything gets nulled out and their move executes over your own it use to drive me crazy
*In some versions of the game the AI is so laughably cheap that if you try and throw a defeated opponent during the 'Fatality' the AI will still auto counter throw you hahaha*
😄😃😄😃
i always thought you just couldnt throw to finish lol
I can vouch for this. It was the earlier version of MKII before any of the patches and you absolutely could not throw the computer opponent. We thought it was ridiculous at first when we absolutely could never land a throw, but then when we tried it after the opponent was defeated and sitting dizzy and even THEN when the moment we hit the throw button the defeated opponent threw US, we knew it was full-on programmed to cheat. This was changed in one of the update patches - not that you couldn't throw the opponent during a match, only that they wouldn't throw you when they were defeated and you tried to throw them. Ha.
@@luisbermudez4756 *Thanks Luis!* Only my little brother and myself remember this so it's nice to know we weren't going crazy haha. Also if you got an AI opponent in a corner when you went to 'throw finish' them you could get them to throw you 2 or 3 times in a row before the timer ran out and they fell over just to showcase how badly the cheat was on!
@@blacknapalm2131 That's right! I totally forgot about the multiple throws thing! I specifically remember Kitana was notorious for this as she would do that backbending slam and you would bounce past her legs and she'd just throw you again.
I had always wondered about that in the arcades back in the day. I had my own cheap AI hacks but the throws especially seemed extra cheap by the CPU and this explains it.
this is why cheats have been made so we can kick their asses with unlimited health
It was obvious when you got to baraka or jade. xD
Yeah and when you uppercut and it "misses" but then they uppercut you directly after
SUPERB (lol) video and analysis! As someone that's been playing in the arcades since MKII, this was spot on. Josh from our channel is a programmer, and talks constantly about how the MKII AI works. Just like you, we still love the game! I will say UMK3 is still my personal favorite entry. I love playing competitively with friends and strangers to this day.
Nice touch with the screen behind you showing the ongoing recording of you talking!
Ya, I think everyone knew it was cheating all along. The frame cuts for some characters were so hilariously obvious, namely, Kitana's grab. You were 7/8 through your attack, and in the very next frame, you were 7/8 through her throw. 😆
Ya, this game was a pile of trash in single player mode. Head-to-head at arcades, was where it shone.
Not everyone knew, because the punk kids at the arcade NEVER BELIEVED ME!
(scars) jk
Shined
Greetings! I'd like to talk about that UMK3 arcade difficulty if I may. I'm the co-creator of an arcade hack out there called UMK3 Plus, and I've spent about 5 years analyzing and picking apart this game's code. The arcade difficulty ramp is pretty interesting, and somewhat different than what was described in the video.
In the case of MK3 and UMK3, the difficulty set in the operator's menu is nothing more than placebo. That setting is never looked at during the game. Instead, your difficulty is based solely on which tower you select at the Choose Your Destiny screen. This is one reason that the Novice tower can be SO ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING after a few fights - especially that Jade battle. The difficulty ramps are universal, but where you start is what's different.
Novice tower difficulty per fight ladder position - 0,1,2,9,9,etc - Jade is usually that first 9 difficulty fight!
Warrior: 1,3,5,9,9,9 etc
Master - 2,4,6,9,9,9,9 etc
Master II/Champion - 3,6,9,9,9 etc.
In the arcade, if you lose, the difficulty ramp goes down by one each time you continue (not 3 as the console source suggests). So if you give the game enough quarters, you'll get opponents that are a little easier. Don't try this on the bosses though, they're a universal difficulty, it doesn't matter what the current difficulty ramp is, bosses are bosses.
In MK2, as the difficulty gets higher, the distance from which the AI can throw you also increases. it's ludicrous! An interesting quirk in the MK2 AI is that they are always advancing on you. Except in certain situations like Sub Zero's ice puddle, they'll go idle until the puddle dries up. This is why you'll sometimes see Scorpion taking Sub Zero's stance, Mileena taking Kitana's stance, and interesting stuff like that. Their "idle" stance is shared among palette swaps - they're just almost never in them.
Thankfully, for as cheap as the AI is in these games, it's also predictable and easy to capitalize on their built in routines.
Also UMK3+ Beta 2 just released a few weeks ago. y'all should check it out, it's pretty cool.
That's deep drew 👏 very interesting though.
The 'always advancing' was the most intimidating part of the game to me haha. Was that to keep you from noticing the pallet swapping?
Great analysis man.
I do find it hilarious that in MK2, the game blatantly just wants to throw you off the machine as early as the third match. After all the complains, Midway made MK3 and were like "what? we listened to you. now we want you to get off the cab on the FOURTH match. be happy."
Thank you for this video. You just described on a technical level what we all intuitively felt while playing the game.
This is serious vindication! This explains so damn much. Now if only I can go back and pass this info to my younger self and save myself from all the time wasted but also keep those quarters in my pocket.
Hi MVG, I enjoyed your video. You made a lot of great points about the AI. However you did not mention that the exploit/strategy to beat the AI really depends on what side you are playing on. For example P1 side of the arcade control, the jump back..AI jump forward to follow you does work.
Yet on P2 side of controls, that glitch/AI exploit does not work at all. The P2 side strategy is basically if you move forward and step back a little, the AI will pause and stand still for a brief moment. That is the cue that it is going to throw a projectile attack in around 2 1/2 seconds or so.
If the AI pauses and stands completely still, then it is 100% guaranteed it will shoot a fireball, iceball, or whatever projectile that character has in their skillset.
This happens only when human is controlling Player 2 side of controls vs AI. Also the jump backwards, AI CPU jumps forward to follow you on P1 side strategy, actually does not work with every character in the game either. I know that does NOT work with Liu Kang for example. On the other hand it works 100% of the time if human is using Shang Tsung. Thought I might throw that out there.
To add to this - the AI has a lot of weird glitches when playing as P2. For example, if you jump towards your opponent and they walk back (which they almost always do at a certain distance) they will keep walking back until they gain enough distance from you, then full stop. You can exploit this by just walking front towards the AI; they will always walk into the corner, and since they can't gain enough distance, will just keep backwalking from you until you back up enough. Back in the day, this helped us a ton (it's even easier to do when the AI is at its hardest) because it makes pretty much everyone that's not a boss into a training dummy to practice corner juggles (universal one was jump kick -> crouch LP -> crouch LP -> Uppercut). IIRC all revisions of MK1, 2, 3 and U3 have this type of weird glitch where the AI is super exploitable when playing as P2.
@@timekillr Thank you for that. I wish I new that back in the day though 🤣
@@timekillr Yes your right as well. I practice all of my corner combos on the AI from Player2 side. Things like Kitana 100% combos and especially Johnny Cage triple flash kick juggles vs JAX and Raiden. Cheers
I’m so happy that you mentioned this man. because we used to clear the game on one credit using this exact technique! I thought that it was just my little corner of the world, but you replying with everything the same really vindicates that people that put the time in back in the day and knew what’s up. really know how to cheat that arcade machine pretty goddamn well. 👍🏻
Spot on from all you guys who mentioned it. I commented about this but didn't know more people knew about this too.
OMG, in my childhood, when playing MK3, I definitely can feel that AI reads my input and counterattacks with pre-coded tricks... You just confirmed this theory, which I could not test for 20 years! This instantly let me feel really relieved...
Long time ago i noticed that i can beat the same difficulty same opponent after loosing like 3 4 times in a row. They also did completely the same thing in mk9 and injustice, shit is ridiculous 😆😄😁
maybe the AI is just that good it kicks your ass
Excellent video on this and I happen to play this. And yes, even on a real arcade cabinet.
I had no chance but to stop using uppercuts or spears because of how ridculous the AI is.
Thank you Ed Boon.
👍
My brother always asked me how I could lose so badly against the CPU when I always completely destroyed him and his friends in every fight.
I explained it to him, but I don't think he really believed or understood it.
I could easily tell what the CPU was doing. It would always stand still and do nothing as long as I did nothing. It just reacted "perfectly" to every move I made.
And the most blatant proof it was cheating: Liu Kang performing multiple bicycle kicks in a row (MK Trilogy) when I knew for a fact one had to hold the high-kick button for at least 3 seconds before Liu performed another bicycle kick. That was funny. 😂
2 was always my fav, too. Raiden was my fav character. He seemed so mysterious and even charismatic in his winning poses like he enjoyed fighting. The music for the game was awesome, too
This is one of the reasons that I love arcade emulation. I can enable cheats in order to balance the game and get back at all of the quarters this game stole from me in the arcade when I was in high school.
Ahhh, the arcade machines...they "earned" your money by playing fair and square!
To my eye, MIDWAY games are kind of infamous for cheating. For example, my favorite ever is NBA Hangtime. On my game rig via MAME, I have a fully souped up player after playing through some 70 or so games and gaining attribute points, and have refined my skills to a point where I’m essentially automatic early on in the game-guaranteed buckets every trip down the floor. It doesn’t take long, however, for the rubberbanding AI to kick in and ensure that the CPU always remains somewhat close, which I believe you’ve actually talked about before. As you said, though, still love MIDWAY’s games, and I still play Hangtime pretty regularly. It’s an even better experience with multiple players-the more the merrier!
sport game in general are ruthless when it comes to rubberbanding, in PES they pretty much buff rival team to superstar levels even if you are playing against the lowest tier team in the game lol
@@LeoJay
Midway sports games are another level. I remember having a better chance of winning a game of Blitz heading into the 4th quarter down by 7 than up by 28.
I’m sorry you only have one eye, maybe that’s why the games are so hard?
Also, Hydro Thunder was another game they cheated too. I remember back when Hydro Thunder coming to my place, I honed my skills to extent where I can do throtlle and boost at perfect time to gain advantage.
But, no matter how good I am, AI was being rubberband so badly that I had 2nd place in 8 of 10 races even with best rides. This get me pissed of on how they being scumbag with those cheap tactics they did for easy money and those karma was strike back to them with failed games and eventually shutdown for good in 2010.
Remember, cheating for your own desire eventually caught you up and you will suffer from it, this is good lesson we learn till now.
nba hang time is so good, so much better than nba jam and so few people know about it
i always try to keep double the score of the AI but after a few matches it becomes impossible
but still a great game to play against all teams with a custom character, the game is perfectly beatable, it doesn't cheat like mortal kombat at all
edit
i mean, there is rubberbanding, but that never stopped me and a lot of people from stomping the AI in need for speed and mario kart games either, reacting to your inputs with the perfect move, even if it was supposed to be impossible to do, is way cheaper than rubberbanding
MK2 was so obvious. OVERLY OBVIOUS as a kid I didn't understand the deeper stuff but i knew that the cpu was reading my inputs.
Mileena took me to the game over screen, every damn time. absolutely brutal on any setting. MK 2's input reading is absolutely insane.
How, she's literally the easiest character to beat in the game... now Kitana was a force to be reckoned with it was impossible to jump on her
I always used to say that when I was a teenager playing this game. “WTF, I swear this game cheats!”
This is one game I did not continue throwing my coins at after my first few times playing. It was ridiculous.
Great job. Always thought it was weird how short the life bars were. Three hits and you’re dead. It’s fun to play against an actual person. :)
Awesome explanation, as someone who has no understanding of programming, i still was able to follow along and understand it as well as wish i could do programming on games bc looking at this and "playing around" with it during development sounds insanely fun
I discovered a glitch in the SNES version that I would use against the computer opponent. When you're Liu Kang, jump back as far as possible and then start doing low fireballs - if you have enough distance between you, the computer opponent will start doing backflips and getting hit by the fireballs over and over (because they're already at the edge of the screen). This works for everyone up to Kintaro as I recall.
Yes I use to do this with Baraka with his blade shard it worked every time
Yes,i found that glitch too,but even so it's ridiculous to have to win that way
You can beat Shao Kahn the same way. Just spam Liu Kang's Low Fireball from full screen and you'll beat him.
Yup true that's how I beat smoke and jade
Any character with a projectile can do it. I used to do this exact thing with Raiden's lighting bolt. It was basically the only way to beat the AI at the higher difficulties.
Any time MVG does some code investigation it's a great video, assured. I'm curious how this compares to the infamous SNK cheating bosses..?
The snk bosses didn't cheat from what I remember (well, maybe in Art Of Fighting 2, that game was insanely difficult), but they have very broken priorities, hit boxes, reaction times, attack and defense values, but they're far from input reading. If, say, Amakusa, Mizuki or Zankuro played reading your inputs they'd just flip your weapon every time.
@@javierortiz82 many snk bosses definitely did cheat. Rugal in kof 94 being the most infamous example since he reads inputs and his genocide cutter has higher priority than literally any other move in the game. Snk is the originator of the "snk boss syndrome " meme.
SNK's games would simply throw everything it had at you. Even on their Level 1 difficulty, you'd have to be some sort of gaming savant to get anywhere close to a 1 CC achievement!
rugal kof02
@@starlitalpha7 You are wrong about KOF bosses. They have cheap AI but, can be exploited. Rugal from KOF94 is a damn cheater. He does the most damage out of anyone. AOF2 cheats
I love these kinda of video bring more exploring other classic arcade games please
I remember the PS3 arcade port of MKII by Sony Interactive. It was a high res port of the arcade original complete with its AI. Even on the easiest setting, the AI will become very difficult to beat after the first couple of fights. You basically have to cheese your ranged attacks and hope for the best.
In MK1 on the SNES, I had a Raiden CPU literally chain throw me back and forth, the entire screen away, until I was dead for the entirety of two rounds. I never saw it happen again, but my brothers were there to see it as well.
I think the first MK on SNES was more fair. Beat it as a kid while MK2 curbstomps me as an adult lol
Yes, he absolutely can do that!
I have a video where Sonya grabs me when I hit her.
The MK1 AI cheats indeed ^^
That happened to me a few times with different characters and didn't matter what I did to avoid it.
This just makes me feel even better about dominating this game in the arcades growing up!
"How arcade games gaslight you into thinking you're bad at games"
Love to hear more about the Mame you are using and the roms also as Emu paradise has been down for a long time
The key is playing defensive and backing up and letting the enemy come to you, it confuses the AI and opens them up for attacks...same goes for MK3 and its updates.
Makes sense. Give a counter-happy AI nothing to counter and it'll have to come after you to win.
You know the same works in some Zelda games. The old bait and switch tactic.
if u played arcade, you always knew this. The machine will never let you win. so you stop....
Or turn on an Infinite HP (P1) code.
If the AI isn't gonna play fair, neither should you.
MK3’s AI was near impossible. I consider myself an average player and I don’t think I ever got near Shao Kahn
MKII was my first Genesis game. Years later when I had a chance to try it on arcade I could not believe how bad I was. This video explains a lot.
It was my second after Sonic 2.
Amazing video, hats down for the hard work sir.
Good vid man i recently just turned 40 and remember most beat em ups were like this like fatal fury etc they would always manage to figure you out smash many a pad on these like.. 🤷🏻♂️
The way to beat this AI is to let it attack you first and then you counter it. This is how I beat Capcom's arcade games.
How do you counter Zangief's screwdriver grab?
@@SayAhh Jump straight up and do a kick, sweep combo at the right time. It is annoying because the AI can grab you from a distance that looks like you got teleported to Zangief's loving arms.
Exactly, or also bait the AI in attacking you. In MK2 I noticed that the AI is programmed to react to any button input, you could just jump up in the air and hit punch and your opponent reacts trying to counter a move that it shouldn't.
Doing grab moves helps. I spammed that a bunch until they started grabbing me. Then I lost.
Just like a true martial artist do! Never attack, respond! :D
Fascinating stuff. I think most of us always suspected it but it's cool to see it all but confirmed. That being said, MK2 was so much fun that I don't even care. 12 year old me, however, is enraged.
Great video, MVG!
PS Rise of The Robots on the CD-i didn't do this 😑
I found it incredibly difficult. I was never really a MK player, I was more of a KI player. But I did play it with an emulator and just cranked my cheats up and it was just crazy how the AI would ramp up its 'difficulty' and cheapness. It was actually kind of funny and yes satisfying at the same time when the game had no chance whatsoever lol. I've seen this in other games and playing racing games I've noticed this a lot. Happy to say racing games I have no problem destroying since its my forte but yeah, getting back at those childhood fighters and platformers it somewhat bittersweet.
ccccooombooooo breeeakeeerrrr
@@CanadaBud23 you realize that KI was a clone baby of MK and SF combined. right
@@SuperHns I don't know about that. KI was a much faster more fluid game than MK was for quite a while. Even SF felt better than MK. I just didn't like it I'm also better at SF than MK too. I haven't played later versions of MK but I imagine they don't play like a stick in the mud anymore.
@@CanadaBud23 Inspiration-wise, not feel-wise. Punch and kick buttons of three strengths and special move motions=SF, blood and finishers=MK. But KI still has its own stuff like the CGI sprite animation, combo system and wonderfully over-the-top announcer.
STOP RIGHT THERE MISTER! I was so dissapointed on hearing this last night... This morning it suddenly dawned on me, 2 player mode is where it's at. Great video btw!
As I noticed this way back when, I started cheesing the AI. My favourite is the teleport punch in MK3 (sektor/smoke), which you can use to cancel a jump kick and start a combo.
This was one of those games where the CPU cheating was so egregious, that I didn't need any factual proof to know it was cheating.
In any case, awesome video all the same, as always, MVG.
Yeah when you get grabbed by jade for thousandth time in a row you start to wonder...
@@Striker2097 ye
At some point I figured the AI in the game was reading the player's movements, so maybe I could use that as an advantage. I've always liked MK Trilogy out of all 2D MK games. So I'd pick up Smoke (robot) and kick jump backwards until the AI started reading that movement, then while in air, performing a teleport punch. The AI's counter move would leave them vulnerable, then I'd proceed to chain a full combo using the Scorpion-like spear and a full combo, so that was an easy way to win all of the fights except for Motaro. It even worked with difficult AI levels.
Now, the thing is...
I can see why the programmers would put such dirty code in the AI since it was a Arcade game, but was that really necessary on the home console releases?
If they didn't put the code in the home console releases, would it be an "accurate" translation? 😉 It would also have confirmed what players already suspected: the AI in the arcade version MUST cheat, because the home console versions don't. (Either that, or it'd start a new rumor that they had "dumbed down" the AI for the home release.)
@Edri Espinoza Great example. Playing the CPU in fighting games is all about AI manipulation. It's more of a puzzle game. In a way using an exploit gets easier as the difficulty goes up, as greater AI consistency also means greater predictability - like controlling the barrels in Donkey Kong. You can't do it reliably until the difficulty has risen enough.
Arcade mode is a totally different game than versus mode. It's annoying but I guess it was impossible to simulate a high-skilled human.
@@SpearM3064 Yup. You're right.
It's just... I consider the AI kinda broken. If you're playing the console versions, then you can play whatever you want. And finding out that the AI it's so mechanical makes the game un-enjoyable. I'm talking about the single player game mode here. The multiplayer on the other hand, it's really a blast.
@@pubjoe Yup. Those were the technology limitations at the time. The only positive thing about that kind of AI it's that it makes it absolutely terrifying. Kind of a Terminator. LOL
I really love the AI in Resident Evil 4. You'll never notice yourself playing exactly the same on repeated playtroughs. However, the AI it's also plagued with "weaknesses", like the predictability thing. If you run towards an enemy, they'll obviously try to attack you. However you can spam their attacks by running and "touching" their "hitbox" then stop running.
I guess the AI it's nothing like this nowadays, since fighting games are still being released.
Who said that they could write non-dirty AI code?
This is why I enjoy TAS runs so much. It's basically a more advanced program beating the sh*t out of a cheap but less-advanced one. It's so gratifying to watch TAS go to town on the cheesy MK AI.
Great video! The input reading also applies to Sub-Zero's freeze and Scorpion's spear - they are ALWAYS blocked by the CPU in MK2 the instant you do them. The way the CPU would throw you effortlessly, even mid legsweep, was notoriously cheap. Still a fun game, but the cheap AI always tarnished it for me.
I was 9 years old when this came out and it absolutely blew my mind. Seeing crowds of people crowding around the unit just to watch a game. Easily My favorite arcade game of all time my only problem was that I was garbage at it
Street Fighter did and still does do this. The CPU also gets "mad" if you do too much damage too quickly and spectacularly. You know it's "mad," because suddenly the CPU player will start moving faster and countering like crazy. They will basically become almost unstoppable. Chun Li, in particular, would even taunt you right before she delivered the killing blow. She knows you can't stop it. It's the only time I've ever seen the CPU use the taunt.
To put this into perspective, most fighting games of the time do the same thing but use a random number pool to pick a start frame delay on the response.
The lower the difficulty, the more weighted a slow response is along with ai interrupts programmed in where a random number will roll and if it hits the ai just stops all inputs.
Thank you so much for making this! As a kid I used to swear that there was what I referred to as a "deal breaker" level of the ladder, where the A.I. would beat you know matter how good you were.
I feel so vindicated now.
When I discovered glitches on the Computer AI that a novice player would never fall for. I knew the AI was flawed and cheated at times. It's the just that the programmers never got around the loopholes and weaknesses of the AI and how players adapt to the flawed AI. Great game, but awful AI. It was more fun in PvP than actually beating the game.
That moment you realize arcade games fit well with carnival carnies for a reason...
Hello! When I was a kid I played a lot of Mortal Kombat 2 in the arcade. I always started the game from the player two position, because the opponents moved completely differently than in the player one position. When I became a really good player, I was completely in control of the opponent's movements, and I could easily play through the game with any character.
Hah I knew it! I always felt like this game was cheating me back in the day.
As an only child, the constant frustration of playing this game against the AI was singularly responsible for turning me away from the genre.
I don't play fighting games at all now, because they're just so associated in my mind with frustration and generally having a bad time, that it just doesn't interest me.
I feel your pain. I can't stand fighting games
Fighting games against friends are fun but they get old fast and when u even get half decent you tend to rage and get salty i don't have that issue much with other PvP games so yeah fighting games i don't like em anymore either
This is how I feel in Sifu, never played that game again
Same here, this is the same reason why I haven't played Mario or any platforming games ever again, the frustration and pain hinder any feeling of joy that I associate with those memories.
Me: "The game is cheating!"
My sisters: "Oh, come on. The game can't cheat."
MVG: "You sure about that?"
Technically; no, it's the corporation that produced the game which is cheating, the game is innocent...
Technically correct, it can’t cheat as it’s following its own rules, what you should say is it’s unfair.
THANK YOU!! this have me so much closure.
When I was in college, MK2 was the popular game in the campus arcade-such as it was; it was only a pair of arcade games outside the billiards room!
A friend and I would often watch better players play-I was always running close to the bone financially, and I think my friend was just as cheap. I think the design of the world and characters really attracted me to the game-I’d later make custom figures of the characters, and yesterday, I found a good deal on a Bataks figure. But whenever I did try to play, either on arcade or in later home ports, I never really felt like I was getting it.
Also, during these sessions in the campus arcade, we’d never see the end of the game. Each player who seemed to have enough quarters opted not to continue past almost the same point. I’d ask my friend in frustration, why if these guys were so good, they didn’t continue to the end.
After watching this, now I know why I wasn’t so hot at the game, and why there was a glass ceiling for better players!
I appreciate your presentation of evidence!
Reminds me of a feature in racing games (notably old NFS titles) called internally "catch up", also known as rubberbanding among players. Basically AI racers, no matter their car performance, will always drive faster or slower based on player car performance and where they are in relation to player. If they are behind they will gain speed until they will be right behind you, and if they are in front they will get slightly slower so you can reach them again. For this reason you can go through entire game without upgrading your car at all
Its why in many games, the best stat is acceleration because the ai will catch up no matter how fast you are and high speed chars take longer to recover from being hit esp in mario kart.
If you can remember NBA Jam, the CPU assistance was the same thing. All games have it. Even the newer, more recent games. You can easily tell it, too.
the drag races in NFS were frustrating if you had a good start it would synch the traffic to hit you forcing you to brake ... i hated the drag races ...
games that input read always felt "wrong" to me. the instant timing, you knew it was cheating. i never thought it was fair. I didn't think some people did think it was. And now that i'm deep into fighting games, I can absolutely tell when playing against human players if they are guessing / using an "option select" or reacting based on how their response "feels" in terms of timing.
Yeah, it's something you can even "feel."
Madden
I haven't gotten as deep into fighting games as I did when I was a teenager, but I understand what you mean. For me, the experience comes from a different source. I've spent my entire adult life in various forms of combat, through the military and martial arts like muay thai. But even then, that experience translates into other areas, like when playing Tekken I don't read the character so much as read the player. You start to recognize some folks by their name and playstyle, and you can start manipulating their reactions and preferences against them... input reading on the fly, if you will. Even in other genres, like FPS, if you know what the opponent is capable of, you can still set them up so they react in a way you want them to, although in FPS it's a lot more dynamic since it's not 1v1... teamwork makes the dream work.
All this makes me WANT to delve deeper into video games today, but meh. Today's games don't really keep my attention for very long. They just don't engage me the way older games do. 🤷♂️
MK2's source code just leaked. Spoiler it was cheating.
AI: Cheats
Kenny from YoVideoGames: YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE!
As a kid I knew the MK ai was key logging you, but never correlated how nefarious that is when it's taking Quarters in the Arcade.
Hindsight is 20/20 but looking back now paying to play an arcade game vs the AI was basically gambling except you could cheese to win. Toss in your quarters after a while and get stone walled until your soul is sucked from you and your out of money.
Bro...it was infuriating the more you liked the game😭
I loved MK 1, 2, and 3 as a kid because I would play almost exclusively at arcades or against other kids at home. It wasn't until later I realized how frustrating the single player experience is.
Well, when your game group start learning about infinites, glitches and unlockables, the versus experience becomes something frustrating too
Man i had exactly the same questions when i was a kid. I had the MK3 SNES and many many times the opponent he would catch me and then throw me. All the examples you have in the video, exactly the same questions i had for these examples. I thought i can't be faster than the computer , i tried it a lot of times but i couldn't and now you say these. Oh my god all these years i tried to think how this game thinks and beating me so easily after the third opponent.
Thanks Man, I always was thinking that im not good enough. I was praying snes version
“Input reading”. I’ve had that theory since I was a kid. Even playing sports games I noticed how it seemed like the AI knew exactly what play I was calling. It made the game & the losses feel cheap, I love a challenge so I always play on the most difficult setting in video games & I don’t mind losing. But when you’re only losing over a cheat then it gets annoying lol
Exactly, I first discovered this when I put serious time and effort into Tekken 4. The timing on blocking so many moves, from any height were so instantaneous, the only logical conclusion was input reading.
It wasn't as egregious as mortal kombat, or Mario Kart 64 where you keep your star from last to 1st place to use it and cut through a lot of dirt and 2nd and 3rd place and still glued to your behind somehow, or Forza Horizon 4 where a stock 1972 Charger kills your 2017 Focus RS in every turn, gains a 1 minute lead on your perfect lap then on the final lap's stretch the "drone" is capped at 50mph as if it realized it cheated far too much and you blast past it at like 150 and end up winning with a twitching eyebrow.
I never end up enjoying these games because it's not even really a challenge anymore, when no matter your skill level you can be immediately cheesed by the AI, I literally sold Horizon 4 the next day on fb marketplace.
Playing an rpg, action adventure or fps on the hardest difficulty is a much more satisfying experience because skill, making a mistake and strategy are what really matters, instead of hoping to God you can out cheese a cheating AI.
@@ericmann1781 true
>Playing on the hardest difficulty.
>Unhappy because the AI cheats.
Lol.
@@ev6558 it doesn't matter what difficulty are they playing on. They may want a challenge, but they also still want a fair fight, and an actual chance at winning (not saying that you can't win against them). It just feels cheap when you jump and they automatically anti-air you.
@@ev6558 it doesn't matter what difficulty are they playing on. They may want a challenge, but they also still want a fair fight, and an actual chance at winning (not saying that you can't win against them). It just feels cheap when you jump and they automatically anti-air you.
I remeber feeling how suspect MK2 was back in the day, so this explains it
So many tears. So many yells at the screen that the game is cheating. So many times a controller was thrown. So many moms yelling "then don't play the game"...It was all true. This video brings closure.
Once you got to 'know the game' you could take advantage of this 'auto-reading'. If you were at a specific distance and jumped back, your opponent would always jump at you, allowing you to take advantage of it. This worked all the way up the 'ladder' to the boss. This is just one example of how you could take advantage of the code.
I've always wanted a version of MK2 and 3 with fixed AI. They're super fun games, but playing them single-player is just *awful*. (And not a lot of people wanna play 'em these days)
MK3 and UMK3 are beatable, since you have combo's
Both exist. Kind of shocked mvg did not mention it. His videos are usually pretty thorough.
@@rustyshobbies8430 I've never seen a patch or ROM that addresses the AI, the only versions I've seen that've been fair are the home ports. If they exist I'd love to check 'em out, though!
@@AntiPseudo Mortal Kombat Plus
@@rustyshobbies8430 Check out the arcade rom hack called "Mortal Kombat II Plus", it has improved AI and new features.