/vr/ - Retro Games

Here is one case from a particular level. The default AIs vary slightly from level to level, but they all follow the same pattern. There is a massive double digit difference between the gold and platinum relic AI. On this one level, the gold AI is set to 10 (0xA in hex), while the platinum is always the max at 32 (0x20). For reference, the gem and crystal are also at 10 here, while the trophy is variable from 24 to 15 (also 3 wins for trophy, but don't have to be in a row).

I have to point out that these were found on a pre-lease build that was not final, but nearly complete. But I am almost sure these were the same AI settings that were used in the final game as well, based on the difficulty I had between golds and platinums. I found no differences in how hard the game felt when playing on the earlier build at these default settings.

It's believed that these challenges were never even play-tested to begin with and were just left on the max setting.

video where you could see the other settings
https://youtu.be/q4TfIB8fW0Y?si=vwL7svNLpQZ66JGx&t=921

You didnt beat the game

>>10526258
Meds please.

>>10526347
I did eventually beat it up to 200% on my original ps1 save file, but many years later. Fully completing the adventure mode was easily the worst crash experience in the entire series for me. I never played through the pre-release build that's accessible from demos, but I did check it out from my Spyro 3 disc to confirm all this.

>>10526358
/vr/ is the best medicine. yes, I know it's a very niche example, but it illustrates the point well. Hidden values like these are very common across all games, but I was wondering if I could see some other examples, where they created a very big deception for the player

>>10526303
>>10526290
>>10526258
I always felt that Crash Bash AI was bullshit but until today I never knew just how much kek.

>>10526358
The thing that I was so hung up on was that the game leads you to believe that the two challenges are very similar based on the given descriptions, when in fact the platinum one is FAR more difficult and NOT because of the officially stated reason that you need to win one more round. Even if they had slightly changed the wording (beat the ultimate, legendary, super-elite or whatever champions) to indicate that now you will be facing a completely different difficulty level, that would've made things a bit less aggravating. I made the thread, because I know many others who tried to complete must've had this issue at some, like this >>10526398 anon, so I just wanted to raise some awareness about what the game was really doing with its AI.

>>10526258
If they were able to build such a capable AI system, why does everything else in the game look and sound like shit?

>>10526427
Different people work on different aspects. It's entirely possible the guy who was programming AI and game logic put a lot more effort than the asset creators or sound designer.

The AI cheats in Platinum in the pong style game, even more if tagging along with a friend, if someone tags along the AI goes you will not win this, heads up, it made our lives hell, this game was really meant just to be played in party mode with a 4 multi accesory.

>>10526443
>the guy who was programming AI and game logic put a lot more effort than the asset creators or sound designer.
>It's entirely possible
It's an absolute certainty

Mortal Kombat 2 arcade is pretty infamous for this. The Throw button doesn't work against AI, and is countered every time. Doesn't matter if the AI is in the air, stunned, frozen, or even in the perma-stun state for Finish Him. You can attempt to throw an enemy for a finisher and it will revive the AI with 0 HP. You can die to an enemy you put at 0 HP due to this. The Throw button only works against another player.
Unless someone tried to throw as a finisher, they wouldn't know and would just think they weren't throwing fast enough or with the wrong timing or w/e.

>>10526529
>Finish him!
>*finishes you instead*

Crash Bash is fun if you only play arcade mode. It's even more based for shitting all over completionist autists til they rage.

>>10526529
Thanks for bringing this up. I also remember hearing the game would read your inputs and auto-block certain attacks when it shouldn't have been possible according to the game's frame time and input logic. It forced you to play very differently against the AI versus how you to play against a human. So I while I eventually figured out how to trap the AI, it was worthless when it came time to play against a skilled players.

>>10526446
What's even more heinous about the pong co-op is the second player has a terrible angle from which to play on, making it even less fair against an AI. In hindsight, they really should've never even bothered making the adventure mode. They could've just left it at the basic battle/tournament modes, bundled it with a multi-tap, and called it a day.

To get one over on all the poor kids who could never hope to see or access any of the real world event-only content that's already programmed into their Pokemon games, Gamefreak decided to implement a very basic legitimacy checker in Fire Red, Leaf Green, and Emerald. This legitimacy check specifically targets Deoxys and Mew, the only two pokemon during gen 3 that were completely unobtainable outside of events.

If the game finds that a Mew or Deoxys have invalid encounter data, that is to say their summary page says they were caught on Route 2 or something which would only be possible using a gameshark to force their encounter, then the game will cause Mew and Deoxys to disobey, as if they were a high level traded pokemon and you lacked the badge to control it, on every single turn.
(valid encounters would be Birth Island for Deoxys, Faraway Island for Mew, or "A Far Away Place" for either which is just the generic encounter data for most event gift pokemon)

It's pretty easy to get around this now, but you can find a LOT of forum posts from kids trying to figure out why they can't use the pokemon they hacked into their games fair and square. Even if you want to argue in favor of protecting the authenticity of event shit, since this check only exists for these two pokemon and not anything else kids are likely to hack in, it always just seemed like a pointlessly mean thing to implement.

>>10526258
>some nerds needed a debug menu to determine that harder difficulty is indeed harder
lol

>>10527092
well it was the ultimate proof, as the game gave you no indication that the difficulty changed in this case as it had previously done. It did seem harder subjectively, but you really couldn't definitively say so because of how RNG heavy these mini-games were.

Level scaling wherever it shows up, killing enemies actually makes you comparatively weaker.

>>10527091
>"authenticity" of some bits in code
I'm so glad blockchains didn't exist when Pokemon came out.

>>10527235
People get upset about that but it's not unfair, it's just a different system that requires different workarounds from the player. You know the rules, the game isn't cheating or hiding anything from you, beat it at its game

>>10527235
Agreed. Wtf happened, everything was super weak and just because I leveled up that means everything else also levels up. It doesn’t even makes sense. You get a quest to kill rats in somebodies basement and when you get there the rats are doing steroids and smoking cigarettes. rayray the rat just took some pcp and now your attacks are ineffective.

>>10527358
Level scaling is just shit design and exposes that game devs put no thought into how players might actually progress through their world.

It also ruins all sense of progression because everything just gets stronger with you so what's the fucking point?

>>10526529
NBA hang time is another midway game where the cpu just does impossible shit, idk the technicals but its enraging to see

>>10527235
>Level scaling
Ultima 3 has a fuck-you built into the game. Once you get higher than level 7 or 9, you stop being able to efficiently take down enemy parties since the enemies get too strong and dangerous. This makes every part of the game harder since enemies are tied to your level. The most common strategy is to get to that level, complete 95% of the game, then level up to as high as you can go with your stockpiled EXP and make a mad dash for the final boss.

>>10526347
>>10526358
Lost

>>10526631
IIRC. SF2 arcade also had the AI cheat. It could attack faster, skip animations, and block when it shouldn't be capable of blocking. It also recovered from stun faster than was supposedly possible.

Rubber-band AI in racing games is another offender. Crusin' USA/World was particularly predatory about it. You got normal AI for the first race to almost guarantee you would win. From the 2nd race onwards, you had AI that would go faster than you could, and would win a race if you didn't manage to block them perfectly. This was to encourage players to put in more quarters. Putting in another credit reset the AI back to normal for a single race. Rinse, repeat, wring the player dry.

The dodge mechanic in Resident Evil 3 probably deserves a mention. Most players thought it was 100% random since it seemed to trigger so rarely. People finally figured out the secret. When a zombie attacks you from behind, you have about 1/3rd of a second to respond. When a zombie attacks you from the front, you have a few frames to respond. Making the timing so tight most people could never consistently hit it even knowing the timing. But you can dodge from the front, if you have superhuman reflexes and timing.

bump

>>10527620
Sierra once made a flying simulator early in their career that wasn't well received. In an effort to push a "realism" angle, crashing your plane would make the game crash your computer, requiring a reset. This was back in the days of the old pre-IDE HDDs, where a reboot while the HDD was being accessed could leave the HDD head out of position and cause damage to the head or platters. This "feature" was patched out in later versions IIRC.

Phantasy Star 3 has an item that will warp you to outside the exit of the dungeon you are in, or the last one you entered at least. A skilled player would realize they can use this near the beginning of the game to get out of the prison cell they find themselves in. The devs anticipated that, and will have the king give unique dialogue congratulating you on your trickery, but saying you need to play through properly. Instead of warping you back to the cell and resetting your inventory so the game can continue on, the devs require you to reset the game. I don't recall if you are given a chance to save your game before this point. Even if you can, you still need to have saved recently in order to avoid a lot of backtracking.
Even stranger, you can use the same item to completely bypass a full 1/3rd of the game since the devs seemed to forget you could use that item and forgot to clear some flags.

Here's an example from a gimmick from the two dumbest crossover games. This pair of crash/spyro gba games had a trading card gimmick. The cards were displayed in a way where it was clear which cards you could obtain in the spyro game and which cards were in the crash game. However, there was one card on both games that was still missing even after scouring the entire world and endlessly gambling in Moneybag's shop. Turns out this card was only attainable when you connected two copies of the SAME game to each other. So in order to get all the cards, both people needed both games just because of that one card.

>>10527620
>Rubber-band AI in racing
the most notorious memory I have of this was in Jak X. it was so vicious on the game's hard mode, that you were better off not fully upgrading your vehicle's speed. I even remember seeing the AI vehicles actually teleporting in real time in a few instances.

>>10527861
I fell for this, for some reason during the lockdowns I decided to buy the cart in your pic under the impression I could finally complete my old copy of Crash. When I realised I was seething, thankfully the games are so shit a copy of Spyro cost basically nothing.
I also have a conspiracy that the game was just going to be centered around Crash and Spyro fusion / the crossover elements in Crash fusion were made at a late stage but that's another story.

Good thread

Bash is unironically one of, maybe THE, hardest games I've ever played.

>Pretty much every plat relic
>Pretty much every pogo from Loco and on
>SKY BALLS FUCKING CRYSTAL
>Swamp Fox

>>10527358
No, level scaling is fucking shit and even your own cope entails "workarounds" which shouldn't be needed from the player to begin with. Before Oblivion level scaling mods came out people would just lower the difficulty slider the more they played, because it was the only way to avoid the frustratingly spongey enemies.

>>10528186
I'm still missing one or two overall, but getting the platinum relics on the tank levels as Crash was so gruelling I've genuinely blocked the whole experience out. Jungle Fox in particular was brutal and Swamp Fox I think I only managed by letting everyone else kill each other and cheese the survivor with mines.

YGO Forbidden Memories, Making iconic/protagonist's cards absurdly expensive is so pointlessly mean-spirited. Battle Ox cost 999,999 with 1700 attack while Seiyaryu cost 1700 with 2500 attack (there is no tributing in this game). And I think you can get only 4 out of the 5 pieces of Exodia as random drops

>>10528186
>>10528217
The worst relics for me were always the ballistix by far (N. Ballism and Skyballs). Then followed by dash racing ones, just because of how shit the actual games are (not to even mention that infuriating lap skip "glitch" the AI frequently gets in Splash Dash). Jungle and especially swamp fox were also really bad. I still don't even fully remember how I did Jungle as crash. As awful as it was, I sort of want to go back through all of it at some point, just to have a playthrough that wasn't extended over many years.

>>10527295
The games now have this online ID check system to try and verify if a pokemon is legit or not, but aside from still being pretty easy to beat it just blocks you from trying to transfer them to different games or use them online. If you want to hack unobtainable forms and make illegal pokemon just to dick around with in-game they never actually try to stop you like in gen 3.

>>10527386
>>10528204
>so what's the fucking point?
Spells you unlock, skills you learn, QOL upgrades like carry capacity make you life easier, your numbers don't go up in relation to enemies but your arsenal of tools increases and if you're not retarded that makes you stronger.
Unfortunately a lot of RPG players are retarded and for them that bigger toolset does nothing, they need the number to go up or they simply can't get stronger

>>10528305
Card prices in Forbidden Memories were "balanced" around being able to go to in person events and game stores to unlock those cards on your save file. Naturally, these events were only conducted in Japan so other regions were basically just screwed out of a ton of good cards that were made expensive as a way of forcing you to go to events.

>>10526529
Was it Mortal Kombat II where, after a few stages, the AI silently changes to the highest difficulty or am I thinking of a different fighting game.

>>10526347
And you didn't game the beat.

>>10527092
Are you laughing at me?

>>10528305
>>10527091
>tying key game items to real world exclusive events
man that iss some cancerous shit. one of those og predatory practices.

>>10529816
meant to reply to
>>10528695
also

>>10528969
I don't know if it was MK2, but I do remember reading about some fighting game that did that, making the difficulty setting on the machine almost pointless. I wanna say it was SF2CE?

>>10529919
>I wanna say it was SF2CE?
Close, it was the US version of SSF2T that did that.

>>10526258
Crash Bash was coded like shit. The full beta version of the game was included in the demo and was accessible with a cheat code

>>10526529
Is Mortal Kombat the most fucking overrated piece of shit series to ever get popular from the retro days?

>>10526258
>high content has better ai
This is pretty common. And telling the player the ai is better is not. You yourself said you were able to infer it's better so what's the fucking problem dude? You are basically complaining online you cant beat a video game. Sorry dude.

>>10526557
kek

>>10530147
The problem is that in this case the game DID tell you very directly that AI levels had changed (gold relic vs previous challenges), but then it used identical wording to describe the platinum challenge, giving the impression that the only thing that had changed was that an extra win was required, when in reality there was a massive gulf between the two AIs.
see
>>10526417

It's the game's inconsistency in telling you and then not telling that threw me off. I did beat it eventually, but only after finding out that it really was a massive jump in AI difficulty (far greater compared to the jump between any other two challenges). I was now fully aware of how much more effort it would take, and that it was not simply getting unlucky RNG or having deteriorating skills. In short, knowing this precisely is what gave me the confidence to finally put in the time and effort to attain it.

>>10528204
Elder Scrolls has level scaling? Does that include Skyrim? Jesus fuck, I thought these games were bad BEFORE I knew this about them. I can't say that I'm surprised though.

>>10528628
Bethesda fags are so obnoxious. You guys will defend anything as long as it's a Bethesda game doing it. I've even met Bethesda apologists who will criticize other games for doing the exact same shit, even when it does so less egregiously.

>>10530142
Quite possibly. It's a genuine shame that such cool characters, lore, atmosphere, and graphics were wasted on such shit gameplay.

>>10528305
That's because those special cards have to be obtained with the game's Pocketstation mechanics, which were removed from all international releases.
And even then, the Pocketstation stuff is a "lottery," and only some cards are guaranteed. Your Pocketstation has an ID, and you had to introduce a password to get a card. If your ID was correct, then you got the card, otherwise you get fucked. A few cards were ID-less, and anyone could obtain them, but a bunch of them needed to have a very specific ID. The rarest Pocketstation cards have something like an ID incidence of 1:10000, so even Nip players won't ever be able to get all 722 cards by legitimate means.
International players can only get 699

>>10526258
Crash bash is a very painful game

>>10530519
There was also the infrared function, which was more lenient and spew random cards for you; and the fusion function, which allowed you to combine cards into more powerful shit. Like, if you fused three blue eyes white dragons + Ritual of Ultimate Dragon, you could get an individual copy of the Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon. There's no other way to get this card without glitching or hacking.
Either way, Konami gutting this function out of the western releases was monumentally stupid.

>>10530519
>>10530535
>>10528695
this all sounds so terrible and dickish, even more so than modern industry practices. it makes me wonder how there are still people out there that have a weird obsession with Forbidden Memories.

>>10530592
Regardless of its draconic Pocketstation shit, the core game is good and you can beat it just fine without those cards.
Hell, the missing 33 aren't even that good, but their absence are a completionist's sore spot.

>>10530592
Forbidden Memories fans are firmly in the "I like the way this sucks" camp.

>>10527091
I actually like shit like this because it exposes people who use cheats or hacks not understanding why their game isn't working properly. Kind of like how one of the Serious Sam games spawns an unkillable scorpion boss that fucks you up when playing a pirated version and so many people exposed themselves asking how to kill this thing.

>>10530615
Same thing with the guy asking why his Alan in Alan Wake had an eyepatch

>>10530603
Yep, it's a beautiful mess.

>>10530627
kek

>>10530615
The best example of pokemon doing that was I think Black and White 2 had some kind of copy protection that would trip on emulators on release, and the guy who runs Serebii (who is a LEGENDARY pokemon bootlicker btw) documented it as if it were a problem with the games, and when people tried to call him out on playing the games on emulator he denied it to the death.

>>10530147
I don't think it's fair to dismiss OP's issue so lightly given how often we see the typical, lazy
>worst game ever
bait threads. Even though he was upset with the game, he clearly put some thought into it and carefully spelled out what his problem was. The point was to give other players who have tried Bash a heads up on the hidden details. Besides, he asked for and we got some interesting examples from other games, so it certainly wasn't for nothing.

>>10530727
I agree with this guy. Ordinarily, I'd be the first person to shit on someone for complaining about difficulty, but there's a big difference between tough-but-fair and obnoxious bullshit. OP does a good job of making his case, and that's rare here on the gaming boards.

From the threads title alone I knew someone was gonna (rightfully) bring up MK2's AI, and I was not disapointed, lol.

>>10528186
What was always hilarious and baffling to me when it came to Crash Bash and other obviously multiplayer-focused games on the PS1 is that you had to unlock stages and game modes in the tacked-on single player mode anyway. In some of those games it feels like a chore.
>>10530493
>Elder Scrolls has level scaling?
Every TES game has level scaling. Arena and Daggerfall have leveled enemies in random dungeons but preset enemies in hand-crafted (main quest) dungeons, with leveled loot across the board. Morrowind has mostly hand-crafted content, with enemies in the wilderness being leveled, and mostly in a sane way (usually they're the same animals but diseased or blighted). Oblivion features the most ridiculous level scaling system known to man - you can practically see common bandits upgrading their gear and stats at the same rate as you do.

I think the red gem in The Uninvited deserves a special mention.
The entire Macventure series of ICOM graphical adventure games is all about collecting items/codes and using them in the right spot at the right time. If an item is a trap, it generally kills you on touch. The Uninvited breaks this pattern with the red gem. It looks wildly important, and nothing happens when you pick it up. Over time, you feel worse and worse until eventually you die, and the game doesn't tell you what killed you.
I honestly don't know how players back then figured out the red gem was slowly killing them, or how they would know the gem was even the cause.

>>10530519
>The rarest Pocketstation cards have something like an ID incidence of 1:10000, so even Nip players won't ever be able to get all 722 cards by legitimate means.
I read about the GBC Duel Monster games and that sounds about on par with some of the ideas in those.
I'm not sure if it counts for the thread, but the fourth game (JP-only) had three versions. You can only use specific cards per version and the god card you unlock in your version isn't for your version. Imagine a Pokemon game where you catch the cover legendary, but aren't allowed to use and have to trade it to the version for their legendary.

>>10530592
>>10530535
>>10530519
From what I've read, Forbidden Memories was supposed to be a more GaaS type of thing, a proto-gacha of sorts. That's why there's so much random shit in the game.
But Konami opted for a PS1 release in the end.

In Pokemon Stadium 1 and 2 it gives you the impression that the AI can't tell what move you've chosen on a given turn. It shows when both players have selected a move. Years later I played on an emulator and made a savestate after it says the opponent has selected their move. I chose a super effective move, but the opponent switches pokemon. So I load state, and this time switch pokemon, but now the opponent attacks instead, again despite their move seemingly having already been decided. I reload like 50 times to test this and they always react the same way. If you're going to make the game this way, you can't LIE to the player about it, because it affects your strategy. At least be upfront and tell the player what's happening.

Actually I tested this out on Pokemon Stadium 2 in R-2 mode. Maybe it doesn't work this way in R-1 mode? But still, it's really scummy.

>>10526358
If they ever make am idiocracy sequel the dumb people will be saying this all the time to anyone with a working brain

Jet Moto 2's AI is beyond disgusting and atrocious. Well, actually calling it ab "AI" is being generous even. The first game actually had AI racers, but in order to save on precious PSX resources, the developers removed the AI from the game and replaced it with "real time recordings" of them playing the game.

What that means is that the AI plays the tracks perfectly well without a single mistake, forcing the player to do so as well. Forcing an enemy AI to fall off their bikes seems to work, but you have to go out of your way to do so, and more often than not you will even knock yourself down too.

Increasing the difficulty simply increases the playback of the recordings, meaning the AI gets impossible speed boosts (it is as if they are holding turbo the whole time). Truly appalling.

>>10527235
kek I remember playing final fantasy VIII as a kid and grinding for 2 - 3 hours and wondering why the fuck all the enemies were still so tough

>>10526258
10.000 points to unlock the Quick-Change suit to 100% the save file... 23 frame perfect jumps in a row under a strict time limit... a single jump too late and you lose, jump too early and you waste time and don't make it anyways... it was changed in the Dreamcast and PC ports because they got that it was BS no kid could pull off... it took me 20 years to actually do it! DAMN YOU NEVERSOFT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEuNwj1l3Dg

I cannot prove any of this, but I have played a lot of PES5 and I know a lot about the game's quirks, and I believe that the developers chose to weaken Manchester United's AI and and boost Chelsea and Arsenal's. Konami only had the rights to Chelsea and Arsenal's logos and likenesses, but not Man United. Whenever I play against United on 6 star difficulty I always crush them 7-0 but against Chelsea it's much tighter despite the teams having the same stats on paper.

I don't know if this is really the developers being assholes as much as it's just a desperate work around to a potential softlock, but in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Red and Blue, if the game ever detects that it's stuck in a loop of generating invalid levels, the level generation will default to generating the only programmed level layout that's basically impossible to fail: a whole-floor single room monster house that gets used in some end-game dungeons.

It's pretty rare, but I'm sure at least a few kids must have experienced a level load taking unusually long only for this to happen to them the server they enter a level.

>>10532460
So, it happened AGAIN. We can blame Seabass, we can blame Konami, we can blame the teammate AI, we can praise opponent AI's effort but the truth is it's simply not enough. Tactics, determination you name it, it all stinks. We're going to end up relegated playing like this. We can't score. Programmers not helping out, even though 90% of them are united fans. We whiffed on both C. Ronaldo and Rooney. 200m PES Points down the drain. Beckham dropped.

Don't get me wrong, I still have full faith in Ferguson and the boys, but MASSIVE reinforcements are desperately needed in the mid season break. Otherwise I'm not very optimistic about our chances of top ten in the league, or in any non-mickey mouse tournament for that matter. Not playing like this. What do you think, /vr/? Is C. Ronaldo a Zidane material? Should we have kept R. Ferdinand as a captain? Are we really selling Beckham? Has Ferguson era come to an end??

>>10532672
lmao
always happy to see this one, especially outside of /sp/

>>10532460
Reminds me of how a programmer for NBA Jam admitted that he rigged the game so that a last minute shot by the Bulls in a Bulls vs Pistons match would always fail. Though he may have been lying since the source code is online and nobody's found that function.

>>10531937
I managed to get this one once on PS1 and I'm never planning to do it again.

>>10531105
>Playing one of the cups with rental Pokemon
>Opponent has a water Pokemon, so I swap to from my Charmander to my Bulbasaur
>Opponent uses an ice move, which also froze me
Utter horseshit. I was furious.

>>10532740
I'm in the same spot, did it ONCE after 20 years attempting it from time to time, and I don't see myself ever attempting it again, I did it once, I prooved I could do it, I'm satisfied.

It was pure suffering though.

>>10530493
I'll defend Morrowind.
Oblivion was shit
And skyrim was shit.

When it came to level scaling in Morrowind; it didn't matter because after a couple of playthroughs you learn how to become very very capable in the game if you're paying attention and I was never above cheats like being able to perma summor or alter starting stats with spells so as to balance the game out a bit. To this day I enjoy Morrowind because it just feels so huge and I still haven't completely 100%'d the game after like 50+ play throughs.

Oblivion is sad in it's design, it's character creation was so goofy and it's main and side questa had been severely dumbed down in comparison.

Skyrim had potential but again, a seemingly huge world is actually pretty small, the side guilds and quests became more cinematic but were still fewer, shorter, and lacking depth compared to Morrowind.

>>10526347
No, but I beat up your mom last night, the nasty whore. Like to be strangled, too.

>>10532831
I was so proud at the time I took a photo. You can also see from the difference between my 1st and 2nd score just how fucking wild it got.

>>10533359
Incredible, man... only those of us who pulled it off, or at least attempted it, know how tough it really is, you have my respect. I didn't take real pictures, but took a screenshot, my situation is somewhat different, as I got close to 10.000 a few times, only to fall short, which was always frustrating, as it seemed like I would pull it off, only to fail in one of the last jumps, or time out.

In Jak II they did a few things with the collectable orbs that bothered me compared to how the previous game worked. In Jak 1, you had a counter for every level, but in Jak II you aren't even told how many there are in the game. You don't need all them to unlock everything (there are 86 extra ones), and I get that they were trying to distance themselves from being a collectathon as much as possible, but it for people who enjoyed 100% of Jak 1, this came off as a bit spiteful. Not to mention that for whatever reason there is one area in the entire game with orbs that you can't return to if you missed any.

the ninja pit section in the last level of ninja spirit
even if you're playing "pc engine" mode that gives you health, you still insta-die unless you memorize the proper pattern

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkrUuxvKmxU

>>10527235
Level scaling always has weird issues
>Mooks scale but bosses dont
>Earier enemies give less gold so if you grinded early you fuck up completely as you are now always behind which compounds with.
>Shops in towns weapons not scaling

>>10532672
lmao

>>10532721
I believe there is also a massive buff that opponent AI gets immediately after you score in PES5. about 80% of the goals I have conceded always come directly after I score and the game resets and suddenly they are immortal and perfect on the ball until it goes out of play or they score.
I've never played any of the modern FIFA games, but people tell me those games are absolutely overloaded with stuff like that to make things unfair and 'dramatic' and narrative driven whatever.

>>10530493
>Elder Scrolls has level scaling? Does that include Skyrim?
Skyrim's perk system as you level compensates for the scaling so enemies do sorta get easier as they also get stronger, its weird. For me the hardest enemies were always when I was at low level, which is also not how it should work either, game's kinda fucked now I think about it.

>>10526347
pwned

>>10536297
>modern FIFA games
I was thinking about the exact same thing when I read that too. They call them scripts, and I'm sure they were there in the retro days, but perhaps not as egregious.

>>10527386
Skill issue. Higher level enemies = Higher level items and resources = You get new gear and whup their asses even harder. Besides, is an open-world game really open world if going off the path throws Lv40 enemies at your Lv10 ass?

>>10528969
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUttRUpVnq4
The AI just straight-up cheats.

>>10531105
YGO game AI cheats so hard it makes Atem look like an honest player. Changing cards in the hand, seeing your face-down cards, ignoring restriction lists, cards having CPU-exclusive effects, I get that YGO is a total mess of rules after all these years but it's almost impossible without cheese tactics.

>>10530493
>>10533069

maybe you don't like videogames

>>10535387
I remember getting lucky and passing through it on my second try. Thought it was no big deal, until I played it again.

>>10529816
F-Zero GX had machine parts for 5 ships unlockable only through in-person 2003/2004 Japan events and the arcade version of the game, F-Zero AX.
Three of the ships were in download stations at the events, where you had to put in your memory card for it to edit your save file to unlock the parts on it, so they'd show up in the selection.
One ship was a license card included in early copies of F-Zero GX, which you then had to take along with the memory card to an AX arcade cabinet to get the parts unlocked.
And the last was also a license card, but this one was given only to tournament participants in those events.
These parts in question are in the GX game data in all regions, but naturally impossible to unlock by any legit means now, and the only way is to use Action Replay codes to force the unlocks. Afaik in the west it's never been possible to get the parts legit at all.

>>10528305
Forbidden Memories also has opponents with 20-card hands, too, as if it wasn't bad enough already. At least the soundtrack was good.

>>10530592
It's one of those games that actually comes together and holds up well specifically as a speedrun or race, but is really miserable if you play it blind not knowing how to play it 'properly' in a way that you can realistically beat the game. There is just too much of a power gap between the CPU and the player that is basically impossible to bridge without 'meta' knowledge.

The final part of the game has enemies that are just constantly throwing down cards that are so, so much more powerful than anything available to the player that honestly I think it's unlikely many blind players were able to beat the game at all without some sort of advice/guide. So few strategies/deck types work against the powerlevels at the end of the game and even then to construct those you have to have some idea on how drops work and who drops what which, again, a blind player simply won't and the game never tells you.

>>10527091
>the pokemon they hacked into their games fair and square

>>10535378
In jak 3 they did actually bring back a counter, but if anything it was a crude joke, because it was out of 600 and only for the entire game world, which is massive. This time they also put orbs in the city (but at least someone was sane enough not to put any in the wasteland), so getting them was even worse.

>>10536613
nice video. I liked how he showed those impossible AI counters frame by frame.

>>10526258
FFX. Lightning dodger and chocoba trainer.

FF12. Gotta sell and trade items at the right time in right quantities in order to get any fo the final weapons short of the zodiac spear, and there's absolutely nothing in-game to help you figure that shit out.

The developers of NBA Jam didn't like the Chicago Bulls, so they nerfed the Bulls in the game.