Brunswick Pro Bowling AI Info

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Apparently, this game suffers from the same or similar "vindictive AI" issues that plague a lot of competitive-style games (such as wrestling, football, baseball, basketball, and fighting games).

Vindictive AI becomes apparent when you deny the AI the win for too long. In this particular game, the AI will start sabotaging your character's ability to throw strikes, forcing him/her to throw nothing but spares, while the AI continues to have no problem throwing strikes. If you somehow still manage to defeat the AI despite this level of sabotage, the AI will step it up even further, forcing your character to have to deal with near-constant splits on the second ball of nearly every frame. Strikes are by now nearly nonexistent for your character, who now averages one strike per three games...if he/she is LUCKY.

The only way to combat this effectively, and thus force the AI into permanent submission, is to give your character a perfect-game total for every game (via the perfect-game CWCheat code, which is available somewhere on the Web...at least for the US version of this game).

I will end this post with a Chuck Norris "fact": Chuck is the only man on Earth who is capable of scoring a 301 game in bowling.

[dlevere]

The Game CHEATS!

By Red Ronin

Have you ever been honestly beaten by a videogame? Are you sure the game didn't cheat to win? Whether you are a novice or a hardcore gamer, it is very likely you have lost only because of a few lines of programming code that predetermined the result.

Programmers often design games to cheat, because it's simpler than developing a full-fledged Artificial Intelligence (AI) routine. Depending on your attitude, this is either the cornerstone of playability for videogames, or their weakest link. You can't escape the AI of a videogame; it watches your every move.

And more often than not, the game will gladly cheat to beat you. This is sometimes very hard to overcome for a while, but eventually a determined player is always able to defeat even the most unfair games.

Depending on your point of view the AI of a videogame may be either challenging or cheesy. So one person who plays a game may find its enemies to be right on target. Another person might find the same game too easy to fool with patterns. A third might believe the same game is overbearing and unforgiving. It is each gamer's responsibility to determine which experience is best for them.

Most game developers do not place a high priority on the AI in their programming code. No matter how powerful the hardware used to bring a game to market, the processing power needed to calculate a complex AI is too great for consideration.

They point to games that do use prodigious amounts of code for AI and say they run too slow, aren't graphically impressive or simply aren't any fun. Speed is very important these days, especially in action games. Any code that slows down a game or takes away processing cycles that are needed to keep a nice picture onscreen is considered unfeasible.

So programming effort is placed mainly on making a game look as pretty as possible and maybe sound good. Too often the 'DIFFICULTY' setting in the options menu of a videogame simply determines the level of CPU cheating a title allows.

So at lower levels of difficulty you might have fewer enemies to deal with at once or they might not shoot at you as soon. At higher levels of difficulty enemies might be harder to destroy while it would take them much less time to find you. Those magical abilities the computer possesses that you do not have access to will become prevalent in the games' strategy.

Lowering the difficulty exposes just how dumb the game's AI is to begin with. You realize almost immediately if it were not for the sheer speed that computer characters react, you could defeat them without pause, wading through them almost as if they were not there. The computer will often have certain goals that are conspicuous at any play level. Likewise, certain weaknesses in the computer's strategy may come to be seen at lower difficulty that is still present, though to a lesser extent at higher difficulty settings.

Among those of us who consider ourselves 'hardcore gamers' weak AI that is easy to confuse and defeat is a waste of time and effort. This ease is readily apparent due to the overuse of generic gameplay mechanisms that we have already seen before.

That brings to mind the notion that perhaps our experience with games has led to both our love of games and our apathy toward them. The joy of new discovery is one of the things that fuels a new gamer's drive to acquire and play new games.

It could be though that there comes a point of realization, wherein one becomes jaded and can no longer accept the same old gameplay as fun. Then fear and anguish set in when you can't find some other frontier to explore or barrier to break. Once you are on top of your game, the game may never have the same hold on you. Honestly, when creating a new game it is not easy to negotiate the fine barriers between a fun to play, while still being challenging to players.

There are many titles that follow patterns of attack that are obvious even to the casual observer. Repetition and memorization go hand-in-hand and are generally the norm among these videogames. This is just fine when all you want to do is win all the time, but games of this sort can be discarded when it comes time to seek a challenge.

Providing that challenge falls to the game developers, who may not have the time or money, needed to create such an experience even if they have the skill. Likewise, games that are made more difficult simply by requiring nigh impossible feats be accomplished are no fun either.

Sometimes you have to search high and low to find a key or a switch to get through a door for no apparent reason beyond occupying your time. There are many games that use these types of puzzles as stalling tactics that are meant to distract the gamer from the inherent stupidity of the situation that surrounds them.

So faced with no real challenge, no real goal, no depth to explore, the only frontier left is to overcome the cheats that have been programmed into the game. Maybe that is all there was to begin with and our earlier joy hid that fact from us.

Once upon a time, I thought that videogames couldn't cheat. After all, it was a computer and a computer HAD to follow the rules, right? Wrong. I learned this when my friends complained about Military Madness (AKA Nectaris) for the TurboGrafx-16.

"It's a good game, a REALLY good game, but there's one thing you should know: The game CHEATS!" they said. I soon learned they were correct as the game's 'randomizer' that generated battle results between units often deferred to weaker, outnumbered, surrounded CPU positions to prevent a player's strategy from forging ahead to victory.

Strategy games cheat a lot in individual battles between units, but usually there is a flaw to their logic that can be exploited in any scenario. No matter the primary goal that would lead to winning, the CPU will usually play to prevent the human player from beating it.

So eventually you may learn that certain hardwired priorities determine the CPU's course of action without deviation. That might involve a need to express air superiority, so the AI would lead the CPU to attack the most insignificant members of your airborne fleet. Such a flaw might cause the AI to determine that if you own a particular type of unit, that it must be eliminated at all cost, no matter its position on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, you can execute your own attack plan and defeat the computer while it is otherwise distracted. This is for human players very similar to misdirection in chess. If you know your opponent cannot resist the temptation of taking a knight, you can use that fact to your own advantage.

One company in particular, Namco, makes no apologies concerning the CPU cheats in their games. This is shown by their Ridge Racer series, which continues a cheating tradition long held since the days of Final Lap Twin on TurboGrafx-16 (or further back, with Pole Position in arcades).

CPU cars all have ungodly handling abilities, never take damage, teleport all over the track to stop you, always attack the human player instead of each other and do their best to block you until your rival car catches up.

There are some racing games that have a built in 'catch up' factor that applies to all play modes, while others work in two player games only. In most of the games that allow this feature, there will be an option to turn it OFF.

Sometimes this option will be called 'Rear Car Boost' or 'Handicap'. The idea is that when playing against the computer you will always have a competitive opponent. Also, when playing against a human being, the leader will not demoralize his opponent by lapping him several times in every race.

Capcom is also guilty of cheating in its Street Fighter games. The biggest cheats involve characters that SHOULD have to charge attacks before releasing special moves. I've seen Guile rifle off as many as FIVE Sonic Boom attacks in less than three seconds! Blanka and E. Honda have at times attacked three different directions at once - left, right and vertical without ONCE touching the ground!

The worst of these is when Guile WALKS forward several steps, throws a Sonic Boom and follows it up immediately with a Flash Kick (and sometimes an airborne throw as well)! I believe this sort of computer cheat in fighting games has led to the adoption of automatic combos for human players.

Since the game could always activate attacks whenever it needed to, players were often left to suffer the consequences. So unless one had uncanny reflexes, such a flurry of attacks by the computer would lead to certain defeat.

With the auto- or super-combos at the ready, a human controlled character can get some of that same 'computer-love' by dishing out immense damage in a short period of time. This allows them to attack faster than most players could do ordinarily on their own.

For many people these types of combos allow the gameplay experience to be much more fun and rewarding. There are some people who readily accept CPU cheats as being 'part of the game'. They believe that since programmers gave the videogame the ability to do certain things, that automatically makes it fair. To them it doesn't matter if the computer has abilities that give it an advantage, because in the end it can't think for itself and the human factor will always be the prevailing advantage.

So the ability of a human being to adapt to changing situations and adversity will always succeed in the end.

There are some games that would benefit more from improved AI than others. Most game developers want their games to be bought and played by as many people as possible. But those who are most honest with themselves may realize that for a certain genre, the required difficulty level will be too high for widespread distribution and popularity. The most difficult games generally have the smallest audience, occupying only a small niche within the gaming industry.

The idea is that if fighting games are popular with 40% of consumers, and challenging fighters are popular only among 10% of the fighting game public (4% of all gamers), it's best to go after the business offered by the 90% majority of fighting game players (36% of the total market) who prefer easier games to play. So you may end up with one spectacular fighting game out of ten that nevertheless gains no respect or sales from the majority of fans in that genre. Meanwhile, nine other games, which may not be so critically acclaimed by hardcore gamers, would sell like water to the thirsty.

So that is the dilemma we face. Easy games sell, hard games don't. Despite all claims about the evils of CPU cheats, the gaming market always supports these 'dumber' games. People have gotten used to games that use simple patterns, predictable responses and software shortcuts that they can readily identify.

If the game cheats you in one way that means you must respond in kind. That way you can 'trick' the stupid AI into doing what you want it to do, at the wrong time. Then you can win, be happy with your performance and reward the game company by going out to by another of their games. That's just good business.

Hardcore gamers will always be a minority in the videogame industry. We won't get anything we demand in games unless we manage to somehow make them ourselves. If would be nice if the AI of a game could learn to grow and adapt to my input over time. If a game could be marginally more difficult, but never impossible, each time I played it would be a refreshing experience.

Thus far there have been limitations to automatic gameplay adjustment. Perhaps the time will come eventually when all games are only as difficult as they need be to provide a proper gameplay experience for every gamer. Until such software routines are created, it's unlikely that any of us will be satisfied.

Yeah, the game cheats. The only way to get over it is to beat the game anyway. But always remember, that victory may not bring you the joy you might expect.

Take care, happy gaming, enjoy life!

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