->''...It's a distant cousin of the "No [[TWordEuphemism F------]] Way Game," the game when you've won too many games in a row during a season, and the Play Station activates that "There's no f------ way you're winning this game" chip.''\\
-- '''Bill Simmons''', on one way this trope manifests itself

A hypothetical: You're playing ''JohnMaddenFootball''. Your team is up by 13, there's three and a half minutes left until the end of the game, and you have the ball. Your victory is assured, right?

Wrong, because suddenly the AI is twice as fast as you, knows what play you're going to do, and shuts down your offense, forcing you to punt. On their drive, the AI marches downfield with no difficulty by completing several consecutive bombs, scoring an easy touchdown. Rinse and repeat, and before you know it you've lost what you thought was a safe lead. The video game has just experienced a MiracleRally.

Why does this happen? The further you stretch a rubber band, the harder it pulls. It's the same idea here. Basically, the better you are doing at a game, the harder the game gets in order to continue to present a challenge. This isn't just the idea of making the game harder and harder as you progress farther and farther, this* means that the level you're on ''right now'' will, for seemingly no reason, ramp up its difficulty if it thinks you're doing too well. This may, in some cases, be coupled with the computer [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard actually cheating]], rather than just getting better.

Of course to be fair this sometimes happens ''in reverse'', the AI easing up when winning to give you a chance to come back, stealing any satisfaction the player might gain from “victory.” The classic example is a [[MarioKart racing game]] in which opponents never gain a substantial lead on slow players but cling to the tails of even superhumanly skilled players, creating the impression of the AI's car being attached to yours by a literal rubber band!

It would be nice to see at least some attempt at including plot-relevant EnemyChatter to justify this, such as opponent teams speaking overconfidently when the difficulty eases up, or receiving a much-needed pep talk from their NPC coach when they're doing poorly.

Also seen in a few {{RPG}}s, where enemies are adjusted according to your character's levels, which can make any non-levelable stuff (like items) useless pretty quick. This is sometimes referred to as “punishing you for your experience.” See EmptyLevels.

Casually, {{Wikipedia}} has [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubberband_AI a comprehensive article]] about Rubberband AI.

The reverse version of this trope is an UnstableEquilibrium. The trope also mixes with DoWellButNotPerfect, where players in games with rubber band AI seem to be punished for simply being too good and aren't supposed to win that way.
----
!!Examples:

*In ''FinalFantasyVII,'' Bizarro & Safer Sephiroth's stats are based off of Cloud's level. So, with a level 99 Cloud, Sephiroth becomes the most powerful final boss, statistically, in the entire series. Still won't stop him from being raped by a couple Knights of the Round, but whatever.
* ''FinalFantasyVIII'' was a recent example. However, since the ability to draw magic and junction it to your stats was technically separate from the {{Character Level}}s gained from actual battling, it was very easy to [[GameBreaker unbalance]] the game with some ingenuity.
** The combat level of enemies was determined by taking the average of your character's levels. Not your party's levels, your character's levels. This means you can just pick three characters and exclusively use them. If they hit level 100 while the other three stay at level 10 or so, you will face a steady stream of level 55 enemies for the rest of the game. Predictably, the game is not even remotely difficult in this case.
*** Of course, the first-time players and people who didn't know how to exploit the system were horrendously screwed. Normal enemies became insanely powerful, and BonusBoss Omega Weapon was nigh-unstoppable at level 100 (and the game would cheat and punch Omega up ten or so levels if the character average was 90 or so).
* Perhaps the most noticeable example is the ''JohnMaddenFootball'' games, which are often accused of featuring an "AI catch-up mode", in which opposing teams inexplicably become drastically more potent in the final minutes of a close game, often to the point where preventing them from completing long bombs and scoring touchdowns seems like an impossible task. Some Madden players, however, dispute the existence of RubberBandAI in the game, arguing that this is more likely the perception of players who are unable to adjust to the AI's late-game all-out offensive strategy. It may also be possible that the difficulty level may have something to do with it.
** In most cases, the AI level of rubberbanding is directly related to the difficulty level, particularly in EA Sports games. On the easiest difficulty level, the AI doesn't rubberband at all: the same tactics, the same plays, over and over. As difficulty level goes up, so does the degree of rubberbanding: on the highest difficulty level, as soon as the player reaches anything approaching a lead, the AI responds aggressively to shut down any hope of winning...much like what sports teams do in real life. The rubberbanding does ''not'' work in the opposite direction, however. The AI just goes back to the normal difficulty.
*** NBA 2k and NBA Live actually have this as a feature, Clutch Factor and CPU Assistance respectively. It does work both ways, though. Doesn't make it any less irritating to see Kobe Bryant missing clutch layup after clutch layup.
* ''TheElderScrolls IV: Oblivion'' is an example of a game where enemies level up along with the player everywhere throughout the world, even in already visited areas. Sentient characters also gain fancier equipment when they level up in this fashion, leading to the absurd situation of having bandits that wear armour and carry weapons that are worth thousands of gold coins demanding you give them the by-this-point-trivial sum of 100 gold. Available loot also levels up.
** This could also be exploited using powerful techniques that low-level characters obtain to get easy victories in ludicrous situations, like becoming the champion of the MonsterArena for the entire game world... at level 1!
*** In fact, doing the earlier parts of the main quest at higher levels is insanely hard, because the enemy will be composed nearly entirely of storm atronachs and the like, while you're up against stumped scamps if you're under level 5
** There are several user-created mods that create fixed monsters and [=NPCs=] or fixed items or both, largely eliminating the leveling aspect. The most popular is ''Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul'', which does both along with various other changes.
* The ''MarioKart'' series does this to an exceptionally annoying and inconsistent degree. Wipe out at the start of a race and it's a straightforward task to still win. Wipe out near the end of the last lap (having raced a ''perfect'' game so far), and there will always be 3 guys right behind you to snatch all the points.
** And if you're good at hitting shortcuts, expect the computer to be able to suddenly hit a top speed well beyond what any human could do. The most blatant instance is Rainbow Road in ''Mario Kart 64'', which has a shortcut that can literally skip 40% of the course (which is, to this date, the longest course in the game's history). Even if you hit said shortcut on all three laps, the computer is still able to catch you on the last lap.
*** By turning on the map-view in Mario Kart 64 it's possible to watch opponents suddenly accelerate to unrealistic speed when they are far behind.
** ''Mario Kart Wii'', unfortunately, takes the rubber-banding to a new low (high?) after the fairly cheating-free DS game. The computer racers change their speed depending on your position in the race, and they also get much better items than you if you're ahead. This is all par for the series, though...until you realize that there are more drivers in Wii--12 instead of 8. The result is that driving too far ahead of the pack results in your getting bombarded with three or four items in a row, which requires impeccable coordination that only a computer could muster and adds at least five seconds to your lap time. This cheating is so blatant that it seems like Nintendo wants to ''discourage'' players from being good at the game, and leaves the results of races to nearly random chance. At least there's always online play...but then you encounter the ''really good'' players, the ones who have beaten the computer at their own game and then some.
** The rubberbanding effect gets pretty bad in many places on the DS and Wii versions. In those two games, there various stats for all karts and bikes. Now imagine this; you're racing in a kart that has near maxed out top speed and someone behind you is driving a bike that has very low top speed. They are catching up to you and sometimes may pass you. How? They are not using items nor are they drafting, they just slingshot themselves past you. This makes having different top speeds entirely pointless if you're in the lead, though they're useful if you're not and trying to catch up.
** One of Mario Kart Wii's recent tournaments had players race Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong while they had an infinite supply of banana peels. If you tried to get ahead of them, they would '''ROCKET''' up to you to make sure you couldn't stay ahead. While the AI never does this in a regular race, the two in this tourney outright broke that rubber band.
** To add to this, the times the AI gets in GP mode is directly based on the player's time by some form of rubber band system, so for example, if the player uses a massive glitch shortcut three times to get a time of say... 30 seconds, the AI's times, or at least the top half of them, apparently beat the non-shortcut world record for that course in time trial. This can most often be seen on Grumble Volcano. On the other hand, if the player does do awful, the AI times of those that came after him are often ridiculous, whole minutes behind the player's, even if the AI was right behind them the whole way.
* ''Sin Episodes'' was released with a much-touted dynamic difficulty system -- kill the enemies too quickly and they'd send more next time, get too many headshots and the next group will wear helmets, etc. Unfortunately, encounters that were ''supposed'' to be easier or harder were counted in this, resulting in situations that a hard encounter would be made virtually impossible due to how quickly you dispatched an easy one.
* In ''Guilty Gear Isuka'', the higher the level you get at Arcade, the faster and more powerful the opponents become. Sometimes they will even run towards you while you perform a special move, only to suddenly show up right behind you, making you completely miss them.
* ''[[DefJamSeries Def Jam: Fight For NY]]'' was notorious for this. Get the computer into a corner, and suddenly the AI shoots up two or three difficulty levels, reversing and countering every single move you make.
** Actually all of AKI's wrestling-games had this. In the N64-games opponents started countering anything reliably once close to losing. While it might seem that was meant to reflect the comeback-effect from wrestling, it doesn't work the same way for the player.
* The first ''MaxPayne'' proudly touted this as one of its features, with arguably less-than-optimal results. Even on the "easy" difficulty setting it ramped up the durability, accuracy and reflexes of the enemies until you died at least once per level.
-->''"Why did they even bother giving you difficulty options? As far as I could tell your options were "insane / insane / impossible / impossible with a time limit."'' -- curst, Quarter to Three forums
** Of course, name any first or third person shooter where you ''didn't'' die once per level. All in the name of fun, of course.
* The original ''NBA Jam'' would frequently job you out of victories with miraculous, last-second, full-court shots. It got to the point where a two-point lead with just seconds to play was an almost certain loss if the computer got the last shot. The player had a similar ability, but not nearly to the same extent as the computer.
** This feature is called "computer assistance" and is also on in human versus human matches. A full court shot for the tie or for the win has over a 70% chance of going in, ALWAYS. Unless you use the "no cpu assistance" code.
*** The NFL Blitz series is infamous for rubberband AI too. Again, it's always active against the cpu, but can be turned off with a code against a human. Manifests usually through fumbles and cheap interceptions, or people just magically blowing past blockers and sacking you.
* The ''NeedForSpeed'' series had an annoying feature known as "Catch-up": your opponents would drive faster the more ahead you were of them, and slower the more behind you were. Forget the traditional strategy of games like ''GranTurismo'', where you can focus on pulling a comfortable advantage over your opponents allowing you to make a couple of mistakes without screwing up your race: in ''Need For Speed Underground'', you had to be extremely careful during the entire race, because your only chance to build up an advantage was to have the CPU crash against the incoming traffic.
** The games allow you to view the statistics of your car as well as other AI cars. As an exercise, you could compare AI lap times when you're running perfect flat-out laps and to situations where you just park your car over the start/finish line. In the latter situation, the AI may be more than 40 seconds a lap ''slower'' than if you've done a perfect lap (where they would always match or beat your lap times even in inferior cars).
** This Game series seems to be 'made' of this trope. In Need For Speed Undercover, it is possible to be driving a maxed out Maclaren F1 with the pedal buried firmly in the floorboards and still have a K9 police SUV casually out acellerate you and slide in front of you to perform a rolling block. TheComputerIsACheatingBastard as well.
** Nothing will drive the point home more than seeing your A.I. opponents crash full-speed into a wall, back up, and re-accelerate to full throttle in the span of 0.5 seconds.
** Or in Most Wanted when you finally ram that last cop into a wall or opposing traffic and stick to holding your Rear view to see nothing then the second you go back to looking forward, there's a cop right practically behind you.
* In ShootEmUps, which don't feature a player going up against apparently identical computer opponents, the feature where the machine becomes more efficient if the player does better is known as "rank" and is often an expected part of the game.
** The Shoot Em Up ''Warning Forever'' is '''based''' off this trope, being nothing but a BossRush with the boss changing depending on how you beat it the last time.
* In Capcom brawler ''GodHand'', enemies can "level up" depending on how well the player continues attacking and dodging counterattacks successfully, increasing in speed and strength. On the flip side, they de-level if the player gets smacked around too much or uses the "grovel" [[LimitBreak God Reel technique]].
** There is an indicator on the side of the screen which shows you what "level" you're on. The higher the level is when you complete a stage, the higher the reward you get.
** ''BattleGaregga'' is a particularly guilty offender. You have to keep your shot power and number of {{Attack Drone}}s low for the first five stages, as well as limit your shooting and avoid collecting excess powerups. Failure to do so would make enemies more durable and shoot more bullets, items fall off the screen faster, and overall make the game nearly impossible to survive.
*** Raizing games are designed to punish the player for playing them wrong. In this case, you are supposed to play the game for score, to give you extra lives so you could die more often to lower the rank. Fortunately, most of them aren't that bad... Battle Bakraid actually lets you beat it by playing the game traditionally for survival.
* The four words most often screamed by ''RC Pro-Am'' players: "[[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard The yellow car cheats!]]" If you get too far ahead in some races, or use your weapons to destroy the other cars, one of them (almost always the yellow one) will drive the rest of the course at the maximum speed, making it impossible for you to win.
** Later on, each of the opponent cars do this a little bit after the start of the race. This fact is the reason that you want to upgrade your car as much as possible, because if it isn't at full performance by the time this happens, you're screwed.
*** There are two seperate effects at work here. There the "super turbo yellow car", which nearly always kicks in only if you use your weapons enough times. This super turbo is faster than your maximum possible top speed. Then there are the late game tracks where any car that gets ahead of you will instantly super turbo. Either way, a missile or bomb will stop the madness, and bring the car back down to earth, for now.
** Also, whenever you drove over the turbo arrow for a temporary speed boost, all of the computer cars immediately got the exact same speed boost, making them pretty much pointless. Naturally, you did not get a speed boost when a computer car drove over an arrow.
* In the ''Initial D Arcade Stage'' game series, two-player battles have a feature called "Boost," and like ''Need For Speed Carbon'''s Catch-up feature, it gives the trailing player a speed advantage. There is, however, an option to turn this off so that players can have a real battle.
** The CPU also has its own boost when it falls behind by a certain margin, though it immediately slows back down to normal speed when it's back within the threshold. I've seen my lead repeatedly sine-wave between 75m and 85m or so when racing Bunta, despite going at a nearly constant speed himself on a straightaway. This is probably meant mostly as a cap to the player's Advantage Bonus, since the bonus is multiplied by the distance the CPU has left to go when the player crosses the finish line. The CPU boost also works in reverse; the CPU will go pathetically slow when it has a considerable lead. As a result, I have also once jumped on a cabinet in mid-game and caught up from 400+ meters behind to win against an easier CPU opponent.
** ''Initial D Arcade Stage 4'' caps the opponent's disadvantage to about 190 meters.
* The first ''WanganMidnight'' arcade game (and its revision Wangan Midnight R, which was eventually ported to PS2) has rubber band AI that's especially present during the final battle against Akio. If you get ahead of him you better be good at blocking because the Devil Z will be on your ass the whole time.
* ''Burnout''. At least in Burnout 3 you can ram the caught-up cars, steal their boost, and regain your lead....
** ''Burnout 3'' had an abusable and abusive AI at the same time. The AI cars would move at considerably faster speeds than their stats would allow, having even the lowest series of cars keep up with the best cars in the game. However, beyond a certain distance, the AI opponents were logged as an order of numbers, not actually tracked. So if you could glitch out the car in second place (usually getting them hung on a wall) then outpace them, you could pull out a 1 minute+ lead on the entire field, as no cars would pass the second place car. This had the unfortunate effect that if the second place car DID get free, it would close that 1 minute+ gap in a matter of seconds, by having the cars move at you at several times the speed of sound. There's nothing more embarassing than having your sports car passed by a 4 cylinder compact car while you're doing top speed and boosting.
** ''Burnout Dominator'' has the charming tendency for opposing cars to make up lost distance ''while respawning''. So you can crash, take out two or three trailing cars in the process - meaning as many as half the cars other cars in the race crashed after you did - and then reappear in ''last place''.
** Averted nicely, though, in ''Burnout Paradise''. It's quite easy to gain a comfortable quarter-mile lead and coast your way to the finish line; just be sure not to crash. It was probably impossible to implement anything like this anyway, given the open-world nature of the game; since half the time you aren't taking the route the game thinks you should, it would be nearly impossible for the game to figure out how far the rubber band is actually stretched, so to speak.
* Perhaps the earliest advertised use of this is in the Bitmap Brothers action game ''Gods'', which would at predetermined points give the player a pity health item if he was doing poorly, or spawn additional enemies if he was unhurt.
* The arcade game ''Pigskin: 621 A.D.'' (released as ''Pigskin Footbrawl'' on the Sega Genesis) is a game vaguely reminiscent of rugby and American football, though set in the Middle Ages. You could punch other players out, or get into a brawl (read: two characters collide and [[BigBallOfViolence turn into a dust cloud]]) on the field. If one side is losing badly, the crowd starts chanting, "Send in the troll!" At which point a big green troll enters the field for the losing side. He's immune to the game's weapons and much more difficult to knock down. If the fortunes reverse and the losing team starts winning, a troll can come in for the ''opposite'' side as well, to even things up.
* In ''Sonic Riders'' for the 'Cube, AI controlled racers vanish from their positions well behind you on the track in order to suddenly zoom by without apparently passing through the intervening space.
** In ''[[SonicAdventureSeries Sonic Adventure]]'', during Windy Valley, Sonic is way behind you, then suddenly is right behind you.
* This can actually happen in the real world, in certain economic systems. There, it's called the "ratchet effect", and the AI is your competitors or some third-party agency. A good example: In the former USSR, the planning agency would reward the enterprises that made more than their quota. However, they'd base the next quota upon how well the enterprise did, so the harder you worked, the worse it got. The right strategy, of course, was to produce ever so slightly more than the quota.
** For publicly traded companies, stock analysts' quarterly earnings forecasts work much the same way. A company that misses the forecast by even a trivial sum loses market value, but beating the forecast by a wide margin raises next quarter's forecast.
** In Macro-Economics, there is a concept called the Catch-Up Effect where poorer nations will have Real GDP growth rates at something like 9.5% or even 10%, that leads to the country overall moving towards a first world economy status at a faster rate, than those countries closer to that status than itself. However that also means that when it screws up and you get high inflation rates or even hyperinflation, which pretty much means the currency will lose something like 10% of its value in an hour, Zimbabwe being the best example at the moment with the treasury releasing a $100 Billion Zimbabwean Dollar note which will expire on December 31 2008 (notes traditionally don't expire they just don't get replaced), which ironically will lead to further devaluing of the Zimbabwean Dollar.
** And you white collar workers thought you were safe? There is a theory – “The Peter Principle” – that if you show competence in a position, you will be promoted to a new one. If you keep getting good at these new positions you'll get assigned to higher ones. The resultant effect is that a person will keep getting promoted '''until''' they reach a position they are incompetent in.
* Many chess programs have an option to match the player's strength. This is probably done with rubberband AI: If the program estimates being ahead, it eases on its calculations, and if it estimates being behind, it calculates more aggressively. When properly implemented, it can work pretty well.
* Magazine ads for the Genesis ''Jurassic Park'' game claimed that as you played better, the dinosaurs would get smarter. It didn't seem to make much difference in the game, unless you count the raptors occasionally ducking your shots as getting smarter.
* ''Cruisin' USA'' for the Nintendo 64. Get too far ahead, and what we would call the "Annoying Blue Car" would catch up, even if you race perfectly.
** In their original arcade versions, all of the "Cruisin'" games (USA, World, Exotica) not only did the computer cars follow the "speed up when behind, slow down when ahead" principle, but the games were also programmed to ramp up the difficulty with each race you won, not resetting until you lost one. By the time you won three or four races in a row, the computer cars were so good that you could literally drive a perfect race and still only finish third or fourth.
* The multiplayer game ''{{MULE}}'' will inflict whichever player currently has the highest score with with bad "random" events, while whoever is bringing up the rear will only have good things happen to them.
* The original ''{{Unreal}} Tournament'' had this with the final boss, a 1v1 to 15 kills. The boss would start at an AI level matching the difficulty you were playing on, and every time you killed him, he'd pop up a skill level. Thus, getting a killing spree was a very bad idea, as the boss would be up at Godlike skill in no time, and even when he got back down to your level after getting a killing spree on you, he'd be loaded with every weapon and full armor, while you'd have nothing because you just respawned. However, the converse is true too: every time you die, he goes back down one, to a minimum of where he started.
* Some WWE wrestling games have this. Play without a loss for too long and the player will eventually be presented with a match where victory is impossible. The Rubber Band AI has snapped so far that enemy players will be completely immune to attacks and able to win via submission or escaping the cage without any problems. In some games the computer will cheat, by making the player so weak that a single hit will make the player unable to get up for long enough that the computer escapes.
* In one of the ''Mortal Kombat'' games, persistent victory results in harder and harder difficulty. The difficulty is TOLD to the player in a % stat on the lower right of the screen. The stat will lower itself back to "beatable" when the player loses. I once kept interrupting my friend by pressing start on player 2. This kept the Rubber Band AI from ever going away and giving player 1 a completely unwinnable match!
* The original ''WorldOfDarkness'' games had something like this at one point. Success of an action was determined by rolling a number of dice corresponding to one's skill. Rolls higher than a target number were successes, lower were failures, and 1's cancelled out successes. Having more 1's than successes constituted a botch, in which the action not only failed, but led to disastrous consequences. A character with more dice, constituting more experience and power, would therefore be more likely to ''spectacularly'' fail than an inexperienced one. This was thankfully revised in later editions, to where a botch also required that no successes at all had been rolled.
** Actually, the remark on WoD games is incorrect. Each additional die rolled makes the chance of a botch less likely unless the difficulty is extremely high, and even then. As long as a single success is present in the roll, a roll with a negative result does not count as a botch.
* Many of the SoulSeries games did this... Arcade mode of Soul Calibur II would RAPE you if you got 2-0 victories 3 or more times in a row. I remember being hit by [[{{Stripperific}} Ivy's]] various [[UselessUsefulSpell uber moves]] 4 times in a direct row, when most players have to practice for 3 hours to work out one of those moves. Cervantes's various teleport-jump moves would work constantly, and he'd use them constantly, when they only worked about 1/3 of the time for me, with minimum effectiveness. Case of TheComputerIsACheatingBastard, too.
** In 3, this is really noticeable in the battle theater (a mode where 2 AI opponents fight eachother), if you watch it a lot (it is [[UltimateShowdownOfUltimateDestiny quite addicting with custom characters]]), you will get used to seeing 1 narrow match, followed by the loser [[MKWalker MK walking]] the previous winner and a narrow 3rd match
** Speaking of Ivy's Ubers, Summon Suffering seemed specifically designed to enable this and TheComputerIsACheatingBastard. In practice, this move was so ridiculously difficult to pull off that even doing so in practice mode was difficult. Doing one in the heat of battle was impractical at best, while computer controlled Ivy would pull it off while obviously not requiring the time or movement that the move needed.
* In ''{{F-Zero}} GP Legend'', opponents won't take [[GameBreaker game-breaking]] shortcuts unless they're following at the right distance to be marked by a "CHECK" marker, at which point they will.
** In the Original ''{{F-Zero}}'' game it's physically impossible to beat the Death Wind course using the Golden Fox on the Master Difficulty. All the other vehicles have a max speed of 478 k/h and remain at that speed the whole race while the Golden Fox's top speed is 438.
** Well, ''{{F-Zero}}'' is infamous for that. You can, with just moderate skill, give the enemy a full lap of advantage, and still win, at least in easy mode (and mind you, the race is only 5 laps!). But getting more than a few seconds ahead of the enemy is completely impossible. Combine this with the game's habit of literally throwing at you explosive cars in the final turns, and you have a recipe for disaster.
* RealLife example: Most tournament bowling leagues impose handicaps that are inversely proportional to a player's average, so if you play poorly, you still stand a good chance against a much better opponent, so long as you play better than your average. Likewise, if you are a very good player, your chances of losing to a beginner aren't too bad either, particularly if you don't play as well as you normally do on that round.
* Canary Mary from ''[[BanjoKazooie Banjo-Tooie]]'' is a particularly bad example of this in her appearance in Cloud Cuckooland. In order to receive a [[PlotCoupon jiggy]] from her, you have to race her by ButtonMashing on the controller. Once you get ahead of her, she'll speed up and pretty much always overtake you a few seconds later. Controllers with turbo buttons are almost ineffective, since the game is programmed to only register the speed boost when the button is released. And it doesn't help that the track is incredibly, horrendously, please-God-let-it-end-already-my-thumb-is-killing-me '''long'''. Especially in the final race for a Cheato page.
** This is more a puzzle than a button mashing challenge. Her rubber band-ness takes a few seconds to kick in, so you can leisurely cruise tapping the A button quite slowly until right near the end, then rubber band her yourself and tear past.
* The ''[[MatchThreeGame Puyo Puyo]]'' GBA game's first level's opponent always gangs up on you with garbage ''late in the level and just as you think you're doing good''.
** Similar things occur in ''{{Pokemon}} Puzzle League'' at the higher difficulty levels, particularly if he/she is on their last Pokemon. You might think you have the match, and then they will not only [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard get out the corner]], but [[OhCrap send a monstrous cascade of garbage blocks your way]].
* I have since given up on ''Major League Baseball 2K8''. After leading the Chicago Cubs through a historic season (the full 162 games, mind you, although you can reduce the number of games in a season), the Cubs were up 5 to 1 at the middle of the seventh inning against the Cardinals in Game 7 of the World Series. The game actually showed a statistic that said the Cubs had a 98% chance of winning. Final score? [[DownerEnding 6 to 5, Cardinals]].
** Obviously, it's because you were playing as the Cubs, a team notorious for pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.
*** ''Five'' runs in the seventh? [[http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=281016102&teams=tampa-bay-rays-vs-boston-red-sox Child's play.]]
** Or, it could also be due to the fact that you somehow got a mystical version of the game that allowed two National League teams to be playing against each other in the World Series...boy, I'll bet the American League was steamed that season!
* ''Homeworld 2'' is notorious in some circles for doing this trope badly. Each level's enemy fleet is based solely on the makeup of your fleet as you start the level. This has the obvious abuse potential of selling all or most of your fleet at the end of each level, leaving you with enough resources to buy a new fleet in the next level capable of defeating the much weaker enemy fleet.
** What is truly bad however, is how far this overadjusts the enemy, especially towards the last missions. If the player has a cap-sized fleet, in one mission, the enemy might as well destroy what the player is to protect before his heavy ships are even in firing range, and even then, are badly outnumbered, without the targets hp getting adjusted at all; a later mission lets the enemy start with as much as ''seven'' battlecruisers, while the player is capped at ''two'' ...
*** This would be more threatening if they didn't attack one at a time with minimal support.
* ''MidnightClub'': ''Los Angeles'' has the variety that also works in reverse. They even (more or less) lampshade it.
--> '''Julian''': You seem to be struggling. Want us to slow down?
** A patch was released for this game that makes the difficulty the opposite of NintendoHard for the first third of the game. The difficulty is supposed to ramp up after that, but if you get the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14 and max the performance stats out, not even rubber band AI will make it challenging...
*** How much did Kawasaki pay to make the game do that?
* {{Sierra}}'s outer space RTS ''Outpost 2'' features this not only with enemy AI, but also with your population. You can opt to research items that improve the quality of life in the colony, however by doing so, the colony knows it exists and demands that you meet their needs. If you research any weapons systems, unless [[TheComputerIsACheatingBastard the enemy already has them]], the computer will start attacking your base. You could say researching anything that remotely deals with these two aspects aren't worth researching.
* Racing game ''Road Rash'' made good use of this trope: Whenever you fell from your bike and were left several hundred meters behind you'd catch up with a speed of 50 meters per second - but the closer you came to the lead the faster the AI driver was going (also happened when you got rid of computer bikes; they came back faster than the laws of acceleration would've allowed...).
* In ''Super Mario Bros. Deluxe'' for the GBC, there is a racing mode in which you can race a boo through one of 8 levels. Sometimes, the boo inexplicably starts going really fast for what seems to be no reason, possibly causing you to lose the race.
** The total time is the Boo takes is always equal to your record time, though. Not really a good example, if you can't beat your own time, you shouldn't be able to unlock anything new.
* Seth, the final boss of ''[[StreetFighter Street Fighter IV]]'', is another example. On the first round, he uses only normal attacks and is fairly easy to beat, if more aggressive than anyone else fought up to that point. If defeated, on the next round, he quickly unleashes his full arsenal of techniques, including [[PowersAsPrograms ones stolen]] [[MegaManning from other fighters]]. And boy, is he a doozy!
** Rugal in ''TheKingOfFighters '94'' did it first. The first match with him saw him use only basic attacks. Then he smiled, stood up, dusted off, and ordered you to face him again. ''This'' time, however, he used his special moves... and promptly redefined SNKBoss. [[OneHitKill "Genocide CUTTER!"]]
* ''Left4Dead'' somewhat has this, thanks to the AI Director. If the group is doing very well, there will be less pills and med kits to find (not counting the ones in the safe room and the finales) and special infected will spawn at a more frequent rate. Also, a Tank is likely to appear if the group is playing too well and there's usually a high chance that after you killed a Tank, the director will spawn a Boomer, Smoker, and Hunter right after that to make sure you don't have it easy. Naturally, if the team is doing poorly, there will be more health items to find and enemy count is lessened somewhat. On Expert, the director will punish you every step of the way if you even spend as much as 10 seconds in one area.
** It should be noted that in the case of Left4Dead, this is seen as a good thing and generally works very well.
* The otherwise superb ''Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10'' uses this heavily in career mode. Shoot well under par, and computer opponents will put up absurdly good scores on the next round. Play poorly, and they'll all post mediocre scores. As a result, the easiest way to win tournaments is to DoWellButNotPerfect the first two days so the computer will hover around par, and then step on the gas in the later rounds.
* There is a minor version of this in the ''Crimson Skies'' PC game. Even if you are flying a much faster plane than your computer opponent, you can't fly 'away' from them. You will get a certain distance ahead, but even if you are pulling 400 mph and they are doing 150, as soon as you turn around, they are right there in your face.
* {{Ridge Racer}} 1 and 2 for the PSP. On Max Tours, Namco lets the 3 AI cars spam nitrous when you past them up. But on the Ne Plus Ultra Tour, The AI can pull away from you faster than hell. And when you use nitrous at the last leg of the race, they can go even faster - without nitrous.
* The Wanted Battles in SkiesOfArcadia are adjusted based on your characters' levels, so that putting them off will result in horrendously difficult battles when you try to go back for them, to the point where many are much easier if you're at a lower level. Quite literally punishing you for every experience point you dared to gain.
* In ''{{Carmageddon}}'', opponents will constantly respawn somewhere nearby, never actually going around the course. This means that it is impossible to lose the race to an enemy - you can only lose if your car is destroyed or you run out of time on the clock. However, it should be noted that this is probably intentional, as the point of the game is clearly to destroy your opponents rather than race them to the finish line. Destruction of opponents gives massive rewards, including sometimes the ability to steal an opponent's car and add it to your collection, so that it can be driven in future races. Also, destroying opponents, or seeking and running down pedestrians, adds time to your clock, allowing you to either finish the race more comfortably or (you guessed it) to destroy your opponents thoroughly.
* ''WiiSports'' has this for Boxing, Baseball, and Tennis. If your ranking points was very high, the AI gets more and more aggressive. Likewise, having a poor rank will put you with dumber AI. It was the game's way of "balancing" the player's skill level.
** ''WiiSports Resort'' uses the same system as well.
*** It should be noted that this style is more of a blessing than a curse, as it keeps the game from getting boring without breaking any of the game's rules AND doesn't change mid-game, one of the more annoying components of Rubberband AI.
*** In ''WiiSports Resort'' cycling, it seems that you run out of energy instantly in first place but have lungs of steel when in last.
* ''WingCommander'' had a "dynamic difficulty" system that scaled the enemy's abilities based on how well the player was doing. It did ''not'', however, change the wingman's performance or take it into account. So if for some reason the wingman was doing poorly (making the mission hard to start with), and the player pulled off a miraculous save, things got a whole lot worse for the player. And wingman.
* [[http://exocubes.en.softonic.com/ Exocubes]] had row generation based on how well you perform. If you performed well enough to clear a significant portion of the board, you could potentially fail that level faster than simply waiting.
* ''Top Gear'' (or ''Top Racer'' in Japan) has this with your partner, if you have the red car (the fastest and oil-waster in the game) and your white car (the most slower but oil-economic car) partner goes way behind, the partner AI can go even to 240 km/h, when it's max speed is 210 km/h, without boosting!, but if the opposite applies, the AI goes to 150 km/h until you are closer. The non-partner AI in first place do the opposite, if you don't reach the first place near the last lap, they are too far or even more than a lap over you (on extreme cases, taking a lap over the second place), the on-screen speed? 190-195 km/h.

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