Been gaming Combatribes recently and as soon as the boss on lvl 2 there's a situation where you can't beat him without taking loads of damage. When he's still holding the torch you can hit n' run by being lower on the platform and going up fast to attack then down again but after taking a couple of hits and when he drops it it's more or less impossible. It can't be pulled off with reliable results anymore he counter-punches immediately. I've tried being on the same platform and kicking from distance but he still counters - and he closes down the distance by coming forward too so it will end in a slugfest. I have to mix it up with this motherfuckers and recieve blows before he's eventually killed off i have managed not to die but like 90% of my lifebar was used up.

But when i watch others play it's so easy you can just keep feeding him blows standing in front of him he barely even reacts so it dawned on me it's not just harder you have to damage and die. And i'm not even playing on the timelimit setting that goes fast with that you get Game Over by the timelimit itself. They've rigged this shit for people to scrape by not ever to master it.

This is the most shocking thing I've read all day.

I'm telling you man shit is crazy

I guess the highest difficulty is ment to be borderline unfair or even plain unfair, arcade operators should not have abused of this setting, I imagine for programmers balancing the difficulty seems like no easy task and we ended up with many unfair games in the higher difficulty so I'm not surprised some of them cannot be 1 coined, operators should've used the normal/default setting as I imagine programmers focused mainly on that setting and it makes the games more enjoyable for the average person, as I kid I always avoided games that seemed unfairly tough, they were not enjoyable at all.

It's almost like....they want you to put more quarters in the machine and keep playing!

It does seem to be that way sometimes that the hardest setting is there to literally rigg the game as opposed to merely being challenging, yeah. The thing is you don't really know it either so you might be chasing a fantasy that wasn't ever even there to begin with. It might be that Technos are scrupulous in that way because this is the 2nd time i've experienced it there but never at say Capcom. I beat King of Dragons on 1 credit and their other beat 'em ups seem accessible aswell.

 

Yeah but i shouldn't be losing if i'm good either that's the balancing act of it.

 

Likely it's due to the approach taken by the programming team, Capcom probably made the effort to make sure the game is fair even at the highest difficulty, other teams might take the much simpler approach of simply having the player take more damage, have the enemies throw more projectiles, grant bosses more invincibility frames, etc, not really putting much thought about it.

I am skeptical that the Capcom AD&D beat-em-ups are 1CC winnable at higher difficulty levels.

Even on normal difficulty, some of the bosses are over-the-top and appear to have spells that cannot be dodged.
 

This is like a discussion from a few days ago where someone proved that the Street Fighter II/Mortal Kombat CPU didn't play according to the game's actual rules. Doesn't surprise me. What's frustrating is when the console port, no longer having the incentive to suck quarters, replicates the unfair difficulty of the arcade.

A lot of (almost all) arcade shmups at least LOOK impossible on higher settings, but even the screen-filling bullet hells have basically all been mastered to the point that people know what pixel to sit on at any given point. That said it's clear that the case is still the same - the intent was to make it impossible to win at certain points.

Difference being with bullet hells they don't tend to literally fill the screen (or do automatic undodgeable damage), just toss a fuck-ton at you.

I see. Yeah i'm not familiar with those specific ones but King of Dragons/Knights of the Round/Final Fight all seem doable to me. I also beat Willow on the hardest.

 

Willow, I would expect to be beatable, since it is a platform action-game where quarter-eater situations are a little harder to contrive while still giving the illusion that it MIGHT be winnable.

Standard beat-em-ups, the hit-dodge rules tend to be pretty consistent, I agree.


But the AD&D games have the added layer of items and magic spells.

There is at least one dark elf boss that can spam lighting bolt spells that I have never managed to dodge.
And there is an alternate red dragon boss that can fry your entire party.

Maybe the strategy with those guys is that a full 4-player party has some ability to interrupt attacks, or possibly it rotates who gets targeted with the spells.

But solo...I'd have to see it to believe it.

 

I'm not sure how many older platformers if any had this, but progressive and reactive difficulty are a thing. The game COULD see that you've died on the same bat 5 times and then dumb down that specific AI or the whole games AI until you've done well for X amount of time.

Im positive when they playtest, they play test on normal and just scale the game to be harder. After beating DooM on Nightmare I asked John Romero if they tried to beat the game on Nightmare before releasing it and he said "God no".

Have you tried with tool assistance? I doubt theres a game that cant to TAS'd.

No i don't know how to do that. But it would be very interesting to see those results!

The only thing is that TAS runs tend to focus on speed above all, and will sometimes die or continue on purpose to save time (i.e. to respawn at a more favorable location). But that's probably not an issue with these sorts of games.

I agree, BTW, that some games out there are probably impossible to 1CC on their hardest difficulty, by design. There are certainly games that are impossible to 1LC on hardest, because of forced damage with no opportunity to heal.

Doesn’t it depend on what the player wants to do? The scene is focused on speedruns, but you can use the tool only to progress farther just as easily. 

I think I've read about a shmup that was deliberately made so hard, that no one would manage to go further than a certain level. Why? Because the development studio didn't have time to finish the game and didn't want players to notice.

But I'd have to look up which game it was. But yeah, after that Street Fighter II reveal and whatnot it does not surprise that some games are made unbeatable by design.

I always remember the 4 or 5th person you face in the tower in UMK3 was always exponentially easier after continuing. They had to fine tune it so they beat you up just enough.

Oh, absolutely -- it's just that most people in that community wouldn't be interested in putting together a run that won't get published (because it's not as fast as possible).

But there are a few people who have done that kind of thing, like someone who put together a run of a Genesis game that seemed unbeatable on the hardest difficulty (The Punisher) to prove that it was possible. There's a 3DO game I'd really like to see TASed for similar reasons, but who knows if that will ever happen...

Guru Larry/Larry Bundy did a video on some of those:





Those are all 100% intentional.

(The most famous example of an unintentionally unbeatable game is probably Impossible Mission II for Atari 7800.)

Donpachi comes to mind...

Oh, well, sure. If one wants somebody else to do it they will need their own motivation, not yours.  But if cartman is good enough to make the attempts he describes and make definitive statements based thereupon, I think he could use an assist tool to prove or disprove his “established” hypothesis. 

OP: it’s emulation with abilities like rewind, slow motion, and save states. Check out Mame-RR if you’re interested.