What constitutes "Fake Difficulty" is, of course, highly subjective, but while we can't agree on the details, most gamers have a notion that there is a difference between "real" challenge in a game and "stuff they just threw in to make the game harder".
Real challenge should evolve organically from the nature of the game. When this doesn't make the game hard, the game is not hard. Developers try to "fix" this by, well, pulling dirty tricks.
(Note: The following list of examples is as subjective as the definition of 'fake difficulty'; many items listed herein could also be considered a side-effect of shoddy programming or bad graphic design)
Examples may make the distinction clearer:
Making the controls unresponsive
Making key objects indistinguishable from the background
In strategy games, making the AI inclined to attack the player over any mutual enemy, even it makes no sense and is downright suicidal for the AI.
Allowing the player to make very few mistakes and punishing them severely for running out. (For example, you have 3 lives to get through the game. One hit kills you, and if you run out, it's game over.) See Nintendo Hard.
In games where the protagonist has several varieties of attack to choose from, giving a powerful hostile unit invulnerability to all but one type of attack, and the ability to randomize that weakness during battle, especially while giving no indication that it has done so, or in games that offer no "scan" ability to tell the enemy's weakness.
Making the controls, hitboxes and other necessary metagame information analogical or otherwise inaccurate, which has the effect of "muddying up" the game -- you cannot be sure exactly how close you are allowed to be to threats, of how far a particular thumbstick movement takes your character, of how far you can jump, etc. Practically every 3D game suffers from this (since even zooming the camera will obscure relevant distance information), moreso if they have analog controls. It's typically hidden by keeping the general difficulty level lax.
In a point-and-click game (Myst, various Flash-based Escape The Locked Room-type games), having to click N times (N>1) on a location to reveal or accomplish something, where the first N-1 clicks do nothing and give absolutely no indication that the player should expect anything to happen upon subsequent clicks in the same location.
Real Difficulty works on a game-level: a hard-to-defeat enemy is "really hard". Fake Difficulty tends to be an aspect of the interface. To better understand the distinction, consider: "Real difficult" is a Kafka story. "Fake Difficult" is Dick and Jane... in Klingon. Compare with Luck Based Mission.
Examples include:
Silent Hill 2. On harder "action levels", the player character, James Sunderland, became a lot more clumsy, and would run into walls and be utterly debilitated by falling off a ledge less than a foot high. Notably, a level which required you to row a boat blind in fog is no longer controlled with basic up-down-left-right controls, instead requiring constant and tricky rotations of the analog sticks.
Silent Hill 3 isn't all that difficult, as it is cheap, what with the insane amount of instant-death traps strewn throughout the game. In this troper's experience, she would never be killed by the monsters, if ever. No, it was the stupid Deadly Gas in the haunted house, or close to the start of the game, running away from that subway train. Also, on Hard mode, the spiked ceiling in the haunted house will kill you. To avoid it, you have to hold down the aim weapon button so Heather crouches just enough to pass by safely. Given that nowhere in the game it suggests that you do such a thing, it's also a Guide Dang It.
In a similar vein, Clock Tower 3 is a shining example of what happens when adventure game writers try their hand at action. Though combat is only possible at the end of each level, the player is saddled with a clumsy, slow-moving action girl, who stumbles and falls down, who can not change her aim while charging a shot, and who will not respond to a pressed button unless the player first releases all the controls. In fact, if you try to, say, duck while running, she will simply grind to a halt and refuse to do either. Given that every time she is attacked, she is knocked to the ground and incapacitated long enough to allow her attacker at least one additional blow, the fact that they don't simply make everything a one-hit-kill seems almost cruel.
Weird apocalyptic RTS Krush Kill and Destroy had a clear advantage for one entire race. In single player campaigns this made the levels more challenging, of course. But they were not toned down for multiplayer, making it nigh-impossible for a Great or better player to beat a Good player or casual Great.
City Of Heroes: Often, you'll see several members of one bad guy faction menacing one or two members of another faction. If you interrupt them by attacking, both factions will gang up on you. This may be more true to life than one would intuitively imagine.
Also in City Of Heroes, or rather Villains, ambush groups somehow know where a hidden Stalker is, no matter where he runs or how many times he placates them. Since the whole combat style of a Stalker involves using Hide to become invisible to enemies, enemies who arbitrarily see through it when they shouldn't be able to are a pain.
In the WWE Day of Reckoning series, all the opponents in 3-way and 4-way matches tend to gang up on your character, even though they are supposed to be fighting each other as well. Particularly egregious in one particular Story Mode match in the original Day of Reckoning, where either John Cena or Shawn Michaels (depending on which story mode you're playing through) approaches you and offers to "have your back" in the coming match. Naturally, the first thing he does in the match is to come after you... and yet, when he turns on you in the following cutscene, it's supposed to be shocking.
Day of Reckoning 2 does nothing to fix the above problem, and actually includes a new "stamina" system that will leave your wrestler totally helpless for a good 30 seconds if they run too much or use too many moves in succession. Oh yeah, guess who it doesn't affect...
The original Prince Of Persia had a unique and annoying example in its poison potions. Located at various points in the game, these looked almost exactly like the regular potions (they had blue bubbles instead of red -- a detail that could be difficult to make out in the console versions if you had a small TV, and easy to miss in general) but hurt you instead of restoring or increasing health. They served no apparent purpose except making the already hard game even harder in a painfully artificial way.
Metal Gear Acid was already complicated enough without the gameplay rules being dripfed to you over the course of the game (and you only received each rule by the time you had probably figured it out yourself anyway). This, combined with the needlessly complex, roundabout way the characters explained it all, meant many people found the game too confusing to play, and sold it back to the shop. Thankfully, the sequel rectified this by providing a very neat and concise in-game manual that could be accessed at any time, as well as a much simpler "go-here-do-this"-type tutorial level -- although even that suffered, as it took place on a psychedelic background which made it hard to see your character or work out where you were supposed to be going, which scared off yet more gamers.
Available for 8-bit and 16-bit computers such as the Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, Rick Dangerous is a classic example of Fake Difficulty. Effectively a pastiche of Indiana Jones, Rick could be felled by spike traps (that looked identical to ordinary floor tiles), falling boulders (released without warning) and any number of other dangerous items.
The Dizzy games for the 8-bit computers often featured sections where players would have to pick up and move items to locate gems and fruit hidden behind them. Sadly the items were disguised as ordinary background sprites, making it impossible to complete the game without a magazine guide or hint book.
In Deep Space NineThird Person ShooterThe Fallen, it is bizarrely difficult to climb down a ladder. Instead of the common videogame convention of immediately grabbing on when you approach the top of a ladder, the only apparent way to get on a ladder from the top is to back off the ledge and hold down the forward button in the hopes of catching hold. Naturally most ladders are of sufficient height that failing to catch on means death or very near to it.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein had a similar problem, made easier on some ladders by the presence of cages. They lampshaded it with a memo about how cages reduced ladder deaths drastically, but they COULD have just put cages on all ladders.
Several commentators have noted how Resident Evil 4 is made easier on the Wii due to the Point-and-Shoot interface being more intuitive than controller-based... Hmm...
Testers of Hitman: Codename 47 complained that the game was too short, many of them completing it in under four hours. The solution? Remove all ability to save mid-mission. It took longer, all right...thanks to endless repetition.
Doom 3 allowed the player to hold either a flashlight or a weapon in its extremely dark environments, but not both at the same time. As a result, the player is forever spotting targets with the flashlight, only to switch to a gun and fire blindly. (Perhaps the hero has only one hand?) The extremely popular "duct tape" mod allowed the player to use both at once, as in every other FPS in existance.
Interesting case in the original Metal Gear Solid - Solid Snake is unable to fire from first-person view and is thus awkward in any fight. Sequels added this ability while cranking up the difficulty of the rest of the game's world, but the Gamecube remake gave Snake this ability and, at least according to one reviewer, created a Game Breaker.
Shining Force 2 had Taros, a large suit of armor guarding a story-important vehicle. He could only be damaged by one character, the hero, because his only weakness is a sword that only the hero can wield.
What's more, that detail can make the game Unwinnable, since it's possible to throw the sword in question away and never be able to get it back.
This editor's frustration at the game Indiana Jones Greatest Adventures on the SNES knows no bounds. The first level isn't too tricky, but the difficulty suddenly spikes in the most unfair way possible. It is the iconic boulder-chase scene, but instead of doing what most chase scenes in video games do and give you room to breathe or visual cues for obstacles, this game gives you no such luxury; 3/4s of the screen is taken up by the huge Mode7 boulder, leaving a very meager section of the screen that is often just enough for Indy to fit in. Traps spring up along the way with very little warning and even littler time to react, and just one knocking you in the right (or rather wrong) direction leads to instant death against the giant boulder. Why did they think this was fair or challenging to make it the only way to complete a level is to have the reflexes of a cat or to completely memorize where the hazards are (a feat in itself)?
Advance Wars: Dual Strike on the Nintendo DS borderline forces the player to use particular commanding officers or Forces (commanding officer boosters) on various maps in the single player modes. One example of this is the War Room map Megapolis, where the AI has very high income to the point of being able to make many strong units, all made even stronger by the computer's officer; the only way to shake off the stronger units is to have an officer with defense boosts him/herself. However, if a certain officer is used, the map becomes absurdly easy.
Another example in a handheld: Golden Sun gave only two of the enemies (the Final Boss and the Bonus Boss) a party-wrecking, unblockable spell: Djinn Storm. Such spell can incapacitate the entire party's Djinns at once, thus making the heroes look like they lost 10-15 levels-ups worth of stats. Your only hope is to pray that they never use them. Or not: coughbattlepatterncough.
Neopets has been accused of Fake Difficulty many times, particularly in the Battledome area where formerly excellent weapons are often downgraded without warning, making them next to useless. The information about the weapons in the "Battlepedia" provided on the site is incorrect, so users turn to In-Depth Battlepedia instead. http://idb.finalhit.org/?searchtype=alpha
Speaking of Neopets, the retired game Pterattack (a vertical shoot-em-up) had a nasty habit of randomly generating a un-dodgeable obstacle the width of the whole playing screen during the start of the first level. It also had glitchy collision detection at higher levels. Thankfully the sequel fixed these.
Phantasy Star Universe has a couple particularly annoying examples in the online mode.
One stage has you running around rescuing people trapped under piles of debris, with a very strict time limit. Every time you rescue someone, it goes into a loading screen, then a small scene where the person says a few lines and runs off, and then back to loading before giving you control. These scenes are unskippable; you can only mash A to speed through the dialogue. Of course, the timer will keep ticking down to your doom during these little scenes.
Another stage has you chasing a small child around a maze. He may or may not be infected by the SEED virus and could turn into a monster if you don't get him medical help...but despite this, will run from you no matter what. You have two perfectly capable party members that could logically help you corner him; instead, they say "Why don't you handle this?" and proceed to follow behind you dumbly. The kid wouldn't be too hard to catch, if every time you closed in on him, the game didn't take control away from you as he leisurely walks off to another room. Once you finally figure out the one specific path that lets you corner him without him teleporting or running straight through a locked door, the kid becomes a monster anyways and you have to kill him. Yes, you could have held the goddamn kid down and blew his brains out right from the start, as many gamers no doubt wanted to do after about 5 minutes of this mission, and it wouldn't have mattered. Oddly, your party's dialogue implies that this would have been favorable, as the kid wouldn't have had to suffer that way, even though there was no indication that he actually WAS infected until he was already a monstrosity.
In addition, some genius at Sega apparently decided that in addition to the normal Standard Status Effects, it would be a good idea to have not one but THREE crippling status effects which rendered you unable to do anything except stand there and let the enemies beat on you. One of these, sleep, would be removed by taking damage, but in the areas in which it was common, was frequently caused by ranged blasts, which would remove sleep status but then immediately force you back to sleep. In addition, while under the effects of these status effects you will remain rooted to the spot until cured or until the effect wears off. If you apply these status effects to enemies though, the same rules do NOT apply to the monsters. So a stunned monster will be thrown around by your attacks like normal, but a stunned you will remain rooted to the spot even if you take damage that would ordinarily throw you into a wall. This is compounded by the fact that while there are a number of items of equipment which render you immune to a particular status effect, you cannot equip more than one at a time, and the units which provide immunity to more than one status effect cannot be obtained legitimately. In other words, you can be immune to one of these crippling status effects and no more at any given time.
In the second Dreamcast version, Ultimate difficulty was added. In lower difficulties, a common enemy of Caves was the Poison Lily. The Poison Lily was largely a non-threat except for extremely low-levelled characters. Its only attacks consisted of poison and paralysis effects, and a weak pecking attack if a player was very close. Lilies would try to peck at players outside the actual range of the attack, however, something this troper found rather amusing. Androids found them even more laughable, possessing racial immunity to both poison and paralysis. Ultimate Caves replaced these with Ob Lilies. Ob Lilies still possessed the pecking attack and paralysing wave, but their poison attack was replaced by Megid - a penetrating linear ball possessing a very high chance of an instant kill on any player it hit. Though not Fake Difficulty themselves, Ob Lilies were often found in large packs, with one Megid having three or four more hot on its tail giving players little opening for attack, and often with Crimson Assassins who possessed the ability to freeze unwary players.
Additionally, in the followup Episode 1 & 2 on Gamecube and Xbox, Ob Lilies were present in the VR Temple stage on Ultimate difficulty. The rooms in VR Temple were much smaller than in Caves, making evasion of the Megid harder, and were often accompanied by large enemies which would often hem players in such that they could not move, (even if those enemies did no damage) and making Megid evasion even more difficult.
Speaking of Episode 1 & 2, Ultimate Episode 2 is a huge example of Fake Difficulty all by itself. Every area in the episode, without exception, had enemies with very high ATP, meaning they would inflict large amounts of damage even with debuffs in effect, or outright one-hit KO attacks that would kill you irrespective of HP or defences. Some particularly bad areas had both.
VR Spaceship, the second area, had the Gran Sorceror, who fired Megid at a high level, and consequently a high chance of killing you, as well as the Baranz, whose missiles, only ever fired in ever-increasing clusters, could wear down a player's HP very quickly.
Central Control Area (which spanned Jungle Area, Mountain Area, Seaside Area and Central Control Area) had the Zol Gibbons who fired Megid, (albeit very low-level Megid) and the sub-boss Mericarol and its siblings Merikle and Mericus. Prior to Ultimate, these enemies would do damage and inflict status effects using medium-speed projectiles with a very long range, but were not tremendously dangerous. On Ultimate, their projectiles were accelerated and instead of causing status effects, would instantly inflict over 32,000 points of damage if they connected. (By contrast, no player could ever have HP above approximately 2,500 through any legitimate means)
Seabed had the Delbiter, whose charging attack was very fast and did a high amount of fixed damage. The Delbiter also had what this troper referred to as "Megid aura", whereby it could suddenly one-hit kill players who normally had enough HP to survive all of the Delbiter's attacks even in a worst-case scenario. Seabed also had Sinow Zoas and Zeles, who had high ATP. a high critical hit rate and near-total invisibility for upwards of 50% of their lifespan, and Deldepths, which were only vulnerable to physical attack for short periods, could not be hit by more than one attack before they became invulnerable again, and could spam high-level Megid at a disturbingly frequent pace.
Control Tower would actually combine the cheesiest of the above enemies into fairly small rooms. A single room could see you attacked by any combination of Mericarol, Merikle, Mericus, Gibbles, (a gorilla-like thing which had very hard punches) Gi Gue, (which would spam purple balls which would drain your HP rapidly AND confuse you) and Delbiter, as well as two exclusive enemies. The first of these is the Del Lily, a D-cell infected Ob Lily on steroids, and Ill Gill. Ill Gill's abilities included the ability to inflict any status effect with its scythe, instant-kill with its scythe, and freeze the player to the spot such that they couldn't evade or escape the scythe strikes. The most frequent offensive tactic used by the Ill Gill would be to root you to the spot and then use an unavoidable death strike on you.
The sequel to Episode 1 & 2, Blue Burst on PC, was even worse, where not only could you be killed instantly by any of the above attacks, but you would be penalised by lost experience for every death, including the unfair ones. Not only that, but Blue Burst removed ALL recovery period between hits on Ultimate difficulty, with the result that attacks which were survivable in the earlier games could add up and kill even a player of level Awesome in under a second. (The Recon is a particularly egregious example of this, despite only being a significant threat in swarms in the earlier games; This editor had his level 200 character killed in about a second by a single Recon on at least one occasion)
Final Fantasy X's Chocobo racing game is fake difficult. Your character is trying to collect balloons (which appear around the track randomly) that decrease your time while avoiding birds that attack you that increase your time. However, the Chocobo at times will randomly turn to miss balloons and hit birds, making completion of this sidequest a Luck Based Mission. Of course, this is the only way to get the main character's best weapon.
The Warlords series is particularly gruesome at the luck's respect. Even in the RTS type Battlecry ones. It made it a genuinely jarring attempt to make an "Ironman" hero that dies for real. Since in the battlecry one any unit can just do a random supercritical that ignores armor, the Hero could easily die, not to mention assassins that could randomly kill the Hero with an attack. In the TBS ones, that is even more jarring. You can make sure of it by arranging battle of two IDENTICAL units. 5 times out of 7, the AI will win. Just as that. Also the AI seems to have an uncanny higher chance of triggering special abilities. Finally, if you're using an unit highly inferior in combat you can expect them to miss (and do only 1 damage) about 90% of the time, and criticals are downright miracles, while the AI seems to only miss half his attacks and criticals half the attacks it hits.
World of Warcraft somewhat arbitrarily assigns 'elite' status to certain mobs, whenever the designers wanted to encourage player cooperation, or to artificially increase the challenge of areas where Player groups are expected, such as instanced dungeons. These mobs look and act normal, but possess the hit points and damage output of a character several levels higher, to the point where a lone PC of comparable level has virtually no chance of defeating it without help. While this sort of thing makes some sense for bosses, it comes off as unrealistic when faced with an army of elite kobolds, or towns filled with 'commoners' who are all inexplicably level 50, and can easily take down trained warriors while armed only with a shovel and wearing a linen shirt for armor. One wonders why these supermen aren't cleaning up the dragons, pirates, and neighborhood villains on their own.
Compare Everquest with its Giant Rats which seem to exist at every known level of power, from newbie to epic. It would be a shame to let a good character model go to waste.
In many platformers, being hit causes the player character to momentarily recoil and be unable to move. Unfortunately, in some games, being hit in this way makes it impossible to avoid the next attack, and so on, leaving the character "stunlocked" until dead or at least far more damaged than the original attack should have left him. Odin Sphere is a primary example with which this editor is currently struggling, but is far from unique in this.
Another common side-effect of taking damage in a platformer is for all of your inertia to suddenly vanish if you're hit in mid-air, causing you to immediately fall into any Bottomless Pit you might've been trying to jump.
This happens after a fashion in fighting games, as well. Often when being hit, for a moment you'll be completely vulnerable, unable to block, counterattack, or do much of anything. Of course, the computer is sometimes programmed to perfectly act on this. Tecmo is particularly bad about this, seeming to view fighting games as programmer-versus-the-player; on some opponents, such as Hayate, the first time you get hit is likely to result in you losing more than half your life bar, as he uses precision computer timing to strike while you're constantly reeling, giving you no opportunity to block or combo break.
River City Ransom has an issue with this, noticeable is that on one map enemys will literaly attack the player as soon as he enters, lock him in this, and cause massive damage to him.
In Gradius 3, the player's ship is painfully slow until you use the speed-up power twice. Not coincidentally, in this editor's opinion, there always seems to be at least two enemies that drop power-ups just after every checkpoint - but god help you if one of them randomly turns into the blue "kill all enemies on the screen but don't give you a powerup" item. This comes on top of that fact that Gradius is a SHMUP.
In Star Trek Encounters, the camera angles make determining the "height" of the rings in a Pass Through The Rings game nearly impossible (even though the game is merciful enough to keep a consistent "up" and "down" despite being in space.)
This troper gave up on Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation real fast after becoming frustrated with the nigh-impossibility of grabbing ropes to swing by. And the camera being your worst enemy (often switching angles on you unexpectedly, sometimes causing you to run into traps due to "forward" now being "left" etc. or simply taking the enemy or Death Course out of your view.) is a proud tradition of the entire series.
Tomb Raider: Anniversary had a particular scene where Lara must kill two difficult flying enemies with an area-effect ranged attack, while standing on a small platform. Oh, did we mention the almost unavoidable ranged attack throws you ten feet and knocks you off your feet? And since there's two of these guys, if the first shot doesn't throw you off the platform to your death, the second one will get you before you recover. If you manage to kill the enemies, there is a nigh-impossible acrobatic sequence which is timed. If you don't make every leap perfectly (see Camera Screw for why that will never happen), the grapple point for your rope disappears, sending Lara falling to her death. Guess where the respawn point is? Before the fight with the two obnoxious flying enemies. This troper gave up after 2 days and at least 20 failures.
Soul Reaver 2 has inexplicable barriers appear compelling you to fight powerful enemies you could otherwise easily evade. Defeating these enemies provides no benefit and often leaves you at the edge of death yourself.
Any time when you are forced to use an "Extra" folder in the Megaman Battle Network games, because these unmodifable folders are absolutely 100% suck (They are not even unicoded, something every folder should try to be) they flow poorly and have bad choices in chips, all of them lack any underlieing theme (you'll be lucky to see one with a program advance)
The Crusader games' hardest difficulties feature enemies who carry much heavier weapons than they're described as carrying...and they still give their pissy little ammo.
The Wii game takes this to a whole new level. Thanks to the number of players a match being boosted from 8 to 12 there's much greater potential for several CPU players to acquire powerful items at once. If you're playing on 150cc difficulty against the CPU the worst-case scenario to be comboed by a Blue shell followed by a Red Shell and then get blown away by a Bullet Bill transformed racer and ran over by another that has become gigantic with the Mega Mushroom right before being pushed aside by the entire rest of the pack right before you hit the finish line, guaranteeing you dead last. And this entry in the series is supposed to be MORE non-gamer/casual-friendly.
In Super Smash Bros Brawl, when fighting against multiple AI opponents in a free-for-all, they tend to forget they're supposed to be against each other and just gang up on you. It's more noticeable whenever the computer gets a Final Smash or the Dragoon; They will target you twice as much as the other computer controlled players. This can also happen when you are on the same team, making this troper quite angry when that Dragoon could've won the match but instead he targeted me.
AI teammates in Smash Brothers games tend to be pretty bad in general.
Speaking of the Dragoon - it's a three-part item, and you have to pick up all three parts to use it. Theoretically, if you get hit before you have all three, you might drop the parts you already have. This troper has found that human players get the parts knocked out of them much more often than AI players, even if the human is hitting harder and more often.
P Cs in Odin Sphere and Rogue Galaxy are saddled with a stamina system that serves no point except to randomly render them helpless mid-battle. Guess what enemies aren't subject to.
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn's Hard difficulty hides the enemy's movement range for no reason other than to force the player to manually count squares and remember the movement cost of thick grass to mounted units. Thanks for that.
Armored Core: Early iterations of this game featured some problems dealing with computer opponents in the arenas, since looking up or down was arduous at best with the games limited controls, and every truly hard enemy in the game was a master of highly controlled air combat. As an added bonus, Armored Core 2 featured an arena opponent named Metheus(I think) who was capable of doing an attack combination involving the most powerful sword and gun in the game ad infinitum, reducing you to 0 AP in a matter of seconds if you were nice enough to stand in front of him at all. All attempts by this troper to mimic that combo have failed horribly, meaning that the computer may be cheating beyond simply having PLOW mecha that the player actually can replicate.
