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Heh shitty developers using underhanded tactics to make their games harder. I would love to see teardown of the PS3 version of Dark Souls for such tools - also crappy hitboxes and such
I notice when I play Mario Kart games I only get good power-ups when I'm in the last place, but when I'm in 1st place, I never get the star or lightning power-up
I applaude you for making this video when Nintendo is currently sueing anyone who displays even single screenshots of their games being played on anything other than their original console
Vindication when I was 13 years old and yelled at my TV "Donkey Kong you f'n cheater!". My older brother just laughed and told me I sucked. Well now we all have evidence.
"How can the game cheat? It doesn't even know you're playing it right now" "The authors were too busy designing the game. They would never make their game cheat"
@@AccelSternritter Doesn't matter that much, the cpu's get limited when you are behind so you can catch up again... the whole thing is an illusion of racing.
@@Planetdune That depends on the distance to the final line...so if they BS you at the last minute, it's not going to matter that they give you a handicap when they're beating your behind.
@@Planetdune I've seen many times, especially on the penguin ice map, where the "Rival" gets stuck in the "catchup" phase after passing you and they max speed the final lap and win.
Everyone in my group in 1997 knew the CPU cheated, but not as much as you're showing. 🤣 Higher top speed, perfect turns, instant recovery, those were easy to spot, but this game is in another level.
Right. Me and my friends knew too but couldnt prove it especially in fighting games. I could tell u just have to find a way to cheese your way thru bosses bc it wasnt about skills at the higher difficulty bc of the blatant cheating
Glad my Fly Cam Mod was put to good use! Great video! A few things to note: - There is a cheat code, which forces the CPU drivers to be "on camera" at all times, thus removing the majority of rubberbanding factors. It's incredibly boring tho, as human players will outrun them even with bad to decent driving skills. I can see why the developers opted to code them how they are. - 8:10 I would refer to the "paths" here as lanes, not to confuse them with the multiple paths on Yoshi Valley. They also are clearly coded differently, as the lanes are just the offsets to the sides of a path, defined by a varying width depending on the selected racing track. Homing shells also always travel on the center of said path. - Some of the CPU techniques can be exploited as well. For example: If a CPU leaves the view frustum while on an off-road geometry plane, they will keep the speed reduction until they come into view again. This is because the game doesn't run any collision detection on off-screen drivers. Thanks for reading!
Does _Diddy Kong Racing_ have the CPU cheating? ⋅ If "yes", then never mind ... 😁 ⋅ If "no", then it's theoretically possible to program a good kart racing game on the N64 that doesn't cheat.
@@robertjenkins6132 but would you want to do it? As Litronom stated, humans would outrun other characters and in an hour or to it wold probably become boring Although, never played _Diddy Kong Racing_, so maybe it works well there?
@robertjenkins6132 Diddy Kong Racing doesn't have rubberbanding, but it does have a similar thing with the CPUs not being affected by things off camera. The biggest example of this is in Boulder Canyon, if you raise the bridge, the CPUs will ignore it completely and drive over an invisible road if they're off camera. Certain items such as the oil and the bubble have little to no effect when the CPUs are off camera.
But, on the other hand, this does definitely make up for how stupid the AI in this game is. I can't count the number of times I've seen a CPU player toss a banana peel in front of themselves just to run straight into it seemingly without even trying to avoid it.
In gta vice city, during a racing mission called 'Alloy wheels of steel' if you just steal one of the bikes from the opponents instead of getting your own. You'll find that it is much more speedy and has way better handling. Thus, it makes the mission way easier
@@Sherolox yes its always fun to do that. In Baldur's gate 3 there is a hidden deva's mace weapon which the devs keep trying to patch out but players keep finding new ways to get it. Last i remember, they hid the item from the enemies corpse. But if you just carry the body in your inventory and type name of the weapon in the search bar, it shows up 😄
It makes me think about whether there ever could have been a class action suit brought against Midway and Capcom among others back during the arcade days. The games weren't really based on skill but rather figuring out exploits in order to beat the CPU cheating, that you had to pay enormous amounts of money to figure out. Some of those arcade games really were just machines that you would deposit money into for nothing in exchange!--which is illegal!
It could be argued it made the victories all the more sweeter because you beat the cheating racers, as opposed to winning every race without breaking a sweat and being kinda boring in the process
@@mattb9664it's like putting quarters in Pinball tables, you know you're not getting anything in return aside from the amusement and fun trying to see how far you can go before you inevitably lose
The bit at 9:10 confirms the weirdest thing I ever saw happen in this game. Decades back on Royal Raceway (the one with the big jump) I was playing as usual on the last lap when out of no where Donkey Kong, who was right behind me just before the jump, won the race. I'm guessing he flew off at a weird angle, landed in the water, then got picked up by Lakitu and put at the finish line. Great video!
The banana slip grace period is for the player to brake and rescue himself so he doesn't spin out. Try it out: brake while you're sliding and you'll get a ♪ indicating a successful recuperation.
0:42 that's when your supposed to use the lightning bolt dumping toad in last place, the jump on Wario stadium is the one place that truly stops them but then creates another rival but at least he has to come up from 6th
As funny as that may be, sending specifically the main rival that far back will cause the regular CPU racers to speed up and become a lot more annoying than the rivals. Make sure to not let those superpowered bots out of your sight or you may not see them again lmao
@@underlightmusicwe ban it at my house, or at the very least ban the wall hop. There is a very easy and repeatable shortcut at the start of the race, that you can retry if you fail it. The first hump you drive over, you can use it to jump the wall and skip half the race. The fact that u can try over and over, and a successful attempt literally skips half the race, leads to everyone (who knows about it) in multiplayer just bonking into the wall at the start of the race until they succeed. Aside from that, if you can get everyone to agree not to do that, I also think it’s one of the best maps.
@@reececaldwell722 yeah it is fair to ban that one. We never banned the Rainbow Road shortcut though because it's so funny to watch someone mess that one up.
Wow. How can someone miss rubber banding? Like NFS Underground was so annoying. No matter what you did the competition always catched you up near finishing line.
@@jothainit's even more annoying in sim racers. Grid Autosport AI will drive like grandmas when your behind them , but the moment you overtake, they become elite racers tailgating you endlessly. Rubberbanding in an alternative form where the the rules of physics aren't broken but annoying all the same.
@8:00 if you tap the brake button once while in the sliding portion after hitting a banana peel you won't spin out at all. Makes bananas barely matter to the player if you get good at this.
I remember playing these games in 480p.. I guess I played them with component cables (Blue, Green, 2 reds, Gray).. Those red, yellow, and white audio/video cables had the worst picture and sound quality to me.. Even as a poor kid growing up in Alabama, I knew components cables were better..
@@kenrickkahn the sound quality is identical between composite and component provided there isnt interference. but the yellow cable does have worse video quality than component since the red (red) green (luminance) blue (blue) cables dont carry audio so the gray and other red you had were for sending an audio cable, the same as white and red. interference can cause a reduction in sound quality with composite video but if cables are properly shielded and your tv set is made correctly this doesnt apply.
composite video combine the color, luminance and sync onto just two wires (one changing voltage, other is ground) and has just 4 mhz of bandwidth and while in the digital era of compression you can stream 4k on youtube with 32 mbps, analog has way more limitations and not only is the resolution 480i or 576i, the color resolution is reduced and theres less bandwidth for the luminance so you get blur and artifacts that component just doesnt have
This is why I never liked Mario Kart 64. Everyone has it on their list of "top N64 games", but it's just not fun to me except for Battle Mode. I'm all for competitive racing, but if you're playing flawlessly and have perfect accuracy with your items, but the CPUs are still always right there with you regardless, how is that fun at all? Also, it wasn't mentioned in the video, but there's a few times in 150cc where if a CPU gets ahead of you and takes the lead, sometimes it is actually impossible for you to catch up to them
@shny_scott How is it any fun to constantly get cheated? If I get good enough at the game to be able to lap AI racers that are playing fairly instead of cheating, my fun is the reward that I'm playing so well and beating them so hard. Do you think time trial mode is no fun because there's no AI at all?
@@divinecomedian2 I'd like to see you make it better in a way that a skilled human would be with a 93MHz CPU and 4 megabytes of RAM, while running 7 of them at once and never dropping from 30fps.
@@MegaManNeo IIRC the heavy characters like Bowser and Donkey Kong are the fastest. As @sirtimabob said, the lighter characters accelerate faster but can’t ultimately go as fast. Those were likely intentional tradeoffs in designing character balance. EDIT: I may have thinking more of Super Mario Kart (SNES) where I recall top-end speed being a notable contrast between the heavy and light characters. From looking up some wikis it appears they were brought more into parity for 64 where the heavy karts are still among the fastest but Toad and Yoshi edge them out a bit.
MK64 was brutal as a kid. You knew this stuff was going on, you just didn't know the specifics. All you knew was that if the AI got ahead of you and you lost sight of them, they were GONE gone, meanwhile, you had to drive 3 laps perfectly and hope the AI items didn't screw you over, lol.
Another weird thing my mates and I realised decades ago was that sometimes even though the 2nd or 3rd placed AI characters would be able to match your 1st place pace regardless of how fast you were going, sometimes they would move past you into 1st place but continue at a "catchup" pace even though they'd already clearly gone past you. So despite you being in 2nd place with mushrooms, stars, blue shells, etc. the AI would still win by half a lap and there was nothing that could be done to catch them.
The best demonstration can be seen in Kalimari Desert in either 1P or 2P GP. With creative use of shells and/or the star, you can "jail" a CPU into the train tracks near the end of the course. As long as this CPU player is visible on either P1's or P2's screen(s), it will never be able to escape. But the moment the CPU player is outside the range of either human's screens, it can magically escape.
I remember one time my friend used Gameshark with Need For Speed Underground for his car to run faster and turn tighter, thus guaranteeing easy 1st place wins. The rubber banding on that game was so aggressive that we purposely stopped near the end of the of the finish line to see the CPU cars just flying like bullets and crashing with everything just to catch up. It was downright creepy seeing cars behave like this.😂
I remember nfsu1 rubberband to be really crazy, but I think on a modern pc its even crazier. On my Xbox 360 (with backwards compability) it was tough sometimes, but usually doable. But when I play on my PC, they literally FLY past you, crashing in a wall while having air-time. Someone might need to look, if the calculations for rubberband are affected by more fps.
@@vetrixfx9264 You might be onto something there. Split/Second by default is capped at 30fps on PC, and the only way to run at 60 is by modding it. I couldn't get it to run at 60 when I tried it. But from the old threads I read, there were some posts mentioning that the AI seemed harder once they got the mod running.
@@deoxysandmew2162 XD No joke. Since the races take place at night and resolution was so low. Sometimes you only saw the taillights and they looked like thrusters!
damn, crazy timing on this video. The night this was uploaded I had just finished Mario Kart 64 for my first time (I'm 31) on my Switch and towards the later 150cc races I could tell some fuckery was definitely going on. One thing that I didn't see mentioned here (and this may just be a thing for the Switch port, if so my apologies) is that often opponents that you're approaching will quite literally just fade out of existence, only to pop up out of nowhere right next to you a few seconds later down the track. This coupled with the fact that it seemed no matter how well I played, I still only took 1st's by milliseconds from the NPC in 2nd, regardless of how many box effects I threw at him prior to hitting the finish line definitely made me realize something wasn't right. Regardless I appreciate, as usual, your thorough effort here. Especially being able to see the NPC racers pulling David Blaine shit off camera with your free cam mod, that was very satisfying to watch even if only to confirm to myself that I don't suck *that* bad at racing games lol
I really like Diddy Kong Racing, and I later found out it does not use rubber-banding. It is possible to lap racers if you are good and vice-versa. On the hard levels, you need to set your pace early else you’ll probably never catch up to the CPU, especially maxing out bananas early.
Same. Although, I remember that if the track had different vehicle options, the opponents would use the default vehicle off camera. I would stay in a spot in a normally airplane type track and watch their cars fall out of the sky.
The worst rubber-banding race i've ever experienced is against the Blacklist racer, Earl, in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. His car (when you win it) is absolute junk, but when he's racing against you, it's faster, turns better, accellerates harder, and is as sturdy as a tank. Such an unfair race.
When I was a kid, I didn't know the CPU explicitly cheated, but I did catch on fairly quickly that for every cup there were two other characters who'd consistently score well in all of the four races. In retrospect, it's a simple observation, but I did feel pretty smart as a 7yo. Also, this was the only game in my 35 years on this planet that ever made me spike a controller against the wall; regret set in right away and luckily I was a weakling so it didn't break. I just thought "oh no, what'll I tell my parents when I tell them I broke my controller because the game was frustrating? Will they take the entire console away? Oh god please I hope it still works." Aah, to be that young again, when that was the worst I thought the world could get xD
I remember trying my hardest to snap my NES controller as a kid 😂 can't remember what game got me so angry though. Good thing those controllers were tough and could take a hard slam and laugh it off.
It also happened in Super Mario Kart, except I believe the rivals were set on a per character basis. I don't remember all the combos but for instance if you picked Mario then your rival would always be Luigi, if you picked Yoshi your rival would always be Koopa Troopa, etc. It also had little to no rubber banding; on longer tracks I could regularly lap the second place racer and often lap the eighth place racer twice before finishing.
@@lordhughmungus actually I think Mario’s rival was DK Jr. in SMK, always annoyed me how he has a much higher top speed yet that top speed doesn’t apply when you actually play as him :P
Something that would often frustrate me in games was when the CPU opponents seemed to gang up against me in what was supposed to be an "every man for himself" match.
As I mentioned in a similar video, I actually enjoy the rubberbanding in this game. I rather have the CPUs always catch up to me no matter what, giving me a good challenge, with stuff always going on and keeping me on my feet...instead of always being way out in 1st with nothing going on being bored and always winning with no challenge at all...
I feel the same; It might just be because i've played so much of it, but 64 had my favorite CPUs because they were relentless. Yeah you might lose sometimes to random nonsense, but i've never felt mad about it? mario kart's entire heart is in random chaotic fun rather than pure skill, idk why people suddenly forget that when it comes to the AI. And if you do want a more fair challenge, play multiplayer with your friends!
I was so pissed when on Wii computer catched up so quickly and sometimes it won despite me been first for the most part of the race. I thought it has to be some cheats, but always blamed the "randomness" of the boosters. Now I know that I don't suck just the CPU is bloody cheater 😅.
when I was a kid and played mk64 I spent hours softloking CPUs by making them fall (or waiting for left path CPUs on royal raceway to simply fall by themselves in the water in the first big turn) while being roughly between in-camera and off-camera, they would be stuck mid air doing the "hit by red shell" animation forever until being in the "in-camera" area and falling back, this and play 2P to stay with a blue shell before bowser's castle tower gap to make CPUs fall and then try to get them all stuck there because once they fall there they have a really hard time not falling again on camera Toad's Turnspike 1st place is a die and retry funny thing on F zero X, you get the same kind of rubberbanding except for the falling off the track part (2 CPUs on easier and 3 on harder difficulties) but 1 they slow down/speed up like crazy when close to the 3rd lap finish line if you're fast/slow and 2 you can just choose to murder them at the begining of any race on S.C.A.R.S. (ubisoft's N64 Mario Kart clone) you also have explicit rubberbanding (you can clearly watch it in game by watching replays after any race on the leaderboard section) and CPUs are completly ordered in speed and item available which isn't a real issue for score because you can easily stack them away like crazy by throwing billions of items at them and CPUs 4th and 6th taking alternative paths on some tracks will often take the lead if you choose to set traps on the main path, also there's a glitch allowing you to softlock CPUs forever simply by putting a Magnet over a Stopper giving anyone lapping them bonus points
Ooh, can we have more videos like this if possible please? It's always interesting to know what is happening behind the scenes. Just to throw some suggestions in (But it does happen behind the scenes so we don't always know it's happening): Something like the Director on Left for Dead, or when you alert an alarm on N64 Goldeneye and you get suddenly swarmed. Something like that.
For a lot of games, this wouldn't be as interesting. In FPS games, for example, it's not uncommon for enemies to just be spawned in really close to you but out of sight.
I remember my friends and I arguing if this existed or not, and with NBA Jam. We were just kids, but it's cool decades later to finally learn the nuts and bolts about it.
Just press brake when you start jiggling because of a banana peel to prevent spinning out. A note icon will appear if successful and you will barely lose any speed.
Mario Kart 64 is one of my "comfort food" games that I'll boot up for a quick cup in the evenings when I'm winding down. Learning the cheats that the CPU racers use and adapting to them has become a core part of the gameplay for me at this point. You do have to use completely different strategies vs the computer players than you do vs human players. It's always surprised me that there wasn't any kind of in depth documentation or explanation on these mechanics up till now, but this video is easily the best look at what is going on behind the scenes with the cheats that CPU racers use. As far as I'm aware once the CPUs are off screen a certain distance away they will completely de-instance their collision altogether. As shown in the video they basically completely phase out of physical existence once they are a certain distance away from the player. A particularly nasty instance of this is the train on Kalimari Desert, you can narrowly make it past the train with speed items on at least 100cc but if the CPUs aren't in view, they will phase through the train like nothing and completely negate the lead gained from this play. There's also a devastating bug where if a CPU racer gets far enough ahead of you they will get the "catch up" rubber band speed boost while they're ahead on top of being invulnerable to items and obstacles on the track. It's completely impossible to catch up when this happens on some courses. The biggest saving grace regarding these blatantly cheating racers is that they only have access to the basic items like bananas, shells and the star so you don't have to worry about getting hit by lightning or blue shells.
Finally, a comment I was looking for. I've played this game for almost 2 decades and let me tell you... with my tradition to 100% this game every year once, my rubberbanding A.I is just flat out broken. For some reason they literally improved than what they used to be. Earl, notorious for rubberbanding, I could beat him with perfect driving back then. Now? Im forced to not only get him into crash TWICE into something, but ALSO perfect almost frame drive with speedbreaker just to win. The first half of the blacklist, at least around Izzy and another blacklist racer later down the road, has legit broken races for me, where no matter how well im going to play, I just cant win against the rubberband. There are few notorious Speedtrap races that with the cars and stats the game provides, is legit NOT enough for you to beat some of those races, which I could back then. Its almost as if me beating the game so many times, increased the rubberband's difficulty. I say that, because I had a case with Earl where I think the rubberband just broke. Flat out! He crashed into things and spun out 3 times in the last sprint race, which than he couldnt recover. It was a weird experience. Either way, rubberband is just bad. Doesnt make you feel like you accomplish your wins, but rather the game told you, "you can win now." Its an illusion...
@@kirinoathe game is still one of the best NFS games. The rubber banding is just brutal. It’s not like it was hard to beat the game. It’s just that it could have been a lot easier.
I realized that this was a big issue in NFS Most Wanted 2005 when I noticed that if you restarted the game (after completion) and brought in your 200+ mph modified car, suddenly the basic, slow Crown Vic police cruisers could rocket to 200+ mph with supercar handling as well. Not a dealbreaker, just ridiculous to observe that level of rubberbanding.
I feel like I just saw a video on the exact same topic with all of the exact same facts in it... I'm guessing you saw it too and liked it lol. I'm not implying this is stolen. It is a topic, incapable of being stolen. I just feel like I see your inspiration. Especially since the algorithm was pushing that video a week ago. Edit: Yup, found it! It's called "Why are the Mario Kart 64 Computers so Fast?" By Abyssoft
I still remember my dad coming home very late from work .. the day this game came out. I woke up after my parents went to bed and played it all night, even though we weren't allowed to play video games on school days. He stopped on the way home to get mario kart, and I unboxed it that night quietly.. thanks dad.
I remember playing Mario Kart DS when I was younger and I noticed that every set of races always had 2 CPU opponents that basically went back and forth between highest and second highest. If you sat on the line for all 4 races, you would have A come in first and B in second on race 1, B in first and A in second on race two, A then B on 3, and finally B then A on race 4. I quickly learned that if you could manage to somehow knock A or B all the way back to the end of the pack at a point where they couldn't recover, it massively increased your odds of winning that overall set of races.
For sure reminds me of older SNK bosses in some of their arcade fighting games. Input reading in fighting games is completely expected behavior from CPU, though SNK went out of their way with a number of boss fights with other parameters weighed against you. Or even the system itself; SVC Chaos (AES version) didn't have infinite continues for its arcade mode & due to player requests the recent port of it had infinite continues patched in, despite making it less accurate but that's an understandable change to anyone that's suffered it
I LOVE these types of videos!!! When you show us some of the magic behind the curtain (ESPECIALLY when it's about games 'cheating' like this AND with games I know well) Seeing 'how the sausage is made' has always been a big interest of mine, in many areas, not just video games. So when you put these videos out and I see their thumbnail, I get all kinds of giddy and excited LOL THANKL MVG!
The detail about lakitu placing them anywhere even at the finish line makes a lot of sense. One time i got so far ahead, i was half a track in front of everyone, then one moment while looking at the map i suddenly noticed i was in second place near the end of the track and lost. From a halftrack lead to 2nd place in seconds. i was never able to duplicate that due to the rubber banding been so insane.
0:55 I thought the reason why Mario 64 had rubberbanding is because the Nintendo 64 was not powerful enough to calculate the location of every racer on the track when they’re spread across the entire track. So I thought the rubber banding was implemented to keep all the racers close together so that the CPU of the N 64 has less calculations to account for
Keeping track of the other racers on the track is probably the easiest thing on the CPU, it's just 7 points with XYZ coordinates that follow simple rules
Before I even watch this, I would LOVE for someone to do this sort of thing with the OG SNES game. Those CPUs were DIABOLICAL. I can't tell you how many times I've shot a red shell, the CPU *jumps* over it, and it loops back around and hits ME instead. COUNTLESS TIMES.
@@Morboeatspeople the nightmare gets too real when you play in Mini Mode (Y+A on character select). EVERY racer tries to go out of their way to run you over like that.
I'm sure I've said this before, but thank you for marking your sponsorship in timestamps. Anyway. Cheating CPUs is definitely nothing new. Cheating CPUs are the reason I almost literally rage-quit _Mario Kart 8 Deluxe._ However, the way it's done here is pretty hilarious.
So many racing games cheat and its frustrating to, i think it was need for speed underground 2 i had the near perfect race and clipped a last corner...and then so many over took me....cos the game would not allow me to get to far ahead, i think that what always frustrated me in driving games is that the AI and the way games are they do these cheating things rather than make the games in a way that feel more like a proper challenge in a fair way
As a racing game dev it’s just not that easy. I agree some games are far too egregious but it’s really hard to make competitive AI without giving them some conditional advantages
Oh, nfs underground was so bad at rubberbanding… AI flying by at at least 300 km/h, or that damn white van. It SOMEHOW always ended up in your way. When it crossed the screen from the right, and tried to take from the right, it slowed down. From the left, it accelerated. Or that one drag race when you must jump on a ramp, otherwise the train hits you. Or a Peugeot 206 which outperformed anything.
@@TheDeveloperGuy yup..burnout 3 is one of my favorite games of that era and had some of the worst rubber banding ever lol. Still love those EA games from that period!
@@SwerveStudios Rubber banding really is vital to racing games IMHO. I remember with the early Forza games I’d either be way out in front after the first corner or the AI cars would disappear off into the distance and I was never able to catch them. Something that keeps the race close ensures you aren’t bored with zero challenge or frustrated at being unable to catch up.
I have a very vivid memory of me as a 8 year old raging during a race on a tight track. No matter how well I was doing, a certain cpu would always overtake me during the race, and looking at the minimap he always seemed to be too fast considering the section of the map he was on. I would even specifically smash into his car at the start of the race to rotate it 180 degrees, putting him at a huge disadvantage. But to my bewliderment, he'd just be even faster than before.
7:44 The little slide is for your advantage here. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's like a second chance. If you hit the breaks momentarily, you will recover from the slide and won't spin. It's a gameplay mechanic.
I love discussions about rubber-banding in racing games because in my favorite one, Blur, you can *toggle* rubber-banding and even its strength, at least during splitscreen local play. It's been a while, so you may be able to do so in other places too.
Such a shame that you can't buy blur anymore; I was lucky enough to buy it when it was still on sale - but sucks that I can't recommend it to my friends
The thing I like doing is placing a banana peel at courses with sharp turns, like bowsers castle. You put a well placed banana peel at a tight turn just to see the CPU fly off the course into a dead zone off camera, but also if you catch them on camera you can see them getting stuck.
So many racing games employ this. Notably was “Crew 2”. I played that game a while back and realized during those hyper car races that go across country, that you could make a mistake and it would take either forever or never to get back up to first place. But then if your killing it and your in first place, it doesn’t matter how long you are there, or how well your racing, you slow down for a second and that CPU is right behind you again.
I like so much your channel. You put emphasis on specific topics that has less development on other places but are things that are papable for a part of the community. Maybe topics with little discussion but in here you make the place for its development. Thanks for your job.
Probably every Mario Kart cheats. MK8 and MK8D have an extremely annoying Rubber Banding that prevents you from having fun at 150cc, but it doesn't support 200cc probably because the AI wasn't trained for it.😑
Idk most races against AI in 8 deluxe I just sit in 1st place and am usually never contested unless I get really unlucky with items at the end but I’m still usually far enough ahead for it to not be a problem. Not trying to brag (bragging about being good against the AI isn’t impressive lol) just curious.
Once i figured out some of this as a kid, I became too good for my own good and people quit wanting to play with me. Knowing how to manipulate the weapon draws was a game changer, same with how they treat 1st and 7th/8th place racers.
I have the most experience with the original Super Mario Kart on SNES and the rival thing was there back then as well. It was pre-determined per character you raced as. I forgot the combinations, but let's say if you pick Mario, then Bowser would always be your rival.
Yeah if you play as Koopa Trooper then Luigi is always your rival. For years I thought it was the same for all characters and Nintendo did it like that because they didn’t want people to hate Mario for always trying to beat you. 😂
@@dreamcastfan I used Koopa Troopa all the time in the SNES Mario Kart. I HATE Luigi with a FIERY PASSION! Knowing that a-hole was right behind you and that he was going to spam the star power up over and over and over and over until he hit you. I swear that jerk used it 5 times per lap on 150cc. It was totally cheating there too, just not as egregious as the N64 game.
I'm glad finally somebody dissected this. It was so annoying that when I got a fast boost, the other players were still in back of me. So annoyingly dumb!
Metropolis Street Racer featured one of the most frustrating rubber band AI that i recall. In the final races, I intentionally slowed down until the last lap to finish in first-place.
rubber banding is what spoilt most of the racing games for me. Instead of winning through skill, I'd almost always just race slowly so the computer rubber bands them in front of me until maybe the last lap and then go for it. Turning multi lap races into a single lap race, almost always the computer ai would let me catch up to the front and then it was only a matter of a single lap of jossling for position, thus less change of getting knocked back along with frustration. I don't know if this works with Mario Kart, it's not a game I've played but it seems just as sus.
Same, I always get 1st in every single player racing game by intentionally staying in second or third until the final stretch of the race regardless of difficulty setting
In Mario Kart 8 i let the CPUs go a bit ahead, because they would start to destroy themself and than it was easier to take the first place after one or two rounds.
When it comes to the oncoming traffic of trucks, my guess is they had to give the AI an exemption because they kept running into the trucks. I don’t think it’s a problem because it’s still easy to beat the AI even when they “cheat”.
I noticed something similar used in the SNES Mario Kart. The opposing racers would have a set order of finish that was determined by the results of the first race. Say the player is Mario and he's racing against Luigi, Yoshi, and Toad. At the end of the first race the player takes 1st place, followed by Yoshi at 2nd, Luigi at 3rd, and Toad coming in at fourth. For the rest of the cup series, those three will always place in the same order--Luigi at 2, Yoshi at 3, Toad at 4, and the CPU will employ tricks to ensure this comes to pass. I also noticed that the order of the racers was seemingly pre-determined by the player's choice of character and never changed. For fun I deliberately messed with the "natural order" once and managed to force the usual "number 3 finisher" into seventh place while someone else took 3rd. Now I suddenly had a different opponent on my butt, but the CPU maintained this new order for the rest of the cup instead of trying to put things back where it was originally programmed to be. Ironically, breaking the mystery of Mario Kart's CPU programming made racing-type games less enticing...
the rival CPU thing makes so much sense. I spesifically remember cussing at Toad way more than the other CPU drivers on occasion, even became a short meme
Fun fact: every racing game (with few exceptions) does this. It’s usually called rubberbanding (NFS calls it “Catchup”) and it’s used as a way to make up for driver AI shortcomings. Without it, a lot of games would be incredibly boring, as you maintain a commanding lead for most of the race completely uncontested.
I knew it! Always felt like the CPU was getting away with BS, more specifically on the desert level with the train. Was able to really see it in action when I managed to get through the train tracks just before the train showed up. I drove a little distance, turned around and happen to see several CPU got straight through the train...
I used to play this game all the time as a kid and definitely notices the CPU cheating. At 7:38. when slipping on the bananas you can tap B when losing traction and you won't spin out.
Yes, this is such a thing in Crash Team Racing. On higher difficulties you kind of need to constantly drift boost to stay ahead and hit short cuts whereever possible.
I find the rubber banding can have a runaway effect. If the CPU gets too far ahead, they'll keep that absurd speed and be impossible to catch up to. Happens to me almost every time I play Bowser's Castle.
I remember writing s couple of paragraph post 10+ years ago about the cheating CPU in Mario Kart! I noticed the lackadaisical manner the CPU responded to distant red shells as a younger girl playing the game as a child. I never learned before the mechanics behind it and really appreciated this dive down memory lane with it!
150cc they deffo cheat and if your leading come 2nd lap blue shell 5 seconds after you hit the checker. It's a joke. You can predict it exactly now. Your better being in 2nd place until over half of 2nd lap
1:17 as narrator discusses assigned rivals. I imagine 1st Fast and Furious's, Dominic Toretto saying "Still a buster" as Bowser and Mario close the gap against Yoshi on screen. Also FnF final scene at 1:40 re-enactment 😂
I felt this happen on Mario Kart Wii. I played with my brother often, and at some point I noticed that CPUs have a pre-determined time to finish the race which is seen once all players finish the race, unless they physically cross the finish line before showing the results in which case they get their own time. So at one race my brother gets first, and we were way ahead of every CPU, except for one, a Toad that was incredibly fast using a car that did not have good speed, yet Toad was faster than my top speed car. Once I saw the results, there was a huge time lead of 30+ seconds due to rubber-banding from the Toad CPU that crossed the finish line vs the other CPUs that didn't. It was then I realized this rubber-banding was just ridiculous at times.
The AI not running off the edge of the cliffs, or passing through walls, to me definitely seems like a clear optimization, possibly falling back on some predetermined spline, which doesn't exactly match the actual track. They seem to use the same pathing it pretty consistently. Very interesting stuff though, I knew about the rubber banding, but hadn't noticed all of these different aspects of it. At the end of the day, I believe the game was optimized for "fun", and I think the rival system is great. I did greatly enjoy MK64 back in the day and it is still one of my favourites in the series.
Rubber banding was used back in the days because uses less data then giving AI code to each racer. Therefore the game must “mimic” the game being competitive and smart while saving tons of megabytes by giving each CPU a rubber band effect. You could also notice that some karts copy the players behaviour in order to save vRAM+Compute.
Dang! I remember my brother and I used to play this a lot in our child times and like 10 years later we decided to revive our childhood games and when we played the game again we thought we sucked until my brother said something like "We don't suck, I think the game knows when you're going to win and it does crazy stuff to not let you get first place" and I see he was right all the time
GREAT VIDEO!!! I'd love to see a similar analysis for off-camera item distribution, especially for newer versions of Mario Kart. One common scenario for me in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, for example, is that one of the CPU-controlled racers uses a Lightning Bolt while I'm in 1st place. Given the placement at which you'd even receive a Lightning Bolt, that should mean that the CPU-controlled racers behind me also lose their items, but I'm too often hit by Red Shells (and Blue Shells) when we haven't recently passed item blocks. I think the game itself gives items to the CPU-controlled racers whenever it'll best screw you over. In Deluxe, I can also have two items, a Red or Green Shell and a Super Horn, the order of which doesn't matter, and some ass behind me will fire a Red Shell and a Blue Shell in whatever order I CAN'T deal with based on the order of my own items. For example, if I have a Green Shell first and a Super Horn second, then I'll get hit by a Blue Shell first to ensure it hits. But if I have a Super Horn first and a Green Shell second, then I'll get targeted with a Red Shell first so I waste my Super Horn, followed by a Blue Shell I can't avoid. This must be studied in more depth! XD
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Heh shitty developers using underhanded tactics to make their games harder. I would love to see teardown of the PS3 version of Dark Souls for such tools - also crappy hitboxes and such
I notice when I play Mario Kart games I only get good power-ups when I'm in the last place, but when I'm in 1st place, I never get the star or lightning power-up
No
I applaude you for making this video when Nintendo is currently sueing anyone who displays even single screenshots of their games being played on anything other than their original console
I know everyone is obsessed with membership models still. But this really makes more sense to offer a one time fee, and have repeat customers.
It's like we are finally getting to watch CCTV footage of a conspiracy.
This is a ''true crime'' fiasco hehehe
It's like the Zapruder Film.
Vindication when I was 13 years old and yelled at my TV "Donkey Kong you f'n cheater!". My older brother just laughed and told me I sucked. Well now we all have evidence.
Facts!!! I'm a little mad at MK64.
I always knew it! This game cheats so hard, it makes playing it no fun compared to others.
All the years as a child yelling at the tv screen saying “the game is cheating” and your parents not believing you. I feel vindicated by this video.
Lol very relateable
Aka "closure" 😊
"How can the game cheat? It doesn't even know you're playing it right now"
"The authors were too busy designing the game. They would never make their game cheat"
@MPOGOS hhhhhmmmm 🤔. IDK this video does make sense.
Skill issue
9:15 The CPU get's picked up by Lakitu immediately, but when the player drives of, you have to watch your character tumble down the whole cliff!
Yeah you get enough time to make a coffee while that thing pulls you back up, but not for the CPU though
@@AccelSternritter Doesn't matter that much, the cpu's get limited when you are behind so you can catch up again... the whole thing is an illusion of racing.
@@Planetdune That depends on the distance to the final line...so if they BS you at the last minute, it's not going to matter that they give you a handicap when they're beating your behind.
Nintendo has a patent on the game cheating you in racing games. Their ninjas are ready if anyone tries these techniques
@@Planetdune I've seen many times, especially on the penguin ice map, where the "Rival" gets stuck in the "catchup" phase after passing you and they max speed the final lap and win.
Everyone in my group in 1997 knew the CPU cheated, but not as much as you're showing. 🤣
Higher top speed, perfect turns, instant recovery, those were easy to spot, but this game is in another level.
Right. Me and my friends knew too but couldnt prove it especially in fighting games. I could tell u just have to find a way to cheese your way thru bosses bc it wasnt about skills at the higher difficulty bc of the blatant cheating
Glad my Fly Cam Mod was put to good use! Great video!
A few things to note:
- There is a cheat code, which forces the CPU drivers to be "on camera" at all times, thus removing the majority of rubberbanding factors. It's incredibly boring tho, as human players will outrun them even with bad to decent driving skills. I can see why the developers opted to code them how they are.
- 8:10 I would refer to the "paths" here as lanes, not to confuse them with the multiple paths on Yoshi Valley. They also are clearly coded differently, as the lanes are just the offsets to the sides of a path, defined by a varying width depending on the selected racing track. Homing shells also always travel on the center of said path.
- Some of the CPU techniques can be exploited as well. For example: If a CPU leaves the view frustum while on an off-road geometry plane, they will keep the speed reduction until they come into view again. This is because the game doesn't run any collision detection on off-screen drivers.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for your fly cam mod! You contributed to this video indirectly, so it's cool you commented!
Thanks for commenting. Can you make more tutorials about how you make mods like this?
Does _Diddy Kong Racing_ have the CPU cheating?
⋅ If "yes", then never mind ... 😁
⋅ If "no", then it's theoretically possible to program a good kart racing game on the N64 that doesn't cheat.
@@robertjenkins6132 but would you want to do it? As Litronom stated, humans would outrun other characters and in an hour or to it wold probably become boring
Although, never played _Diddy Kong Racing_, so maybe it works well there?
@robertjenkins6132 Diddy Kong Racing doesn't have rubberbanding, but it does have a similar thing with the CPUs not being affected by things off camera. The biggest example of this is in Boulder Canyon, if you raise the bridge, the CPUs will ignore it completely and drive over an invisible road if they're off camera. Certain items such as the oil and the bubble have little to no effect when the CPUs are off camera.
But, on the other hand, this does definitely make up for how stupid the AI in this game is. I can't count the number of times I've seen a CPU player toss a banana peel in front of themselves just to run straight into it seemingly without even trying to avoid it.
To be fair to AI I have also seen many human players do this too.
This. NPC opponents were so easy already. I'm ok with them cheating
😂
@@kalradic1252as a human if you wiggle your joystick it counters the banana
@@TekkLuthor last time I wiggled my joystick I got in trouble.
In gta vice city, during a racing mission called 'Alloy wheels of steel' if you just steal one of the bikes from the opponents instead of getting your own. You'll find that it is much more speedy and has way better handling. Thus, it makes the mission way easier
That's amazing. I love the idea of being able to steal enemy-only weapons and vehicles and keeping them forever.
@@Sherolox yes its always fun to do that. In Baldur's gate 3 there is a hidden deva's mace weapon which the devs keep trying to patch out but players keep finding new ways to get it. Last i remember, they hid the item from the enemies corpse. But if you just carry the body in your inventory and type name of the weapon in the search bar, it shows up 😄
@@gavinjones that's a hilarious workaround hahaha; even more incentive for me to go try the game out i reckon 😄
the vehicle handling is in the handling.dat ,so the bike must have higher stats
I just looked up the wiki and it says that the stats reset if you stash the bike in a garage. So I guess i must have misremembered :/
This game, Goldeneye, and pizza guaranteed a fun party back in the day.
I feel like filing a lawsuit against the Nintendo corporation for robbing my childhood.
I won those races after all.
It makes me think about whether there ever could have been a class action suit brought against Midway and Capcom among others back during the arcade days. The games weren't really based on skill but rather figuring out exploits in order to beat the CPU cheating, that you had to pay enormous amounts of money to figure out.
Some of those arcade games really were just machines that you would deposit money into for nothing in exchange!--which is illegal!
If that's gonna show them how we feel about them going nuclear against the emulation communities...🤟👍
It could be argued it made the victories all the more sweeter because you beat the cheating racers, as opposed to winning every race without breaking a sweat and being kinda boring in the process
@@mattb9664it's like putting quarters in Pinball tables, you know you're not getting anything in return aside from the amusement and fun trying to see how far you can go before you inevitably lose
You'll probably have to sue a lot of other car games and most other MK clones. Rubber banding is pretty common in the racing genre.
The bit at 9:10 confirms the weirdest thing I ever saw happen in this game. Decades back on Royal Raceway (the one with the big jump) I was playing as usual on the last lap when out of no where Donkey Kong, who was right behind me just before the jump, won the race.
I'm guessing he flew off at a weird angle, landed in the water, then got picked up by Lakitu and put at the finish line. Great video!
The banana slip grace period is for the player to brake and rescue himself so he doesn't spin out. Try it out: brake while you're sliding and you'll get a ♪ indicating a successful recuperation.
All you need to recover is a tap on the brake, but if you steer at all during the grace period, you spin out
All you need is a very quick tap on the break without turning and you recover.
My parents refer to this as "singing a little song."
It depends on the track. Bowser's Castle and Banshee Boardwalk has the player stop to spin.
That's weird because in real life you shouldn't hit the breaks when sliding.
0:42 that's when your supposed to use the lightning bolt dumping toad in last place, the jump on Wario stadium is the one place that truly stops them but then creates another rival but at least he has to come up from 6th
That's why Wario Stadium is the best for multiplayer.
As funny as that may be, sending specifically the main rival that far back will cause the regular CPU racers to speed up and become a lot more annoying than the rivals. Make sure to not let those superpowered bots out of your sight or you may not see them again lmao
@@underlightmusicwe ban it at my house, or at the very least ban the wall hop. There is a very easy and repeatable shortcut at the start of the race, that you can retry if you fail it. The first hump you drive over, you can use it to jump the wall and skip half the race. The fact that u can try over and over, and a successful attempt literally skips half the race, leads to everyone (who knows about it) in multiplayer just bonking into the wall at the start of the race until they succeed. Aside from that, if you can get everyone to agree not to do that, I also think it’s one of the best maps.
@@reececaldwell722 yeah it is fair to ban that one. We never banned the Rainbow Road shortcut though because it's so funny to watch someone mess that one up.
@ lol same with same reasoning. It’s so high risk that if they make it they deserve it.
I tried for YEARS to get my friend to see rubber-banding in racing games! I'm SO sending him this clip. Thanks MVG!
Then all of a sudden the response will be "who cares?" cuz that's how the prideful operate.
Is your friend blind?
Wow. How can someone miss rubber banding? Like NFS Underground was so annoying. No matter what you did the competition always catched you up near finishing line.
I'm not here to bash anyone about lack of eyes, logic or otherwise.... I am just interested to hear if there is any update :)
@@jothainit's even more annoying in sim racers. Grid Autosport AI will drive like grandmas when your behind them , but the moment you overtake, they become elite racers tailgating you endlessly. Rubberbanding in an alternative form where the the rules of physics aren't broken but annoying all the same.
@8:00 if you tap the brake button once while in the sliding portion after hitting a banana peel you won't spin out at all. Makes bananas barely matter to the player if you get good at this.
It's even better: just let go of the gas. You lose almost no time.
Caught in 240p 😂
Actually the proper resolution for these old consoles.
📼 Bro Caught on VHS Capture
I remember playing these games in 480p.. I guess I played them with component cables (Blue, Green, 2 reds, Gray).. Those red, yellow, and white audio/video cables had the worst picture and sound quality to me.. Even as a poor kid growing up in Alabama, I knew components cables were better..
@@kenrickkahn the sound quality is identical between composite and component provided there isnt interference. but the yellow cable does have worse video quality than component since the red (red) green (luminance) blue (blue) cables dont carry audio so the gray and other red you had were for sending an audio cable, the same as white and red. interference can cause a reduction in sound quality with composite video but if cables are properly shielded and your tv set is made correctly this doesnt apply.
composite video combine the color, luminance and sync onto just two wires (one changing voltage, other is ground) and has just 4 mhz of bandwidth and while in the digital era of compression you can stream 4k on youtube with 32 mbps, analog has way more limitations and not only is the resolution 480i or 576i, the color resolution is reduced and theres less bandwidth for the luminance so you get blur and artifacts that component just doesnt have
This is why I never liked Mario Kart 64. Everyone has it on their list of "top N64 games", but it's just not fun to me except for Battle Mode. I'm all for competitive racing, but if you're playing flawlessly and have perfect accuracy with your items, but the CPUs are still always right there with you regardless, how is that fun at all?
Also, it wasn't mentioned in the video, but there's a few times in 150cc where if a CPU gets ahead of you and takes the lead, sometimes it is actually impossible for you to catch up to them
If you’re playing flawlessly with no rubber banding and you’re a full lap ahead of the CPU racers at all time, how is that fun at all?
@shny_scott How is it any fun to constantly get cheated? If I get good enough at the game to be able to lap AI racers that are playing fairly instead of cheating, my fun is the reward that I'm playing so well and beating them so hard. Do you think time trial mode is no fun because there's no AI at all?
@@shny_scott so we can't make better AI? We just have to have cheating AI or none at all?
@@shny_scott the solution isn't to allow the computer to cheat. It's to make it better in a way that a skilled human would be.
@@divinecomedian2 I'd like to see you make it better in a way that a skilled human would be with a 93MHz CPU and 4 megabytes of RAM, while running 7 of them at once and never dropping from 30fps.
That explains why Toad always used to piss me off so much, that little piece of sh*t!! 😂
He's also the driver with the highest speed.
I can totally relate there.
Well, the top acceleration, that is...@@MegaManNeo
@@MegaManNeo IIRC the heavy characters like Bowser and Donkey Kong are the fastest. As @sirtimabob said, the lighter characters accelerate faster but can’t ultimately go as fast. Those were likely intentional tradeoffs in designing character balance.
EDIT: I may have thinking more of Super Mario Kart (SNES) where I recall top-end speed being a notable contrast between the heavy and light characters. From looking up some wikis it appears they were brought more into parity for 64 where the heavy karts are still among the fastest but Toad and Yoshi edge them out a bit.
Yeah but he's *the best!*
do NOT blaspheme the good name of Toad
MK64 was brutal as a kid. You knew this stuff was going on, you just didn't know the specifics. All you knew was that if the AI got ahead of you and you lost sight of them, they were GONE gone, meanwhile, you had to drive 3 laps perfectly and hope the AI items didn't screw you over, lol.
Another weird thing my mates and I realised decades ago was that sometimes even though the 2nd or 3rd placed AI characters would be able to match your 1st place pace regardless of how fast you were going, sometimes they would move past you into 1st place but continue at a "catchup" pace even though they'd already clearly gone past you. So despite you being in 2nd place with mushrooms, stars, blue shells, etc. the AI would still win by half a lap and there was nothing that could be done to catch them.
Noticed this happens if you fall out of bounds, it's almost like it doesn't realise you've dropped behind
same shit in nfs games
I've seen this happen many times.
I’ve seen that a few times
@@youneverknow111 Luckily not in NFS Rivals, it's one of the reasons why that's my favorite NFS game ever.
The best demonstration can be seen in Kalimari Desert in either 1P or 2P GP. With creative use of shells and/or the star, you can "jail" a CPU into the train tracks near the end of the course.
As long as this CPU player is visible on either P1's or P2's screen(s), it will never be able to escape. But the moment the CPU player is outside the range of either human's screens, it can magically escape.
I remember one time my friend used Gameshark with Need For Speed Underground for his car to run faster and turn tighter, thus guaranteeing easy 1st place wins. The rubber banding on that game was so aggressive that we purposely stopped near the end of the of the finish line to see the CPU cars just flying like bullets and crashing with everything just to catch up.
It was downright creepy seeing cars behave like this.😂
NFSU rubberbanding is brutal
Yo! Those aint cars my friend!
They have jet engines installed. XD
I remember nfsu1 rubberband to be really crazy, but I think on a modern pc its even crazier. On my Xbox 360 (with backwards compability) it was tough sometimes, but usually doable. But when I play on my PC, they literally FLY past you, crashing in a wall while having air-time.
Someone might need to look, if the calculations for rubberband are affected by more fps.
@@vetrixfx9264 You might be onto something there. Split/Second by default is capped at 30fps on PC, and the only way to run at 60 is by modding it. I couldn't get it to run at 60 when I tried it. But from the old threads I read, there were some posts mentioning that the AI seemed harder once they got the mod running.
@@deoxysandmew2162 XD No joke. Since the races take place at night and resolution was so low. Sometimes you only saw the taillights and they looked like thrusters!
damn, crazy timing on this video. The night this was uploaded I had just finished Mario Kart 64 for my first time (I'm 31) on my Switch and towards the later 150cc races I could tell some fuckery was definitely going on. One thing that I didn't see mentioned here (and this may just be a thing for the Switch port, if so my apologies) is that often opponents that you're approaching will quite literally just fade out of existence, only to pop up out of nowhere right next to you a few seconds later down the track. This coupled with the fact that it seemed no matter how well I played, I still only took 1st's by milliseconds from the NPC in 2nd, regardless of how many box effects I threw at him prior to hitting the finish line definitely made me realize something wasn't right.
Regardless I appreciate, as usual, your thorough effort here. Especially being able to see the NPC racers pulling David Blaine shit off camera with your free cam mod, that was very satisfying to watch even if only to confirm to myself that I don't suck *that* bad at racing games lol
I really like Diddy Kong Racing, and I later found out it does not use rubber-banding. It is possible to lap racers if you are good and vice-versa. On the hard levels, you need to set your pace early else you’ll probably never catch up to the CPU, especially maxing out bananas early.
Same.
Although, I remember that if the track had different vehicle options, the opponents would use the default vehicle off camera.
I would stay in a spot in a normally airplane type track and watch their cars fall out of the sky.
Diddy Kong Racing is a much more enjoyable single player game than MK64.
Diddy Kong racing I played like a maniac back then. They wouldn't call it diddy anymore I hope
Yes indeed but don't forget to collect all the silver coins! DKR had some really cheeky collision detection too
Other races in DKR are the least of your problems, the bosses are who's really annoying to race....that and anything water based...
The worst rubber-banding race i've ever experienced is against the Blacklist racer, Earl, in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. His car (when you win it) is absolute junk, but when he's racing against you, it's faster, turns better, accellerates harder, and is as sturdy as a tank. Such an unfair race.
When I was a kid, I didn't know the CPU explicitly cheated, but I did catch on fairly quickly that for every cup there were two other characters who'd consistently score well in all of the four races. In retrospect, it's a simple observation, but I did feel pretty smart as a 7yo.
Also, this was the only game in my 35 years on this planet that ever made me spike a controller against the wall; regret set in right away and luckily I was a weakling so it didn't break. I just thought "oh no, what'll I tell my parents when I tell them I broke my controller because the game was frustrating? Will they take the entire console away? Oh god please I hope it still works."
Aah, to be that young again, when that was the worst I thought the world could get xD
I remember trying my hardest to snap my NES controller as a kid 😂 can't remember what game got me so angry though. Good thing those controllers were tough and could take a hard slam and laugh it off.
IIRC the rivals are based on what character you pick.
The part about two rivals being assigned was really interesting! Makes sense now I think back to all the times playing the game.
The rivals system makes so much sense now - I remember wondering why specific characters were out for me and not just anyone in the race :P
It also happened in Super Mario Kart, except I believe the rivals were set on a per character basis. I don't remember all the combos but for instance if you picked Mario then your rival would always be Luigi, if you picked Yoshi your rival would always be Koopa Troopa, etc. It also had little to no rubber banding; on longer tracks I could regularly lap the second place racer and often lap the eighth place racer twice before finishing.
@@lordhughmungus actually I think Mario’s rival was DK Jr. in SMK, always annoyed me how he has a much higher top speed yet that top speed doesn’t apply when you actually play as him :P
Something that would often frustrate me in games was when the CPU opponents seemed to gang up against me in what was supposed to be an "every man for himself" match.
@@renakunisaki yeah that's annoying
Is this in MK8 too? I'm pretty sure some characters hate me depending on who I choose or just a random character on the race
As I mentioned in a similar video, I actually enjoy the rubberbanding in this game. I rather have the CPUs always catch up to me no matter what, giving me a good challenge, with stuff always going on and keeping me on my feet...instead of always being way out in 1st with nothing going on being bored and always winning with no challenge at all...
I feel the same; It might just be because i've played so much of it, but 64 had my favorite CPUs because they were relentless. Yeah you might lose sometimes to random nonsense, but i've never felt mad about it? mario kart's entire heart is in random chaotic fun rather than pure skill, idk why people suddenly forget that when it comes to the AI. And if you do want a more fair challenge, play multiplayer with your friends!
I was so pissed when on Wii computer catched up so quickly and sometimes it won despite me been first for the most part of the race. I thought it has to be some cheats, but always blamed the "randomness" of the boosters. Now I know that I don't suck just the CPU is bloody cheater 😅.
I hate rubber band cpu in racers
Rubberbanding was the worst in MK64
The cheating by the CPU on Mario Kart Wii was just absolutely atrocious. Just decided never to finish it.
mkw cpus are light asl lmao, if u have functioning braincells u can lap them
i gave up mario kart altogether, i knew it was bullshit but didn't know why until now
when I was a kid and played mk64 I spent hours softloking CPUs by making them fall (or waiting for left path CPUs on royal raceway to simply fall by themselves in the water in the first big turn) while being roughly between in-camera and off-camera, they would be stuck mid air doing the "hit by red shell" animation forever until being in the "in-camera" area and falling back, this and play 2P to stay with a blue shell before bowser's castle tower gap to make CPUs fall and then try to get them all stuck there because once they fall there they have a really hard time not falling again on camera
Toad's Turnspike 1st place is a die and retry
funny thing on F zero X, you get the same kind of rubberbanding except for the falling off the track part (2 CPUs on easier and 3 on harder difficulties) but 1 they slow down/speed up like crazy when close to the 3rd lap finish line if you're fast/slow and 2 you can just choose to murder them at the begining of any race
on S.C.A.R.S. (ubisoft's N64 Mario Kart clone) you also have explicit rubberbanding (you can clearly watch it in game by watching replays after any race on the leaderboard section) and CPUs are completly ordered in speed and item available which isn't a real issue for score because you can easily stack them away like crazy by throwing billions of items at them and CPUs 4th and 6th taking alternative paths on some tracks will often take the lead if you choose to set traps on the main path, also there's a glitch allowing you to softlock CPUs forever simply by putting a Magnet over a Stopper giving anyone lapping them bonus points
2:03 wario driving like he has free car insurance
his greatest achievement
on the gameboy advance
@invschematics aaargh my stomach...
Mortal Kombat II cheats, this cheats....I want my childhood back! 🤣
Ooh, can we have more videos like this if possible please? It's always interesting to know what is happening behind the scenes.
Just to throw some suggestions in (But it does happen behind the scenes so we don't always know it's happening): Something like the Director on Left for Dead, or when you alert an alarm on N64 Goldeneye and you get suddenly swarmed. Something like that.
For a lot of games, this wouldn't be as interesting. In FPS games, for example, it's not uncommon for enemies to just be spawned in really close to you but out of sight.
I remember my friends and I arguing if this existed or not, and with NBA Jam. We were just kids, but it's cool decades later to finally learn the nuts and bolts about it.
I knew I was getting screwed 😂
yea it's very similiar to IRL rubber banding - taxes
@@SoyAntonioGamingyeah, but that doesn't apply once you're in top position.
Just look at how the billionaires have increased their treasure hordes.
Why do the rich get tax breaks and not us? that sounds backwards doesnt it
I hate rubber banding in games. Some modern games still doing this which i hate. Like all recent nfs games etc
Just press brake when you start jiggling because of a banana peel to prevent spinning out. A note icon will appear if successful and you will barely lose any speed.
Brake and break have two very different meanings.
@@jeffs1571 Thanks for pointing this out, I have fixed the typo!
Mario Kart 64 is one of my "comfort food" games that I'll boot up for a quick cup in the evenings when I'm winding down. Learning the cheats that the CPU racers use and adapting to them has become a core part of the gameplay for me at this point. You do have to use completely different strategies vs the computer players than you do vs human players. It's always surprised me that there wasn't any kind of in depth documentation or explanation on these mechanics up till now, but this video is easily the best look at what is going on behind the scenes with the cheats that CPU racers use. As far as I'm aware once the CPUs are off screen a certain distance away they will completely de-instance their collision altogether. As shown in the video they basically completely phase out of physical existence once they are a certain distance away from the player. A particularly nasty instance of this is the train on Kalimari Desert, you can narrowly make it past the train with speed items on at least 100cc but if the CPUs aren't in view, they will phase through the train like nothing and completely negate the lead gained from this play. There's also a devastating bug where if a CPU racer gets far enough ahead of you they will get the "catch up" rubber band speed boost while they're ahead on top of being invulnerable to items and obstacles on the track. It's completely impossible to catch up when this happens on some courses. The biggest saving grace regarding these blatantly cheating racers is that they only have access to the basic items like bananas, shells and the star so you don't have to worry about getting hit by lightning or blue shells.
Another well-known game that's notorious for its rubber banding AI is Need for Speed Most Wanted 2005
Need for Speed Underground as well. I saw a similar video of the AI cheating off camera it also pulls the same kind of BS.
Finally, a comment I was looking for.
I've played this game for almost 2 decades and let me tell you... with my tradition to 100% this game every year once, my rubberbanding A.I is just flat out broken.
For some reason they literally improved than what they used to be.
Earl, notorious for rubberbanding, I could beat him with perfect driving back then. Now? Im forced to not only get him into crash TWICE into something, but ALSO perfect almost frame drive with speedbreaker just to win.
The first half of the blacklist, at least around Izzy and another blacklist racer later down the road, has legit broken races for me, where no matter how well im going to play, I just cant win against the rubberband. There are few notorious Speedtrap races that with the cars and stats the game provides, is legit NOT enough for you to beat some of those races, which I could back then.
Its almost as if me beating the game so many times, increased the rubberband's difficulty. I say that, because I had a case with Earl where I think the rubberband just broke. Flat out! He crashed into things and spun out 3 times in the last sprint race, which than he couldnt recover. It was a weird experience.
Either way, rubberband is just bad. Doesnt make you feel like you accomplish your wins, but rather the game told you, "you can win now."
Its an illusion...
NFS went to shit with UG. The shit AI is just another part of that.
@@kirinoathe game is still one of the best NFS games. The rubber banding is just brutal. It’s not like it was hard to beat the game. It’s just that it could have been a lot easier.
I realized that this was a big issue in NFS Most Wanted 2005 when I noticed that if you restarted the game (after completion) and brought in your 200+ mph modified car, suddenly the basic, slow Crown Vic police cruisers could rocket to 200+ mph with supercar handling as well. Not a dealbreaker, just ridiculous to observe that level of rubberbanding.
I feel like I just saw a video on the exact same topic with all of the exact same facts in it... I'm guessing you saw it too and liked it lol. I'm not implying this is stolen. It is a topic, incapable of being stolen. I just feel like I see your inspiration. Especially since the algorithm was pushing that video a week ago.
Edit: Yup, found it! It's called "Why are the Mario Kart 64 Computers so Fast?" By Abyssoft
I still remember my dad coming home very late from work .. the day this game came out. I woke up after my parents went to bed and played it all night, even though we weren't allowed to play video games on school days. He stopped on the way home to get mario kart, and I unboxed it that night quietly.. thanks dad.
That's a good memory to have. I recall having a broken leg and sneaking onto the computer at night on a school day. My mother once caught me.
@@Sherolox Oh forgot to add, he stopped at toys R us on the way home to get this game for us! lmao
Did you get caught???
I remember playing Mario Kart DS when I was younger and I noticed that every set of races always had 2 CPU opponents that basically went back and forth between highest and second highest. If you sat on the line for all 4 races, you would have A come in first and B in second on race 1, B in first and A in second on race two, A then B on 3, and finally B then A on race 4. I quickly learned that if you could manage to somehow knock A or B all the way back to the end of the pack at a point where they couldn't recover, it massively increased your odds of winning that overall set of races.
Oh so the Wario Stadium shortcut was just evening the playing field.
The Wario Stadium jump was the ideal place to ruin cpu's chances. Very easy on any class
For sure reminds me of older SNK bosses in some of their arcade fighting games. Input reading in fighting games is completely expected behavior from CPU, though SNK went out of their way with a number of boss fights with other parameters weighed against you. Or even the system itself; SVC Chaos (AES version) didn't have infinite continues for its arcade mode & due to player requests the recent port of it had infinite continues patched in, despite making it less accurate but that's an understandable change to anyone that's suffered it
I LOVE these types of videos!!! When you show us some of the magic behind the curtain (ESPECIALLY when it's about games 'cheating' like this AND with games I know well) Seeing 'how the sausage is made' has always been a big interest of mine, in many areas, not just video games. So when you put these videos out and I see their thumbnail, I get all kinds of giddy and excited LOL
THANKL MVG!
The detail about lakitu placing them anywhere even at the finish line makes a lot of sense. One time i got so far ahead, i was half a track in front of everyone, then one moment while looking at the map i suddenly noticed i was in second place near the end of the track and lost. From a halftrack lead to 2nd place in seconds. i was never able to duplicate that due to the rubber banding been so insane.
I appreciate your commitment to using only original resolution game footage for this video, it makes things feel more authentic
This is nowhere close to the original resolution, it is simply less than 4K and 4x3 aspect ratio
0:55 I thought the reason why Mario 64 had rubberbanding is because the Nintendo 64 was not powerful enough to calculate the location of every racer on the track when they’re spread across the entire track. So I thought the rubber banding was implemented to keep all the racers close together so that the CPU of the N 64 has less calculations to account for
The game is still calculating each racers location regardless of where they are on the track... being near the player doesn't change that fact.
Keeping track of the other racers on the track is probably the easiest thing on the CPU, it's just 7 points with XYZ coordinates that follow simple rules
@@grassroots15 but the location of the players also has to be stored in RAM and the n64 only had 4mb
@@WigWoo1 the location of each racer is likely only a few bytes of data per racer
Before I even watch this, I would LOVE for someone to do this sort of thing with the OG SNES game. Those CPUs were DIABOLICAL. I can't tell you how many times I've shot a red shell, the CPU *jumps* over it, and it loops back around and hits ME instead. COUNTLESS TIMES.
I remember one of them threw the race just to pin me against the wall so I couldn't even move.
Also don't they have infinite power ups of one kind they can keep spamming?
@leatherhidegaming One of the most stressful experiences is being spammed with Poison Mushrooms and Fireballs from CPU snipers. Lmao
@@Moony_Os Or when Mario/Luigi are your main rival and they keep spamming the star while inches away from you.
@@Morboeatspeople the nightmare gets too real when you play in Mini Mode (Y+A on character select). EVERY racer tries to go out of their way to run you over like that.
I'm sure I've said this before, but thank you for marking your sponsorship in timestamps.
Anyway. Cheating CPUs is definitely nothing new. Cheating CPUs are the reason I almost literally rage-quit _Mario Kart 8 Deluxe._ However, the way it's done here is pretty hilarious.
So many racing games cheat and its frustrating to, i think it was need for speed underground 2 i had the near perfect race and clipped a last corner...and then so many over took me....cos the game would not allow me to get to far ahead, i think that what always frustrated me in driving games is that the AI and the way games are they do these cheating things rather than make the games in a way that feel more like a proper challenge in a fair way
As a racing game dev it’s just not that easy. I agree some games are far too egregious but it’s really hard to make competitive AI without giving them some conditional advantages
Oh, nfs underground was so bad at rubberbanding… AI flying by at at least 300 km/h, or that damn white van. It SOMEHOW always ended up in your way. When it crossed the screen from the right, and tried to take from the right, it slowed down. From the left, it accelerated.
Or that one drag race when you must jump on a ramp, otherwise the train hits you.
Or a Peugeot 206 which outperformed anything.
@@TheDeveloperGuy yup..burnout 3 is one of my favorite games of that era and had some of the worst rubber banding ever lol. Still love those EA games from that period!
@@SwerveStudios Rubber banding really is vital to racing games IMHO. I remember with the early Forza games I’d either be way out in front after the first corner or the AI cars would disappear off into the distance and I was never able to catch them. Something that keeps the race close ensures you aren’t bored with zero challenge or frustrated at being unable to catch up.
I have a very vivid memory of me as a 8 year old raging during a race on a tight track. No matter how well I was doing, a certain cpu would always overtake me during the race, and looking at the minimap he always seemed to be too fast considering the section of the map he was on. I would even specifically smash into his car at the start of the race to rotate it 180 degrees, putting him at a huge disadvantage. But to my bewliderment, he'd just be even faster than before.
7:44 The little slide is for your advantage here. It doesn't always happen, but when it does, it's like a second chance. If you hit the breaks momentarily, you will recover from the slide and won't spin. It's a gameplay mechanic.
I love discussions about rubber-banding in racing games because in my favorite one, Blur, you can *toggle* rubber-banding and even its strength, at least during splitscreen local play. It's been a while, so you may be able to do so in other places too.
Such a shame that you can't buy blur anymore; I was lucky enough to buy it when it was still on sale - but sucks that I can't recommend it to my friends
The thing I like doing is placing a banana peel at courses with sharp turns, like bowsers castle. You put a well placed banana peel at a tight turn just to see the CPU fly off the course into a dead zone off camera, but also if you catch them on camera you can see them getting stuck.
When I was a kid this was too obvious I can't believe I noticed it it's crazy glad I wasn't insane
So many racing games employ this. Notably was “Crew 2”. I played that game a while back and realized during those hyper car races that go across country, that you could make a mistake and it would take either forever or never to get back up to first place. But then if your killing it and your in first place, it doesn’t matter how long you are there, or how well your racing, you slow down for a second and that CPU is right behind you again.
4:25 use this to skip the sponsor
Doing honest work.
Its chaptered.
I hated that 3 minute sponsor should had been a minute at least
Even better option is to get SponsorBlock
Or watch it to support the channel
I like so much your channel. You put emphasis on specific topics that has less development on other places but are things that are papable for a part of the community. Maybe topics with little discussion but in here you make the place for its development. Thanks for your job.
Probably every Mario Kart cheats. MK8 and MK8D have an extremely annoying Rubber Banding that prevents you from having fun at 150cc, but it doesn't support 200cc probably because the AI wasn't trained for it.😑
Idk most races against AI in 8 deluxe I just sit in 1st place and am usually never contested unless I get really unlucky with items at the end but I’m still usually far enough ahead for it to not be a problem. Not trying to brag (bragging about being good against the AI isn’t impressive lol) just curious.
Yeah usually if I lose it was because I didn't get enough coins.
@@Devin11246 it's not bragging,. MK8 is just a very easy game overall.
I’m MKDS The red shells cheated by hitting you in the front to avoid the bananas
Oh yeah they all cheat, but the SNES and N64 titles cheat way more (possibly GBA and GC too, but I played those a lot less).
I stick to time trials.
Once i figured out some of this as a kid, I became too good for my own good and people quit wanting to play with me. Knowing how to manipulate the weapon draws was a game changer, same with how they treat 1st and 7th/8th place racers.
I have the most experience with the original Super Mario Kart on SNES and the rival thing was there back then as well. It was pre-determined per character you raced as. I forgot the combinations, but let's say if you pick Mario, then Bowser would always be your rival.
Yeah if you play as Koopa Trooper then Luigi is always your rival. For years I thought it was the same for all characters and Nintendo did it like that because they didn’t want people to hate Mario for always trying to beat you. 😂
@@dreamcastfan I used Koopa Troopa all the time in the SNES Mario Kart. I HATE Luigi with a FIERY PASSION! Knowing that a-hole was right behind you and that he was going to spam the star power up over and over and over and over until he hit you. I swear that jerk used it 5 times per lap on 150cc. It was totally cheating there too, just not as egregious as the N64 game.
I'm glad finally somebody dissected this. It was so annoying that when I got a fast boost, the other players were still in back of me. So annoyingly dumb!
Metropolis Street Racer featured one of the most frustrating rubber band AI that i recall.
In the final races, I intentionally slowed down until the last lap to finish in first-place.
ty ty ty for diving deeper into the CPUs. Its interesting to think about how many of us experienced this decades ago without ever thinking about it.
rubber banding is what spoilt most of the racing games for me. Instead of winning through skill, I'd almost always just race slowly so the computer rubber bands them in front of me until maybe the last lap and then go for it. Turning multi lap races into a single lap race, almost always the computer ai would let me catch up to the front and then it was only a matter of a single lap of jossling for position, thus less change of getting knocked back along with frustration.
I don't know if this works with Mario Kart, it's not a game I've played but it seems just as sus.
Same, I always get 1st in every single player racing game by intentionally staying in second or third until the final stretch of the race regardless of difficulty setting
In Mario Kart 8 i let the CPUs go a bit ahead, because they would start to destroy themself and than it was easier to take the first place after one or two rounds.
Of all the racing game of that era I've played, Mario Kart was by far the worst for this crap.
Ikr?! Rubberbanding is just a cheap way to say "restart and play again a**hole!"
In short: Fake Restarts.
@@Azuris190 Not really relevant here, but love the avatar. What is it from?
Fantastic video as usual, although I must say, I miss your synthwave tracks at the end. Was always a little thing I looked forward to :)
When it comes to the oncoming traffic of trucks, my guess is they had to give the AI an exemption because they kept running into the trucks. I don’t think it’s a problem because it’s still easy to beat the AI even when they “cheat”.
I noticed something similar used in the SNES Mario Kart. The opposing racers would have a set order of finish that was determined by the results of the first race. Say the player is Mario and he's racing against Luigi, Yoshi, and Toad. At the end of the first race the player takes 1st place, followed by Yoshi at 2nd, Luigi at 3rd, and Toad coming in at fourth. For the rest of the cup series, those three will always place in the same order--Luigi at 2, Yoshi at 3, Toad at 4, and the CPU will employ tricks to ensure this comes to pass. I also noticed that the order of the racers was seemingly pre-determined by the player's choice of character and never changed. For fun I deliberately messed with the "natural order" once and managed to force the usual "number 3 finisher" into seventh place while someone else took 3rd. Now I suddenly had a different opponent on my butt, but the CPU maintained this new order for the rest of the cup instead of trying to put things back where it was originally programmed to be.
Ironically, breaking the mystery of Mario Kart's CPU programming made racing-type games less enticing...
i sort of knew this as a kid playing this, always p ssed me off
So what you're saying is I'm not only good at MK64, I'm even BETTER than I thought I was! 😎😎
I like how this feels like an exposé
the rival CPU thing makes so much sense.
I spesifically remember cussing at Toad way more than the other CPU drivers on occasion, even became a short meme
6:24 Me when I'm late for work.
Fun fact: every racing game (with few exceptions) does this. It’s usually called rubberbanding (NFS calls it “Catchup”) and it’s used as a way to make up for driver AI shortcomings.
Without it, a lot of games would be incredibly boring, as you maintain a commanding lead for most of the race completely uncontested.
These videos are always great! When I found out how Mortal Kombat 2 cheats hard af I was like “I knew it” 😂
I knew it! Always felt like the CPU was getting away with BS, more specifically on the desert level with the train. Was able to really see it in action when I managed to get through the train tracks just before the train showed up. I drove a little distance, turned around and happen to see several CPU got straight through the train...
I used to play this game all the time as a kid and definitely notices the CPU cheating.
At 7:38. when slipping on the bananas you can tap B when losing traction and you won't spin out.
No wonder the MK64 CPUs catch up to the player quickly and sufficiently. What were the developers thinking when programming the game's difficulty?
GTA Online is a modern game that cheats. You can watch enemies rubber band on missions. It's not just races. But in races it's called "catch up."
Yes, this is such a thing in Crash Team Racing. On higher difficulties you kind of need to constantly drift boost to stay ahead and hit short cuts whereever possible.
What a weird coincidence that another channel I follow did a video on the same subject, recently
I find the rubber banding can have a runaway effect. If the CPU gets too far ahead, they'll keep that absurd speed and be impossible to catch up to. Happens to me almost every time I play Bowser's Castle.
They programmed this game like it costs quarters to play
Welcome to 1995: Nintendo and Silicon Valley Hardware and 64 bits.
I remember writing s couple of paragraph post 10+ years ago about the cheating CPU in Mario Kart! I noticed the lackadaisical manner the CPU responded to distant red shells as a younger girl playing the game as a child. I never learned before the mechanics behind it and really appreciated this dive down memory lane with it!
I don't doubt that this is the case for Mario Kart 8 on the Switch as well.
In 150cc, they don’t cheat, but they definitely cheat in 200cc.
They cheat just differently
150cc they deffo cheat and if your leading come 2nd lap blue shell 5 seconds after you hit the checker. It's a joke. You can predict it exactly now. Your better being in 2nd place until over half of 2nd lap
SO you mean to tell me. All those times as a kid when i called BULL SHIT on the CPU players. I was actually right.
Yup.
😂
6:31 caught in true 240p
Scuffed
1:17 as narrator discusses assigned rivals. I imagine 1st Fast and Furious's, Dominic Toretto saying "Still a buster" as Bowser and Mario close the gap against Yoshi on screen. Also FnF final scene at 1:40 re-enactment 😂
Yes, but why is the Peach cpu in particular so evil in this game?
What do you mean?
Do you mean peach hitting you whenever you recover?
Peach IS evil, she cheats on Mario with that ugly stinky dragon wannabe called Bowser.
its because she is a woman, what did you expect?
@@AccelSternritter 😂
@@AccelSternritter No she doesn't, you edgelord.
I felt this happen on Mario Kart Wii. I played with my brother often, and at some point I noticed that CPUs have a pre-determined time to finish the race which is seen once all players finish the race, unless they physically cross the finish line before showing the results in which case they get their own time. So at one race my brother gets first, and we were way ahead of every CPU, except for one, a Toad that was incredibly fast using a car that did not have good speed, yet Toad was faster than my top speed car. Once I saw the results, there was a huge time lead of 30+ seconds due to rubber-banding from the Toad CPU that crossed the finish line vs the other CPUs that didn't. It was then I realized this rubber-banding was just ridiculous at times.
Diddy Kong Racing forever.
This was incredibly detailed and very entertaining. Worth the subscription!
Ugh, I hated rubberbanding in NFS games, and I hate it here.
The AI not running off the edge of the cliffs, or passing through walls, to me definitely seems like a clear optimization, possibly falling back on some predetermined spline, which doesn't exactly match the actual track. They seem to use the same pathing it pretty consistently. Very interesting stuff though, I knew about the rubber banding, but hadn't noticed all of these different aspects of it. At the end of the day, I believe the game was optimized for "fun", and I think the rival system is great. I did greatly enjoy MK64 back in the day and it is still one of my favourites in the series.
Rubber banding was used back in the days because uses less data then giving AI code to each racer. Therefore the game must “mimic” the game being competitive and smart while saving tons of megabytes by giving each CPU a rubber band effect.
You could also notice that some karts copy the players behaviour in order to save vRAM+Compute.
None of that makes any sense.
Dang! I remember my brother and I used to play this a lot in our child times and like 10 years later we decided to revive our childhood games and when we played the game again we thought we sucked until my brother said something like "We don't suck, I think the game knows when you're going to win and it does crazy stuff to not let you get first place" and I see he was right all the time
Wow this feels similar to the video from abyssoft
Is that it? I felt like I had watched this a long while ago.
@@meeklynobody3230 watch and compare. They feel very similar to each other even with the examples they show
GREAT VIDEO!!!
I'd love to see a similar analysis for off-camera item distribution, especially for newer versions of Mario Kart. One common scenario for me in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, for example, is that one of the CPU-controlled racers uses a Lightning Bolt while I'm in 1st place. Given the placement at which you'd even receive a Lightning Bolt, that should mean that the CPU-controlled racers behind me also lose their items, but I'm too often hit by Red Shells (and Blue Shells) when we haven't recently passed item blocks. I think the game itself gives items to the CPU-controlled racers whenever it'll best screw you over.
In Deluxe, I can also have two items, a Red or Green Shell and a Super Horn, the order of which doesn't matter, and some ass behind me will fire a Red Shell and a Blue Shell in whatever order I CAN'T deal with based on the order of my own items.
For example, if I have a Green Shell first and a Super Horn second, then I'll get hit by a Blue Shell first to ensure it hits. But if I have a Super Horn first and a Green Shell second, then I'll get targeted with a Red Shell first so I waste my Super Horn, followed by a Blue Shell I can't avoid.
This must be studied in more depth! XD
5:51 if you slide after a banana slip, press B to break briefly and you'll recover. It's not cheating, it's an advantage.
I’m sure in the manual it’s called “playing to your own tune”