A.I.

No, I'm not talking about the film either. (It's been years since I watched it and paranoid childhood fantasies of my brother not being human aside, if I want to watch a film I'll just watch Futurama again)

I'm once again talking about the A.I. present in video games (well that and wondering why the hell I don't make this a gaming blog - oh right, because then I'd want to rant about Tron again or something), something which just occured to me a few seconds ago. If you have the ability and/or resources to make a video game, and do so for a living, then you should come up with some decent A.I. for the enemies. I'll admit that it might be hard in certain situations, but if you're playing some heavily interfaced RPG like Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, or even a more traditional single-player RPG, with macros and calculations being performed all the freaking time, surely it's not too much harder for them to include basic logic into enemy habits?

For example, say you're fighting a goblin. This particular little goblin, who I'm going to refer to as "Joseph", because I don't know anyone called Joseph and I'm being random, is a caster goblin. Casters, as anyone with an IQ of over 7.5 can work out, is an enemy that "casts" magic (as opposed to "shoving" magic or "funneling" magic or "toasting" magic or something retarded like that) in favour of melee combat. Now, most RPGs are programmed so that the goblin will begin spamming you with fiery spells and crap when they first spot you, and switch to hitting you with their rhythm stick/mace/hammer/fish when you get close, if they cannot escape. This is fine, it's more like common sense than logic - you wouldn't blast someone with a fireball at point blank range. Enemies in video games nowadays (hell, in the past too) are either completely defenseless or overdefensive. For example, Joseph begins a battle by throwing fireballs at you from a long way away, which are unavoidable for most. Having a distain for the character classes that involve running up to people and smacking them repeatedly until they die, and being terrible at managing those that involve remembering fifteen hundred different spells, three of which you will ever use (and I mean that quite literally), I prefer the Rogue class, simply because it's fun to hide from people. Rogues use daggers, sometimes swords and even sometimes maces if you're just plain stupid (not being opinionistic, honest). In this case, I went with my usual tactic, once spotted, of running straight up to dear old Joseph (who's probably died of old age by the time I get round to actually getting to the point), and rearranging his internal organs with the aid of two trusty daggers.

It's natural for him to want to try and protect himself. My daggers are not enchanted, mearly coated in a dangerous poison that will kill Joseph more painfully. So WHY IN THE NAME OF EVERY SINGLE OFFENSIVE RELIGIOUS COMMENT EVER MADE does Joseph decide to use Flame Ward and other spells that render him immune to fire? Surely it'd be easier for programmers to make them increase their blocking ability, or even try to run away before they've got so little health that the cough of a butterfly on the other side of the game world will kill them?

Wow, this was an anti-climax.

Email me telling me how my mother is an anti-climax: rai-thunder@hotmail.co.uk