Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

new edits
page history
related to...
edit page
discuss
forums

The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard
"The thing about video game basketball is that the computer decides whether or not the ball goes in when you shoot. "
- John Dies at the End by David Wong

"I have to say, though, could the programmers at least have tried to mask the cheating?"
- Brian Clevinger, author of 8-Bit Theater on Puzzle Quest

So you're playing a game -- say... a racing game. You've blown past all of your AI-controlled competition and are ahead by a good minute when you make a tiny mistake. All of a sudden, three of the other five AI cars zip past you while you're getting back up to speed. Surprise! The AI is a Cheating Bastard!

The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard whenever it places penalties or restrictions on you that the AI controlled opponents are exempt from. This does not include the normal barriers of the game, such as wide pits, powerful enemies, numerous enemies, hard to find ammunition... those are Real Difficulty. It does include the following:

  • In Real Time Strategy and Turn Based Strategy games, the computer typically builds faster -- or just has new units magically appear out of nowhere. It may also acquire resources faster, start with more, or not actually require resources to build units. It will generally be able to instantly micromanage every unit and structure under its control, though this is really an inherent advantage of a computer over the human brain rather than anything necessarily malicious. The computer can sometimes see the entire map, and is not affected by the Fog Of War.
  • In RPGs, the Useless Useful Spell never works on enemies, but when used against you, it is 100% effective.
  • In racing games, there are many different types of Cheating Bastardry:
    • The "Rubber Band" type of Cheating Bastard, which makes all opponent cars trail you by no more than a set distance. Games with a conscience sometimes offer the same advantage to the human player if and when he/she falls behind the computer opponents.
    • The "Divine Driving Skills" Cheating Bastard, which can hold the racing line and makes no mistakes unless you physically intervene.
    • The "Situational Turbo Boost" Cheating Bastard, which has an infinite supply of Nitro Boost until it catches up or passes you.
    • And there's the "Race Ringer" type of Cheating Bastard, in which there is one car which clearly has superior performance to anything you can drive, and is generally coupled with the Divine Driving Skills and Situational Turbo Boost Cheating Bastards, meaning you have to get very creative in order to beat them. Or ram them off the road at the beginning if the game you're playing allows this.
  • Similarly, sports games frequently have a "Rubber Band" -- if you've played too well, the opposing team will become nigh-unto-unbeatable in the last minutes of the game.
  • In First Person Shooters, the typical Cheating Bastard doesn't have to reload, can snipe the wings off a fly at eighty miles using a shotgun, and in some cases (such as an especially annoying and Sniper-filled part of Halo 2), can see you and shoot you without actually having to face you. In some multiplayer FPS, the computer may start with equipment you have to find.
  • In Fighting Games, the Cheating Bastard has full and complete mastery of all the character's moves and knows every button press and motion you make on the controller, allowing it to counter or block anything you use against it. Sometimes, the Computer will take advantage of this to bully you into a corner. In addition, it can perform even the most complicated move with ease, as it is not hampered by a controller or joystick with which to do motions. (Fans of the King Of Fighters series know this as the Raging Storm Dilemma.) The SNK Boss is a specific type of Cheating Bastard.
    • All these things and more are made worse in the arcade versions of the games.
  • Random Number Generators often cheat in the AI's favour.
  • A special exception is made for strategy games that explain by the skill level what cheats are added. (The Age of... and Rise of... series are noted for doing this...sometimes, explaining that at hard levels the AI teams get a sizable gold bonus.)
  • Some games use as marketing points that their AI are not cheating bastards.

When used as a quick-and-dirty substitute for good AI design, The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard becomes a method of adding Fake Difficulty to a game, and can lead to certain objectives being classified as a Luck Based Mission. On the other hand, many game designers contend this trope is inevitable in order to challenge a human player at all. This is particularly the case in strategy games; most computer strategy games are so complex that even the best-programmed AI players are no match for human ingenuity, and the only way to keep them competitive is to give them some form of cheat.

Dynamic Difficulty may simply be a matter of increasing and decreasing the level of cheatiness and bastardy.

Older games fall victim to this trope somewhat more often, since technical limitations meant it was much harder to make an AI that could actually challenge you fairly. In particular, things such as having the computer actually follow Fog Of War make coding much more complex, by forcing the AI not only to keep track of what it can and can't see, but having to add whole strategies for using scouts efficiently and so forth. Still, many modern games have Cheating Bastards too.

Note: Since The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard is so incredibly common, only especially egregious examples should be listed here, otherwise this entry would take over the entire wiki. Aversions or subversions should probably be left out as well, since that's (hopefully) the default.
Examples:

  • In Sid Meier's original Civilization, the player's civilization must devote immense amounts of resources to building one of the Seven Wonders of the World; your AI opponents, on the other hand, do not actually 'build' these but simply have a random chance (minute, but significant in the long run) of being awarded one each turn. This goes above and beyond the usual accelerated-build advantage of strategy games because only one civilization ever can build any given Wonder — so the AI not only gets a free toy, but may ruin your own investment.
    • In the sequels, the game manual actually details exactly how much the computer cheats and in what areas at various difficulty levels. Later versions also alert you as to when enemy civilizations commence constructions of wonders to allow you to adjust your strategy accordingly.
    • The spin-off Colonization pulls many of the same tricks, with the Royal Navy being the worst of them (They can teleport!). One of them is probably a bug, though: The AI programming doesn't always understand the treaties you made with it, so sometimes it goes and lays siege to your towns, then starts complaining when you break the treaty by attacking back.
    • A nasty one that crops up in higher difficulty levels of Alpha Centauri is that enemy units can use probe team abilities (ie taking control of your units) even when they aren't probe teams.
    • It also seems that the game tries to force averages to occur. Try using saves to make sure you always win. If your win chance is 50%, your chance of winning the first fight is 50%, right? Right. Second fight (after your unit is healed), displayed chance to win is still 50%--but try saving before it and loading. Your chances are closer to 25%. Winning a third fight in a row is likely to have even worse odds--but the displayed chance to win is still 50%. This troper has seen a fight with a listed 95% chance of victory lose more than ten times in a row in one of the Civilization/Alpha Centauri games. The question exists, does it work in reverse also? Sacrifice a dozen or so units for a run of good luck?
    • You can't see strategic resources on the map in Civ 3 until you have the skills to use them. The AI can see them all right from the start of the game though, and will make an effort to build cities next to them to give itself an advantage later on.
    • Civ 4 intentionally attempts to hide (rather badly) some of its more egregious abuses. The computer will build units that require resources it has no access to. Not that unusual. But if you clear the fog of war around a city (thereby proving it has no access to a resource) it will suddenly downgrade those impossible units.
  • In the Street Fighter series, there are moves known as "charge moves" which require holding the joystick in a certain direction for a short period. The computer, however, doesn't have to do this and can often perform a charge move in the middle of moving in the opposite direction, such as using Blanka's charge-back roll attack while walking forward. This also applies to "spin" moves (moves which require a 180 degree, 360, or more cycle of joystick motion). Most obvious the 3,000th time Zangief hits you with a full-strength spinning piledriver (the "air" version, triggered by any upwards joystick click, is approximately 3/4 the damage of the ground version).
    • In the first Street Fighter II, Guile was especially infamous for this. He could generate Sonic Booms faster than any other character, taking advantage of his nonexistent recovery time. He also abused Flash kicks, making it impossible to jump.
    • Worse yet was Balrog. He could execute dashing punches faster than the player can recover from a block. He had the option of using them exclusively until the player's life was bled away. Only a perfectly timed Dragon Punch, Flash Kick or Spinning Lariat could stop the nefarious beast. This made him potentially the most difficult boss.
    • On the other hand, Capcom vs SNK 2 EO allows you to do just as the Cheap Bastards do by flicking a stick. The power is now YOURS to beat booty with.
  • In some games the random generator MAY cheat for the player, but not in Warlords, more specifically, Warlords IV. This troper thoroughly tested the game's random generator and can rightly accuse it of cheating. Even in the lowest difficult setting, the computer will have some advantage in terms of unit Combat. If you have two units with the exactly same combat and life hitting each other in the hardest difficulty (and not considering special abilities) the computer will win roughly 75% of the time. If your unit has one combat more than the computer, he'll still hit attacks with just about more consistency than yours, making him win 60% of the time. If your unit has one less combat than the computer's, your unit will miss roughly 50% of the time while the computer's will now practically never miss. Even with a considerably larger Combat than the computer's, he'll hit with certain consistency (10 combat more than the computer and he still hits 20% of the time, while you in the same situation can pretty much say goodbye to any chance of hit). Even then, the chance of critical is not affected much (if at all) by lower Combat (although it is affected by higher Combat), but the computer's units have roughly between two and three times your chance of critical with lower combat. And that's only dealing with the mechanics of the Combat stat. The computer also cheats with special abilities, being that he has a much larger chance of triggering chance related ones, and gaining larger numbers with number inflicting ones. Death gaze, that has only 5% chance of killing in level 1 at the start of combat, has about 30% chance of killing when the unit with it is used by the computer. Archery 1, that give a 20% chance of an unit to shoot an arrow outside of combat before it starts (for 1-6 damage), works 50% of the time with the computer, while consistently failing with you if you have the other 7 creatures in your army being archers. Not to mention that he'll often hit with it for 5-6 damage (70% of the time), while your arrows will consistently hit bellow 4 damage. And that's only a sample of the AI cheating in the game.
  • In the first Super Mario Kart game, the AI opponents didn't just have Rubber Band AI, but had infinite stores of super-special weapons and items that in several cases the player was never able to use -- namely, the poisoned mushrooms, dinosaur eggs and meandering fireballs.
    • Furthermore: the Grand Prix mode would select an order of skill for each of the computer-controlled players, based on your own character selection. If one of the Mario brothers were picked as the "champion" racer (which happened if you chose Bowser or Koopa Troopa) you could expect perfect racing lines and cornering coupled with infinite and arbitrary use of the Super Star, allowing them to go at increased speed with no slowing down, plus invincibility. Having one of the plumbers trigger this on the final stretch, powering either past or through the player and being unable to stop regardless of what's fired at them (or even more annoyingly, just as that red shell was about to knock them out of first place) meant that it was often easier just to start a new game and hope you didn't get one of them as the top racer again.
      • The star didn't provide the computer with extra speed. They just tended to switch it on as they breezed past you, to make it impossible to counter them.
    • The computer's infinite store of items could also be used against it in one track. By placing a banana peel in the right area just before a jump the computer would use its ability to leap over it and by extension miss the jump... repeatedly.
    • Mario Kart Wii will hate you in the form of item distribution. The AI always cheats by always getting the most powerful items no matter what, but if you happen to be in the back of the pack, expect nothing but a variety of Mushrooms and occasionally a Spiny Shell or Bullet Bill while other items are much more rare.
    • Mario Kart Wii. 12 Players. 11 AI. 150cc, any cup. Expect a BLUE SHELL to hit you ON THE LAST LAP BEFORE YOU REACH THE FINISH LINE. Even better, imagine one hitting you over a jump. And for more fun, try getting hit a Blue Shell, followed by a Red Shell, then Lightning, and, for kicks, a POW Block in the middle of all that action. Item Rape doesn't even come close to defining it.
    • Another ability the computers have in Mario Kart 64 and earlier is the ability to instantly recover from items as long as they weren't on screen when the item hit. This frustrated this Troper to no end when the best items would simply stop computers for a moment if you couldn't see them, while the same items used on you would make you fly through the air. If the computers still do this in more recent versions, it isn't as noticable.
      • This troper never played Super Mario Kart as much as he did Mario Kart 64, so he believes that the rubber-band AI in MK 64 is the most egregious in the series. If you'd like to see for yourself, switch the map view to the lap mode (the whole track is in a square) and watch your hard-earned lead evaporate.
  • Mario Party is frequently accused of this, though it is difficult to prove due to Random Number Generation. Given the game's partial reliance on the roll of the dice, it is surprising how well the computer rolls when they're otherwise being slaughtered. The developers may have used it as a convenient difficulty band-aid, as it is easier to rig the dice than it is to program the AI to play more effectively without cheating.
  • Traditionally, in any of the RPG-style Yu-Gi-Oh video game, you start out with an incredibly weak jumble of cards for a deck, with no way of improving it until at least halfway through. Your opponents, however, have sleek decks with cards you could only dream of having, right from the get-go. On the other hand, games which make no pretense at a plot and are simply a gallery of opponents tend to start you with a half-decent deck and a pathetic bottom tier of opponents, with new cards given to you after each victory.
    • The Sacred Cards is most notorious for this: the restrictions set on you when making and updating your deck (which is severely dependent on your level and experience point total) are so strict, most of the better cards aren't even available to be used until almost the end of the game, let alone all at once. Of course, the computer opponents are not bound by these restrictions. They also don't need to go anywhere to refill their life points after each duel, whereas you have to go back to your character's house and sleep in order to do so, and this is the only place you can do so (which gets irritating when you've got a whole city you need to duel through).
    • World Championship 2004 was a "gallery of opponents" style game, which had a list of restricted cards like the real card game. But computer opponents were not bound by it. The computer could have 3 copies of Game Breaker cards that you were only allowed to have one of (many of which would later be outright banned with the introduction of the real-life game's "Advanced" format used in official tournaments). This was probably to make up for AI so stupid that it often seemed like it was trying to lose.
    • In all of the handheld games in the series, enemy AI can clearly be seen using strategies specifically to counter your own face-down cards or cards still in your hand which it could not possibly know you have. This is understandable when facing Pegasus, as he is shown in the anime and manga to be a mind reader, but when other characters do this it is simply due to sloppy AI which was not programmed to tell the difference between face-up and face-down cards.
    • The worst offender of this has to be Tag Force 2; not only does the opponent act both nigh-omnipotent and nigh-omniscient with any strategy you use, when you get them as your tag partner, they're suddenly bumbling idiots that seem hell-bent on screwing up your strategies and practically handing the duel to the opponents. Combine that with a list that you are bound by but not the opponent and the introduction of the "Destiny Draw" which allows either player to draw one of up to five cards they designate beforehand when they're losing (which apparently the computer opponents always have even if you disable it), and you've got a game that's all but Unwinnable just by its mechanics. Your only saving grace is the ability to tweak your partner's deck, but that only comes after you've built up their hearts to the max, and you're restricted in what you can change, as well (for instance, removing any of the cards your partner considers his "favorites" are forbidden).
    • In fact, not only do the top-tier opponents always know your face-down monster's defense points and have three game-breaking cards, they will always draw them when they need them. In Worldwide Edition, Seto Kaiba will have a Goblin Soldier and at least one Blue-Eyes in the first draw, and no amount of weeping and cursing will change that.
    • In other words, it's just like the show. Except you're the Jobber now.
    • This runs rampant in Forbidden Memories, where the computer not only has better cards than you, but can also play fusion monsters as single cards. In other words, the CPU can play a powerful fusion monster without fusing other cards like you would normally have to. Then there's a certain opponent who is rumored to always know what you have face-down, but personally, This Troper wouldn't be surprised if all of the CPU opponents could see what your face-down cards are.
  • In the Mortal Kombat arcade series, the computer player often blatantly cheats. For instance, in Mortal Kombat III, the AI has the ability to throw the player as the player performs a projectile move; this simply isn't possible in reverse, or during a two-player match. The computer can also perform certain combos that human players are prevented from using, and some of the computer's combos do more damage than the exact same combo performed by a human player.
    • In Mortal Kombat 4, Jax's Multi Throw move is quite difficult. This Troper could only reliably get 2-3 hits. The computer however, could get all of them each time, and incredibly quickly.
    • Likewise in Mortal Kombat 4, it is possible to temporarily take control of the computer. This is done by getting within grab distance, and performing either a throw or bonebreaker, which about 90% of the time will cause the computer to perform the move.
      • In Mortal Kombat 2, this was true of most attacks, especially uppercuts and sweeps. The computer would invariably perform the exact same move as you, later than you, and it would take priority and own you.
      • In the original Mortal Kombat, this troper remembers computer characters ducking and slowly sliding across the floor to counter a barrage of player fireballs.
  • In Railroad Tycoon, the player can only build stations with two entrances, and they must be opposite of each other. The computer gets an eight-way station, with entrances at right angles and diagonals. Combined with the fact that the computer doesn't actually build any trains, it's very obvious the computer is playing a different game than you.
    • This is in order to compensate for several weaknesses: the computer can only make routes from city to city (no middle-of-nowhere depots for freight pickup); it can neither create nor deliver secondary products (e.g. food or steel); never builds industries, and never takes advantage of station facilities.
    • The sequels avert much of this entirely. In Railroad Tycoon II, for example, you do see all the computer's trains and their deliveries.
  • Enemy Navis in Mega Man Battle Chip Challenge always have more Program Deck space than you do -- even when you're using that same Navi. WoodMan, for instance, only has room for a couple of the best Wood-type chips when you control him. When Sal is controlling him, expect to be hit with those chips every round.
  • Dragonball licensed games have this during story missions. For instance, some characters in later stages are programmed to automatically dodge most combo attacks (like throwing your enemy in the air and teleporting to hit them up there, more than one energy attack, etc.). This becomes a problem in levels where you can get a Ring Out. Because the enemy will doubtless be able to break your guard and counterattack whenever he feels like, you'll be easily knocked out the ring by him, while he can simply decide not to be hurt by your attacks. Also, the computer defies the rules of teleportation. normally, after attacking someone with a fully charged attack, you can teleport behind them ONCE that combo and knock them away. The enemy can do this up to and including three times from the fighting equivalent of a flick. This editor recalls one time the enemy instantaneously used this non-stop for four minutes, killing his character without a proper fight. This is probably because the enemy AI cannot tell the difference between being in maximum power mode and being energy-less.
  • In that same vein, Richard Wong in the Psychic Force games can become unbeatable in a fight by spamming his magically-appearing sword move.
  • In Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, the AI opponents will often head towards powerups that are offscreen, that the player has no idea that they're there.
  • For video games, this is one of The Oldest Ones In The Book. The famous "hacker epic", The Story of Mel, involves an extremely primitive, early computer game being coded to cheat. There is no reason to believe this story is fiction. (http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html)
  • The main reason why Sonic Riders is so hard during story mode is because the computer players are not limited by the same air gauge that the human player is.
  • Mr. The Hedgehog seems to have some trouble with this. In Sonic Shuffle, you can steal cards from opponents' hands, though you can't see what cards they are until you take them. Evidently, the computer players can see them, as they always take the exact card they need. (Though they apparently can't tell when you've gotten the penalty that turns all your cards into Eggman cards.)
    • Not to mention when the AI enters a card battle, not only will it choose exactly the card it needs, but it has the frame-perfect timing to beat the monsters with an exact number, winning not only a Precioustone, but also a Force Jewel. EVERY! SINGLE! TIME! Not to mention the AI players button-tap impossibly fast, and are able to easily escape the provably-impossible croc-escape minigame.
  • The old Microprose game Master Of Magic initially had a shapeshift spell that would disguise one unit as another. The manual noted that this illusion would not affect the computer players. Too bad Master Of Magic was a one-player game with no network or internet play capabilities.
    • Computer players also got bonus "picks" at character creation on harder difficulties, giving them additional spells or special abilities.
  • Warcraft 2 also did this, and both are likely caused by the fact that the AI is not affected by things that affect how something is displayed on screen, as they resolve the data directly.
    • Playing the game at the LOWEST SPEED greatly reduces the computer's ability to think. Most people automatically boost the speed up to max because they think this will help them. It won't. It is probably the biggest factor in the difficulty of Warcraft 2. It may be painful for a twitch player, but it's a lot less painful then dealing with an enemy force that can instantly focus targets to kill all of your guys easily before you can even think, or spam heal themselves to full in seconds. I've found that not only does lowering the speed allow you to acomplish some of the feats that make the computer opponents powerful, but the computer does not take the same initiative in a slower speed game, and often they just stand there while your army of ogres/knights storm over them.
  • Compare to C&C Generals and both Battle for Middle Earth games in which the AI promptly ignores stealthed or disguised units, sometimes to comedic (or disastrous) effect. These moments often justify their bonus units and resources.
  • In the '80s arcade version of Super Dodge Ball, the first match is perfectly fair: each side has one big jock and three little jocks (with small guys on the sidelines). Then as you progress, you have face a four-on-five (with the player outnumbered), then a four-on-six, and the computer has all the big, mean guys on its side. With more big guys on the sidelines ready to hammer you. Throw in (no pun intended) a bunch of uncatchable shots and power shots that only the computer can throw, and you're in for a hard game. Oh, and there's a time limit. If time runs out, you lose the match.
  • The yellow car from RC Pro-Am exhibited signs of Rubber Band AI during certain races. Well, not exactly... the rubber band outright snapped, making that car move nearly twice as fast as all of the other cars on the track (including your own, even if you collected all of the upgrades). When you heard that tell-tale high-pitched squeal around the beginning of the second lap, it was your ass.
    • To be fair, there was a simple fix to this: shoot the bastard when he passes you. If the yellow car stops, the squealing stops and he goes back to normal. Granted, that's pretty hard when he blows right by, but it's definitely possible.
  • When a boss, the Devil-Triggered Vergil in Devil May Cry 3 is Implacable, not flinching from the player's best blows and apparently invincible. Not so when playing as Vergil, who flinches much more easily and takes conspicuous damage.
    • And let's not even go into how Vergil can eventually stay in Devil Trigger mode indefinitely when his life is low. But to be fair, he only did that in the higher difficulties, and it's refreshing to see him not have infinite Devil Trigger for the most part. Well, until you realize that he goes back into it 5 times faster than you can. And stays there longer.
    • Used in a slightly different way during the second Dante boss fight in Devil May Cry 4. The player might figure he'll be as easy as he was during the first encounter as the game's tutorial level, but this Dante is viciously fast and is capable of using every one of Dante's styles to their greatest effect. It's not so much that the computer Dante is more powerful in boss form than the playable Dante that immediately follows the fight, in fact, he is a carbon copy (except for the life bar). No, it's the fact that he can use every one of Dante's moves without the slightest error, especially when it comes to the Royal Guard style, which, when coupled with computer precision, essentially makes him invincible and Nero a dead man. In short, his computerized reflexes are far superior to yours, and there is very little you can do to compensate for this disadvantage. Even Devil Trigger is nearly worthless, and this fight has been a known cause of many controller-shaped indentations in the wall when playing on the highest difficulty level.
  • The first race in Ultimate Spider Man is almost impossible because of this and Rubberband AI.
    • Don't you mean the second one and that's the one on the skyscraper. The first one is easy and try it to find out!
  • In Luminous Arc, one enemy, Iris, the Steel Witch, has the ability to dodge attacks that are listed on-screen as being 100% sure hits. That's on top of the fact that said enemy starts with the ability to perform a Limit Break at the start of battle. Obviously, neither ability is available to your characters.
  • While the AI in Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl isn't of Rubber Band variety, it still possesses reflexes well beyond any skilled human player, including, but not limited to:
    • Being able to parry/reflect any projectile with just the shield, something that requires frame-precision timing, thus rendering projectiles largely useless. Naturally, this is not an issue if the human player is using a character who does not possess a useful projectile.
      • This has actually been remedied in brawl, where the computer ai, even on the hardest difficulty, is not capable of consistantly pulling this off, unlike in melee.
    • Being able to Meteor Cancel, even at ridiculously high percentages, meaning KO'ing them off the bottom of the screen is very difficult, further limiting options. Again, human players are much less able to consistently MC. This is circumvented by KO'ing off the side or the top, but that requires more work, because more damage needs to be built up.
    • The grab range of computer opponents seems to be far greater than when human players use them, meaning we aren't as safe as we thought we were.
    • The AI also notices when items have appeared off screen, resulting in it running off in the middle of a heated duel to grab an item that it shouldn't have even noticed until it came on-screen (on no stage is this act of cheating more obvious than on the Temple stage, where the AI will happily abandon the fight all of a sudden to run all the way to the other side of the stage to grab a Pokeball that only appeared just a second ago.)
      • If Stereo sound is enabled, one should quite easily hear the tell-tale *plink-plink* of a Pokeball hitting the ground off-screen. This only applies to Brawl (where, ironically, the Pokemon are nowhere as good as they were Melee); in Melee the Pokeball makes no special sound and you don't know that it dropped somewhere until they use it. This now applies to the Dragoon pieces, and they make no distinct sound upon impact.
    • When it comes to knocking out Dragoon parts and Final Smash Balls out of people, there's usually a high chance that you will drop it from even the weakest attacks and at low damage, but no matter how hard you hit the AI or how hurt they are, they will hardly drop the said items.
    • Speaking of Final Smashes, when the AI uses Sonic's or Pikachu's, not only are you the prime target, but they have PERFECT control over their powers, as in they will only miss once in a lifetime.
    • To add to the frustration of the already cheap as hell Wario Ware stage, the computer always seems to get rewarded with invincibility for completing a microgame a lot more than you do.
    • No Interface Screw in the world is going to deter the AI.
      • When Togepi appears and performs Night Shade, the screen goes COMPLETELY black. Not only you can't see what the hell you are doing, but the AI knows EXACTLY where you are in the darkness, making this Pokemon move more of a hindrance. Likewise, the Nintendog assist, which has a puppy cover up a significant amount of the screen, won't stop them either.
      • Also in Brawl, the AI have perfect bearings when the controls or the stage in Spear Pillar is reversed, making the fight much harder and cheaper than it needs to be.
      • Not to mention generally grabbing a Cloaking Device in any single player mode in Melee. There was an Event match that had both Fox and Falco permanently invisible just to drive the opposing point home. Evil bastards.
      • Also, in a Fast special match, the computer will have obscenely good reflexes and is able to make moves faster than a human opponent can react, since it's not limited by human reaction time.
    • And to top it all off, all this and more is characteristic of the AI on the easiest difficulty.
    • But what is hilarious is that in Melee, on the highest AI, the CPU character ALWAYS suicide themselves in the donkey kong arena if you stand on the other side of the stage.
    • The final match before Master Hand in brawl is a Battle Royal... except for the fact that it's not. CPU characters focus on killing the player, instead of each other. This is even more evident with the Dragoon. It always focuses on you.
      • In fact, this seems to be the case in a regular free for all match. There will always be at least one guy who will stalk you no matter how much you try to distance yourself and when they do, it attracts attention from the other AI players, thus you get caught in the "brawl."
      • In one match this troper had, the level in Pokemon Stadium 2 changed to a mountain theme. Kirby has a final smash ready, but gets "stuck" behind a mountain, not even bothering to fully jump over and reach the human player. The other two AI players keep walking back and forth, ignoring Kirby when they could have attacked him many times over. As soon as the stage goes back to normal, Kirby goes after this troper instead of the other players that were next to him for a whole minute, proving the AI hates humans.
      • And this troper swears on all that is holy that when an AI player knocked him out with a final smash, the other AI characters actually taunted when I was knocked off, even though they didn't do anything! If this isn't proof enough that the AI hates you, I dunno what is.
      • The AI on level nine in free-for-alls will never attack their own, making it a team battle with friendly fire enabled.
    • Playing on higher difficulty levels in Classic Mode (and most modes, really) reveals that the computer takes a very cheap shortcut to making the fights much harder. Do they simply make the game's AI much more challenging and intelligent? Nope, they just make the attacks of the CPU controlled characters MUCH stronger than you ever are. They can cause much higher levels of damage and can knock you away further than normal. This is intensely irritating in Giant matches where (often with an idiotic CPU partner) a single well-placed smash attack can launch you off the stage if you're not extremely careful.
  • Dawn Of War Dark Crusade has some truly irritating sort of cheating. Enemy territories could have 'two bases' in defense. What this actually means is that you face two AI when attacking that territory. This doesn't sound so bad until you realize that they both have separate soldier caps, which leads to you having to fight, at most, two armies, two huge super weapons of doom, two incarnations of a God, etc. etc. You, however, have to slog it through the hard way.
    • It's worse than that, in fact. Not only does the AI start with two bases on some maps, but those bases start off built up to at least Tier 2 on the tech tree, allowing the AI to come at you with high end super units long before you could get anywhere near them. Fortunately it loses that advantage in Soulstorm.
    • The third Expansion Pack, Soulstorm continues this fine tradition of Cheating AI Bastardhood, being able to freely and instantly replace it's commander's Honour Guard units, and being more than happy to throw those at you at the start of a map, and when controlling the Dark Eldar race, it is able to use offensive Soul Powers on your units no matter where they are on the map, despite the fact that, as Dark Eldar, you can only cast Soul Powers in visible areas outside the fog of war.
  • In the Star Wars Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games, All other force using characters (enemies and friends) possess immense force batteries, have bullet-time perfect reflexes and cannot be surprised. Furthermore, their force powers don't cool down and can be reused instantly. (Theoretically, this is how a Jedi should be anyway, so it's more that the player's been nerfed than the NPCs have been buffed. Regardless...) All this is designed to make them impossible to kill without a lightsabre, since they will deflect blaster bolts and telekinetically redirect missiles straight back at you. When you have a Jedi NPC, a Dark Jedi NPC and a missile launcher (or better still the concussion rifle) in the same room, it is actually possible to get the two to play a deadly game of Force Push tennis.
    • These forms of buffness make for some interesting tactics. An enemy's rapidfire force-push or two-handed lighting blast makes for a great charge-up when Force Absorb is engaged, and also reveals just how strong with the force Jaden (the PC) really is (i.e. not).
      • With certain tricks, it is possible to kill a Dark Jedi with a ranged weapon. For example, a moderately-charged blast from the Tenloss Disruptor Rifle (effectively the game's sniper rifle, which wasn't blockable with a sabre) aimed at the targets crotch would cause a force sensitive enemy to leap into the air. If you were quick, you could then catch them in midair with a second blast.
      • Enemies also didn't actually calculate where they were jumping to if they were attempting to avoid explosions, meaning that quite often they would casually leap off cliffs to their doom.
    • The AI opponents DO have a weakness that makes the game stupidly easy when learned (they can be force pushed when jumping).
      • Given that this works on the final boss in both games, it probably wasn't intentional.
    • The Dark Jedi enemies (except possibly the bosses and the occasional miniboss) do not possess endless Force power. Several pushes or pulls is it takes to drain them, at which point you can hammer them with all the explosives or disruptor shots you like. They do, however, have no cooldown when they still have a reservoir or Force power, which is bloody annoying when they're alternating between push and pull.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City suffers from Divine Driving Skills in the Malibu Bank Robbery mission "The Driver," where, barring crashes with police cars, your opponent is an infallible driver, and those crashes have to be engineered by you or unexpectedly from the side. He will always dodge head-on collisions. He also recovers abnormally fast from said crashes too, sometimes being able to turn back onto the road without even coming to a stop. This troper gave up in frustration and ignored the game for two whole months.
    • That mission also suffers from the 'Race Ringer' in that you are driving a generic family sedan while your opponent is driving a badass souped-up muscle car.
      • AND this mission suffered from a glitch where occasionally you would fall through a bridge as you were just about to win.
      • To be fair, this glitch can affect the AI opponent as well, causing him to fall through the bridge and make the mission laughably easy.
  • If a move has an accuracy of less than 100% in Pokemon, you can guarantee that your likelihood of missing is the listed value, while the computer's likelihood of missing is half that, at best. Further, if there is a positive secondary effect that can kick in with a move, you can practically guarantee the computer will get it twice as often. And to top it off, the three status ailments that have a chance of preventing a Pokemon to act (confusion, paralysis, and attraction) will be much more likely to afflict a human player than a computer player. The frustration with this is so great, human players refer to Pokemon built to take advantage of these as "hax" and most are dismissive of those who try to use such tactics in Pv P environments.
    • If your Pokemon is confused then you're in for about a 50% chance of dealing damage to yourself. The computer does not go by this rule- although admittedly, Pokemon does a better job with this than some other RP Gs, most notably EarthBound, where feeling strange affects your party members nearly 100% but pretty much never affects your opponents.
    • It doesn't help that random computer players with no plot significance tend to have Pokemon that learned powerful moves about five levels early, either.
      • And let's not forget that Gym Leaders don't seem to be governed by the same rules of evolution as the player. This editor remembers facing Lance as the Pokemon League Champion in one game where he had a couple of third-evolution Pokemon a good five levels under the required one. Considering that said third-evolution Pokemon smoked this editor's team, it was not a pleasant experience.
      • His Aerodactyl is definitely 'Sharked: it has Rock Slide, which it can't learn in the second gen.
      • So was pretty much every computer controlled Machoke/Machamp in the game. This made Chuck's Gym a pain to get through, to say nothing of Chuck himself, whose Poliwrath spammed Hypnosis and Dynamic Punch (which causes instant confusion by the way), with 60% and 50% accuracies respectively, and both hit EVERY DAMN TIME!!!!!!
      • In later games, Pokemon learning moves early is actually justified - a skilled breeder can get level-up moved bred into level 1 Pokemon, so presumably the computer-controlled trainers bred their own. While the player can't do this at first, many Tournament Play fans abuse this in the Metagame.
    • The battle tower in the latest two games screws with odds to the point where your low odds of success never work and the AI's always do.
      • This is most notable with any instant-kill effect, which theoreticallly all have 30% success rates (in the newest generation, the right held item can boost that to 33%). Experienced Battle Tower players key in on anything that could conceivably learn Sheer Cold, Guillotine, Fissure, or Horn Drill first, or lose their entire team in as many rounds as they have Pokemon.
      • Later levels of the Battle Tower (usually 50 and up) also seem to include Pokemon with specific stats that exceed their possible limit, even with maximum EV training. It's pretty frustrating to have an entire fully trained team wiped out by a single Pokemon because its stats are inexplicably twice as high as they should be.
      • The Diamond/Pearl battle with Palmer especially. His Miltic killed EVERY member of my squad. By using Hydro Pump. ALL of them hit. And on paper, my Luxray should have OHKO it. Grrr.
    • The Stadium games deserve special mention, where the most common (read:Only in all but a handful) method of loss for someone with a decent team is cheating computers.
      • In fact, the game seems to do little to mask how it's cheating. Play a hard AI in free battle and compare it to an easy or normal AI: It isn't smarter, just a bigger cheater, with every other hit as a critical hit, improbably accurate instant-KO moves, et cetera.
      • In the first Stadium game, if you even try to use a Ground type Pokemon or any other Pokemon who is weak to water against Lt. Surge's Pikachu or Raichu in the Gym Leader Castle, they will use Surf! I wish I was kidding! Those Mons technically cannot learn Surf through the HM, but a hidden method within the Stadium game lets you teach a Pikachu Surf, which is the only way to do it without using a cheating device.
      • And while we're on the subject of Stadium, there is at least one trainer who has a Mew in their party. The kicker? You can't get a Mew within the game by normal means.
      • One of the NORMAL trainers managed to take out both a mew and mewtwo using average pokemon. Those guys cheat nomatter what.
    • This troper swears on all that is holy that once, while playing Blue version long ago, one of the Elite Four somehow taught one of her pokemon Toxic right in the middle of the battle, there was even a message declaring that she had used a TM. It is still unknown whether this was a glitch or not, however.
    • When battling against the Elite 4, this troper noticed that they seemed to have infinite PP. This means that while your Pokemon can use Gyro Ball (PP 5) five times, the computer can just keep using it over and over and over.
    • Not only do status conditions seem ineffective on the computer, but they tend to wear off obscenely fast. This, compounded with the biased accuracy, means that your Hypnosis seems to have a 1/3 chance of hitting and might keep the opponent asleep for two turns, and his Hypnosis will miss once in a blue moon and make you sleep for ten turns- or enough turns to get K Oed.
    • It doesn't stop there. In Pokemon Puzzle League, the computers on Very Hard and especially Super Hard move so fast that they are, in fact, faster than any normal human could possibly move. This Troper got through Super Hard by getting lucky...the computer still messes up occasionally. Oh, but it gets worse. If you lose at Stage 16 - the final level - you go back to Stage 15. So, what are the odds of getting lucky twice in a row on Super Hard?
      • Pretty good, actually. The computer is blindingly fast, but human controls can get about five eighths of that speed at times - more than enough to obliterate it the exact moment it messes up. Which it will, because the AI is an idiot.
  • The 2D Worms games were particularly bad at this. Depending on the difficulty setting, AI opponents may have pixel-perfect accuracy with their bazookas, would always get a favorable wind, and will launch grenades that explode exactly when it hits you.
    • On the other hand, since the grenade, shotgun, and bazooka are usually in infinite supply, they will rely exclusively on these and ignore more powerful weapons like the sheep. They will also try to hit you with a perfect ballistic arc, even when it would be trivially easy to use the terrain to help guide the shot. And every Wormer's best friend, the Ninja Rope? AIs never use it.
  • Some players would suggest that the Familiar Surgeons' healing abilities in Dungeon Siege II: Broken World work a little too well.
  • In the PSP remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, the Onion Knight job is marked by being able to use any piece of equipment, being unable to use abilities, yet having extremely high stats when mastered. However, in one link mission, you and your partner must defeat a team of master Onion Knights who have a full range of powerful abilities equipped.
    • Time Mages have the movement skill "Teleport", which allows moving anywhere on the map, but with a chance (roughly proportional to distance) that the movement will fail. At least in the PS1 original, some special enemies are blessed with "Teleport 2", which never fails. The only way for a player character to get "Teleport 2" is to hexedit the save or use a cheat device; otherwise, it exists solely for the sake of ad-hoc Fake Difficulty.
    • Hell, Final Fantasy Tactics is just plain cheap, even in the original version. It doesn't matter what the hit percentages say, you WILL miss the enemy when it matters most, and said enemy WILL hit you back and more than likely screw you over. This Troper has personally seen a Dual Wielding Ninja hit his Ramza, who had Blade Grasp and 97 Brave (i.e. a mere 3% chance of being hit AT ALL) with two hits. Two CRITICAL hits. Result: Ramza dies, match ends. I'd like to say that was the only time such a thing happened, but I'd be lying.
  • In Master of Orion II, the AI is able to spend money to "buy" research instantly. The human player can't.
    • Also, higher difficulty levels simply grant AI players more racial abilities for free rather than significantly changing the AI behavior.
      • Antarans seem to come in greater force and attack the player more often on harder difficulties. Since Antarans pilot ridiculously advanced ships, this can often result in a colony's total destruction.
      • Or, since a skilled player can often capture and canniballize Antaran ships, it could result in an empire suddenly becoming overwhelmingly dominant.
  • In Empire Earth, on the hardest difficulty setting, the computer is basically just cheating constantly.
  • Dark Sims (a type of multiplayer bot) in the original Perfect Dark were meant to be cheating bastards: they shoot perfectly, they always know where you are, they spawn with the best available weapon in the match, and the game tells you most of this in their description. They're the opposite of Meat Sims, who are designed to miss 95% of the time and walk straight by opponents and useful weapons.
    • Thanks to a programming error, however, the difficulty swaps when projectile explosives become involved. Since they move slower through the air than bullets, the Dark Sims aiming to hit end up being easy to dodge, and the Meat Sims aiming to miss shoot right into your path!
  • An actual evidence of cheating has been found in StarCraft. There, modders eventually deciphered the files that control AI actions. While most opcodes in them just match normal player actions, they also found codes that will give the AI player instant ore and gas or let it create units out of nowhere. In addition, if you extract the campaign maps and open them in the map editor, you'll see how surprisingly often the AI is helped by scripted game events ("Triggers"). This goes so far that the AI plays with unlimited resources for almost the whole campaign. To be fair though, those advantages are usually not abused, so the game doesn't become frustrating even despite the cheating.
    • In fact, they are not abused to the point where this troper has run them completely out of resources in custom games EVERY SINGLE TIME. to say nothing of the fact that the AI loses it's ability to think when it's fields are exhausted.
    • There is one exception in the skirmish mode, though. At the time when the Brood War expansion was released, computer opponents in skirmish mode were apparently able to utilize buildings even while they were under construction. The easiest way to test this is to attempt a Dark Templar rush against a Terran opponent; the Terran will be able to use a half-built Comsat Station to detect your invisible units.
  • In World of Warcraft, one thing the computer can do that all players hate: Daze. All mobs have a chance of applying daze when they hit a player in melee range that is facing away from the mob. [1] It slows your running speed by half and dismounts you.
    • There's a boss whose story leans toward this. When he was first introduced, one of his actions was to turn the entire raid facing him into sheep and sit down for a drink to restore mana - a parody of the mage class. However, burst damage would break his concentration, so one of the Shaman's newly-introduced Elemental Totems (short-term summons) could keep him from restoring mana. The dev team didn't like that, so if he gets hit while drinking he'll just pop a mana potion instead to get the same effect, and use the time saved to get a head start on blasting everyone.
    • The mass sheeping also works on players immune to polymorph, just as most boss events that stun the player or put him to sleep to let something happen (getting new weapons, resurrecting allies) cannot be broken by the tools specifically in place to do so. What's that? Insignias? Racial abilities? Forget about it.
    • There is also a boss that you have to play an imitation of chess against. The AI isn't particularly good at it, so the boss cheats every once in a while (with a visible announcement)
  • In Ridge Racer 6 for the Xbox 360 (and perhaps the other Ridge Racer games, this editor hasn't spent enough time with the other games in the series to know for sure), the computer cheats so often it's almost pointless to even try the harder difficulty levels and race types. Special races, for example, pit you against a car that you can win if you beat it. This car is always better than any car you have available at the time. Also, the "Reverse Nitro" races are well known for rampant cheating. In a Reverse Nitro race, your car cannot gain nitro from drifting like it can normally, so you are given an extra two tanks to work with and the only way to get them back is to go into what the game calls "Ultimate Charge" (coming out of a nitro blast while drifting). Somehow, all computer controlled cars in these races can gain nitro simply by driving in a straight line for a couple of seconds, completely ignoring all the rules for nitro boosts set out for you. This means they can, suddenly, blow past you with a fully charged 3-tank nitro boost just after they finished another 3-tank nitro boost.
  • Guitar Hero III has become very well known for this trope. This editor has experienced it himself when battling Tom Morello on Medium mode. Slash and Lou are very easy because they have more than enough notes to screw up on if you hit them with a power-up. Tom Morello, however, has just enough notes that, no matter how much he screws up, he will never lose.
    • If you don't use a power-up, they will NEVER miss a single note.
  • In a twist on AI favoring RNGs, newer Fire Emblem games use a two RNG (see http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/elaice/general/truehit.html) system where the listed hit percentage (barring 0 and 100% chances), are fake, the actual results favor high hit percentages hitting and low ones missing, this normally results in the RNG favoring the player (although it benefits some bosses as well), whose units have significantly higher hit percentages then enemy canon fodder.
    • Fire Emblem also contains arena opponents that have stats higher than the stat caps their particular class is supposed to have...
      • This troper laughed out loud when he saw a generic Soldier in the arena, a fodder class that lacked a playable version and had no promotion, with ?? displayed as his health, meaning that his health was higher than 80, something only the final boss of the game could have boasted.
  • In Midtown Madness, some racing modes involve competing against computer-controlled cars, and since you are always in danger of smashing into vehicles or obstacles, it helps greatly that they are too (not to mention that it's gratifying to see them smash head-on into oncoming traffic or miss a critical turn). Except that if they ever leave your immediate surroundings and end up in a part of the city of Chicago that isn't currently being "simulated," they go into cruise mode and move quickly and safely wherever they are meant to go next. In one of the races, a single computer car takes a very different route than the rest, meaning that in order to win you must be very lucky to have it crash during the parts of the race when it ends up being near you.
  • In Final Fantasy XI, at least for most jobs, in order to unlock the ability to level from 70 to 75 on a character, you must defeat Maat, a geriatric yet powerful fighter, in combat. It normally is somewhat challenging, and for some job classes, an important test of their fighting skills. The cheating comes in the form of Asuran Fists, which has the potential to take a player out in one shot. The problem, however lies in his ability to use the attack consecutively, WITHOUT END, until you are a pile of fine paste. Horror stories of Paladins using their Invincible 2-hour and getting smacked in the face with Asuran Fists for 0 damage each time repeatedly(Until said Invincible wears off, then they die) pretty much confirm that no matter how hard you try, it's the old fart that decides if you win or lose.
  • The Monster Rancher series suffers from the same cheating as Pokémon, that PC simply ignores the missing rate, and top on this, your monster has far more chance of doing "foolery" instead of attacking, even when both are supposed to be equally unloyal due to master inexperience.
  • In the Descent: Freespace series, the AI ships (friendly or hostile) can target even in scrambled radar situations that make stuff "untargetable." This means that the AI ships can use their normal aspect-seeking missiles on targets that you wouldn't be able to do the same to. However, this can be exploited with the "Target my target's target" key. When you're in a mission where the enemy has some Applied Phlebotinum that prevents you from targeting them, you can select a friendly ship that's engaged with an "untargetable," press the "target my target's target" key, and viola! Start firing away those Interceptors. This is highly useful, for example, in the missions when you first encounter the Shivans, the Shivans being untargetable supposedly due to your ship's lack of information on Shivan electronics, or in the Silent Threat missions that feature the stealth Lokis.
    • Unlike you, the AI can still target you if you destroy their sensors subsystem (if that happens to your fighter, your radar and targeting computer will be disabled), and fire if their weapons subsystem is disabled, but with less accuracy. In Freespace 2, while you have a limited sensor range when flying in a nebula, the AI can target enemies from any distance and pursue you even if you can't see them. However, the AI are less capable than the player in other regards, the degree of impairment being dependent on difficulty level.
      • Disabling the weapons subsystems will disable the gun and missile hardpoints on fighters or bombers. Turrets on capital ships on the other hand, will lose accuracy without the weapons subsystem but will still have to be individually disabled. This is how it works with all ships (including the player ship if the player is flying a bomber with an automated turret, like an Ursa).
  • The Command And Conquer series:
    • The first game had AI that could build anywhere it likes, despite the fact that the player can only build next to his own structures. However, in the campaign, the AI only builds structures in the exact same place. This can be exploited by placing your own unit or structure where the original destroyed structure of the enemy stood, preventing them from rebuilding the structure.
    • Also in the first game, the last GDI mission had the NOD harvesters instantly fill up a bunch of Tiberium silos in one trip. The enemy gathers resources very quickly that you can't expect to win because their production far outstrips yours. In that mission, there were actually a bunch of hidden, lightly- to wholly-unguarded Tiberium silos which only seemed to exist for you to be able to capture all that Tiberium for yourself. Apparently the enemy doesn't mind you gathering their insane amounts of Tiberium, if only because you don't stand a chance otherwise.
      • The AI's ability to instantly fill up all of their silos at once is actually a constant throughout the game, GDI or Nod. The last GDI mission is just the only one where it's also your saving grace.
    • Also in the first game, the AI would inexorably attack the northernmost structure in your base first, despite fog of war or any stealth factors. This can be exploited to your advantage, of course.
    • The Red Alert series feature Gap Generators, structures which create a permanent shroud above itself, effectively hiding anything that is covered by its radius of effect. It is somewhat effective in multiplayer for long games, because it can hide units and structures, forcing your opponents to guess what sort of attack to send your way. However, it's completely useless against AI opponents, which are omniscient and can target any specific unit or structure, even ones that it isn't supposed to see.
    • Tiberian Sun allso cheats, in skirmish mode. No matter the difficulty, the AI knows exactly where your Construction Yard is, even if you moved it halfway across the map prior to deploying it, so long as they have seen ANY of your UNITS. Even a lowly Scout Bike.
    • Tiberium Wars continues the series fine tradition of cheating, this time in Skirmish maps on the 360 version. Fire up a game on Easy difficulty, and the enemy is a pushover. Fire it up on Medium, with any personality type other than Balanced, and it very quickly goes from a mild challenge to you wondering where the hell the enemy came up with twenty Avatars five minutes into the match.
  • Those who played SNK vs. Capcom (also known as "SvC Chaos") learned to dislike Goenitz, an SNK sub-boss with an attack targeting one of four areas on the screen (close, close-mid, mid, far) that always knew exactly where you would be, canceled projectiles, and was spammed constantly, making getting close enough to hit an exercise in frustrating patience.
    • Even Goenitz's bastardhood paled in the face of Ryu's, whose anti-air Dragon Punch special had easily abusable invincibility frames A player can learn to take advantage of this, but not with the CPU's efficiency. What made Ryu a nightmare was that he used it all the time and could counter literally anything but projectiles with it. This editor, unfortunately, tried beating him with Kim, who has only physical attacks, resulting in not only countered air attacks, but countered specials, countered pokes, countered sweeps, and point-blank countered super attacks. The only way to win against a late-level Ryu was to wait for him to attack and pray you could counter before his move ended (when he would inevitably Dragon Punch).
  • The Triple Triad card game in Final Fantasy VIII had another blatant example of cheating. Normally, the human player and the computer can see each other's hands, making the card game fairly easy to win. However, whenever the hands are concealed, the computer's win rate goes up more than tenfold, as it seems perfectly aware what cards you have, and its cards are not so much "hidden" as "the computer's single remaining card has the exact combination of three values, in three specific locations, needed to win." This is especially frustrating as you watch it happen ten times in a row.
    • Made even worse when you're on the Lunar Base, where practically every card rule is in effect.
  • Brilliantly subverted in one boss battle of Final Fantasy X. The boss does have a move that will instantly kill the entire party without fail unless they have anti-KO armor (unlikely at that point in the game) or are zombified. Ironically, it also has a move it uses earlier in the fight which zombifies the entire party with the same kind of accuracy, making them immune to the other attack. Players who prioritize removal of negative statuses from the party - or, worse, cleverly outfit the entire party with zombie-proof gear beforehand - often find this battle infuriating.
    • However, if you don't dezombify your party, you'll be killed off by the massive cure spells cast by said boss. It's a good idea to have two zombie-proof characters and one that stays zombied.
  • 'Swashbucklers: Blue vs Grey' has two examples of computer cheating: in naval battles, it has unlimited ammo for special weapons. You don't. In sword-fighting mini-game both you and computer has access to powerful two-hit combo. If you get hit once, you won't be able to block the second hit. Computer, however, can block it.
  • Even though World in Conflict has quite clever bots to fill the gaps in multiplayer, the campaign features standard fare AI, which doesn't use special abilities nor tactical aids, but makes up for it by far superior numbers. Given the game's unique gameplay, this rarely becomes an issue except in the few cases where the player is forced to hold out without reinforcements.
  • Leveling terrain in Transport Tycoon is extremely useful, but also extremely expensive. Of course, the AI players don't pay for it. This was not fixed in the Deluxe edition of the game. Other omission: they build roads and railroad much faster than the mouse interface would allow, often denying the player subsidies, awards for being the first company to perform some transportation.
  • Goldeneye: Rogue Agent had this in the form of the Omen gun, a weapon that, if it hits, kills anything in one shot. When wielded by the player it has a slow trigger-to-shot time, the glow obscures the aim, and misses 50-90% of the time. When equipped to the faceless, nameless guards, however, it became game-breakingly annoying to the player, as even being winged by it leads to having the restart the section repeatedly.
  • This troper got through nearly the entirety of Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, up until the last level. Utilizing a desperate final strike, sacrificing heroes and other heavy hitters, the enemy's own heroes (the biggest threat) were eliminated, and the scenario's win was almost accomplished... which was when this troper found out that the enemy heroes could be brought back easily three times as fast as your own. After this, cheat codes were not only necessary, but fully justified.
    • Hah. You want cheating? Use the cheat that allows you to see the whole map during the last mission of Reign of Chaos, and watch how ridiculously fast the enemy, with seemingly limitless resources, cranks out enemies for the next wave.
      • To be fair, it's a survival mission, and you have two allies that can hold their ground for quite some time with your help. However, the final wave against each is impossible to stop.
      • Mostly because of Archimonde. While the final waves themselves ARE ridiculously powerful, the indestructible mega-demon with the ridiculously powerful attack is what makes the waves impossible to stop.
    • In quick games at least on the harder settings, the computer gains twice as much gold for the same amount of resource gathering. Also, if you try to expand before them to keep up, every single player on the map will charge headlong at your mine, Fog of War be damned.
  • This troper was infuriated by the horse race minigame in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time where you must race Ingo in order to get Epona. He is given a head start before your buttons even start responding, every time. Interestingly, this is one of the few times where The Computer Being A Cheating Bastard is actually Justified with an in-story reason: Ingo is a Jerkass.
    • One of the most blatant examples. The only way to beat the bastard was to cut him up early and road hog him. It became a game of sticking to him as best you could, because his horse was incapable of getting tired.
  • The Arena in Armored Core 2 features Humongous Mecha that fight against you, outfitted with weapons and equipment that don't exist. The real kicker is that even if you could buy said equipment, you couldn't put it all on one AC without that AC being incapable of fighting to begin with.
  • A certain chess program, when it was close to losing, would actually flash the message "The [piece] has escaped!" and that piece would appear back on the board. Obviously, only the computer's pieces ever 'escaped'. One suspects this isn't how Deep Blue beat Kasparov.
    • Outside of violating the actual rules of Chess, nearly all Chess programs 'cheat' in a sense as well, since, being computers, they not only lack the ability to make stupid moves based on emotion (which can be a big part of Chess), but all their moves are actually planned out ahead of time. Programming Chess games for most programs is based around just churning out as many scripted moves as possible, so if you end up in a certain position, the AI will always make the exact same move. This can be interesting when the AI is unintentionally programmed with a stupid move, which means the player can just exploit it again and again and the AI will never correct itself.
      • Since human players do the same kind of memorization (although not on the same scale), I don't see how this could be cheating even in the loosest sense of the word.
      • It's not so much cheating as having a race between two competitors, one of them a flesh and blood human, and the other being a car.
    • Watch the chess in Kubrick's 2001 very carefully. Or I'll tell you to save time: HAL declares a checkmate that doesn't actually exist, and his human opponent is either so bored or has so strongly assumed that HAL would win, that he doesn't challenge the mistake.
    • Actually, THAT'S how Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It at one point made a mistake, Kasparov assumed that there was no way such a machine could make such a stupid mistake, did not exploit it, and lost.
  • In Tecmo Bowl if you got Los Angeles as one of your final two opponents, 99% of all players would simply reset. Bo Jackson's legendary unstoppable nature DOUBLED when controlled by the CPU. If the CPU decided it was time to score, even if you called the correct play Jackson would break every tackle and zoom down the field at speeds downright impossible for human controlled players. Tecmo Super Bowl didn't have any Bo level players, but was just as bad about simply running through you whenever it felt like it.
  • Anyone who's played Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords has horror stories of random enemies erasing half of his HP in a single turn, attempts at forging rune items that fell flat when the CPU would spend DOZENS of turns refusing to drop an anvil, or attempts to learn a spell foiled because the board REFUSED to line up for a needed combo.
    • And then there's Spell Resistance. An enemy with 10% resistance to a mana type is supposed to mean "Your spell will be blocked roughly 10% of the time." In practice, it turns into "Your spell will connect 10% of the time."
    • Interestingly, the programmer for the game was asked about the problem with the CPU getting crazy combos earlier in the game, but it seems it wasn't any sort of malicious programming; the AI simply doesn't make human mistakes (such as not seeing groups of 4) and the random nature of the falling bricks is just as likely to help the player. As a matter of fact, he's stated that he doesn't even know how to rig the game beyond that point.
      • The truth or falsehood of that claim notwithstanding, there is one aspect where the computer demonstrably cheats. Every time either combatant makes a move, there is a small (5% or less) chance that they will get an extra turn. The AI knows when its "random" extra turns are coming and, when they are, it moves gems in ways that would directly conflict with its normal priorities if the player was going to go next.
  • Europa Universalis notably doesn't make an AI at war with both another AI and a player automatically prioritize the player, allowing players to take full advantage of one of history's most consistently effective strategies, but falls into this trope in numerous other ways. The extra advantages it gives an AI on higher difficulty settings are publicly accessible, though.
  • Having run out of ideas for making the player think, Wild Arms 4 just stops trying to add legitimate challenge by the end, especially in the fight with Lambda. His inherent fighting ability is that, and the game actually tells you this, he randomly takes no damage from your attacks. At all. It may not seem like a big deal, at first, but when you can't even hurt a boss 9 times out of 10 (from this troper's experience, that's about what the probability was), it stops being funny about 2 minutes into the fight.
  • Blizzard has an odd way of inverting the trope, as well as occasionally using it (see the War Craft III and Star Craft entries, above), though this particular method is also used in some other games: except for the cheat code that gives your units invulnerability, the computer gets the benefit of any cheat code entered.
    • Which makes using the 'Infinite Mana' cheat on Warcraft 2 almost guaranteed death for your side - the invulnerability cheat does not work against spells, and the computer can target and spam-cast spells faster than a human can possibly react, so without the one-or-two spell limit provided by mana, a players entire force can find itself Deathcoiled into oblivion or permanently turned into sheep.
  • This troper hated the big battle at the end of Tales of the Sword Coast (the expansion for the first Baldurs Gate), because it had an ability that allowed a save--but blatantly overrode the results of the save to affect the target anyway, every single time to every single party member in over a dozen tries. And this troper knows this because thanks to judicious leveling and use of magic items, not a single one of his main character's saves was greater than 1 (and some were less than one). Without a save penalty on that ability of at least -10, it is...highly improbable at best that he wouldn't have made the save at least once. Oddly, though, around the thirteenth try, something weird happened at the ability ended up reflected at the creature...and it didn't make the save, either. Heh.
    • It gets worse in Baldur's Gate II. Attacking the Shadow Theives' Guildhall before you have a quest requesting that you do just that will result in a random assassin popping out of nowhere and killing your entire party no matter what, one character at a time. He always hits, has infinite AC and hit points, and all of his hits will kill your characters in one shot - and he's permanently hasted and can follow your characters even if you use cheats to teleport them to a different area. This troper only found out because he enabled cheat keys, and used the instant kill command to deal thousands upon thousands of damage to the guy, and still didn't kill him. If you trigger the ire of the unnamed assasssin, you will end up reloading the game.
    • Amazingly, it gets even worse in the Throne of Bhall expansion, where the final boss has to be killed four times, resting up to full health between each fight, while you have to fight things while she rests. She's capable of summoning dozens of creatures that are too powerful to summon per round, can teleport around at will, and hits far harder than epic level fighters despite being a caster type. Oh, and she can move during *your* time stop.
    • Speaking of teleportation, nearly every mage in Baldur's Gate II can teleport - except for you. No one in the universe has a dimension door scroll for you to buy, with no explanation given at all.
  • Burnout 3: Takedown features broken one-way Rubberband AI in many of its events. When you're in the lead, driving perfectly and constantly boosting, the AI will be, as a helpful yellow pop-up caption exclaims, "right on your tail!" no matter how many times you wreck them. The moment you crash, they start to take an insurmountable 30-second lead that is nearly impossible to catch up to.
  • If your attack is blocked by the computer in Fatal Fury 2, the computer will throw you. Doesn't matter what difficulty level, or how strong the attack and the subsequent blockstun is - the computer will throw you.
  • Any racing game the promises "realistic damage modeling" means your car will take damage and be hampered by it, the AI cars will not.
  • Soul Series has their moments of blatant cheating, but Soul Calibur III has the most notorious examples.
    • The AI will suddenly block every throw, land their throws on your character despite being theoretically out of range, block or counter every move the player has used so far in the "set" of battles (even if the CPU character's back is turned, and it's not Voldo!). Read: The computer opponent will read your controller inputs. Every. Single. Time. This Troper notes that PC-controlled Mitsurugi, Zasalamel, and Abyss are the worst offenders for this.
    • If you get knocked down even once, you'll usually NEVER get a chance to fight back, unless the CPU decides to ease up.
    • SNK Boss Night Terror is an especially egregious example, nulling the time-honored Ring-Out defeat by flying back when knocked out of the arena (sure Word Of God stated they're trying to de-emphasize the use of Ring-Outs...), and a stance that rendered it invincible.
    • Setsuka when controlled by the computer. Just....Setsuka. She is the destroyer of controllers and the crusher of souls.
    • This troper's also noticed that even when you DO actually have a good chance of winning, the opponent will suddenly go completely batshit insane in terms of speed and power, and will demolish your entire life meter in two or three hits. Really, really noticeable in Chronicles of the Sword. Chronicle 5 and onward will make you snap your controller in sheer frustration. Even worse is that you have to beat this mode once in order to unlock some of the custom parts for custom fighters that cannot be unlocked via abuse of versus mode.
    • Soul Calibur II's Weapon Master mode starts placing incredibly blatant handicaps on you later on. ("Now defeat this character...and he only takes damage from being knocked into the wall!") One of them was to make the opponent invisible except for what they're holding or carrying--that is, their weapon. In other words, if you wanted the slightest chance of even hitting them, let alone hitting them enough to win, you had to keep your eye on their weapon at all times to so much as see which general direction they're in. In other news, the Playstation 2 version of this game included Heihachi from Tekken, who fights barehanded. See if you can tell where this is going.
  • Nethack is a notable aversion of this: unless a specific creature's basic nature gives it immunity, if a weapon/trap/wand works on you, it works on everybody. (ie, everyone falls into the hidden pit if they step into the trapped square, except creatures with wings.)
    • Well, it mainly avoid this trope. Which magic items have which appearance is randomized from game to game, forcing the player to figure out which is which anew in each new game, but all monsters already have this knowledge. And if stepping on a certain trap is to a monster's benefit then it will head straight towards it, while the player has to discover all traps via observation or bad luck.
  • The nigh-forgotten Eternal Champions games on the Sega Genesis and Sega CD were 2D fighters that took the unusual approach of requiring "inner energy" for all special moves. Theoretically, this forced the player to learn the characters and apply specific strategies in every possible matchup... Except against the AI, which could always execute specials with sheer and utter disregard of it's own energy levels.
    • Even more, well, insulting, charact