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alt title(s): The AI Is A Cheating Bastard
The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard

Good luck with that.

"Cheat wherever you can. A.I.s are handicapped. They need to cheat from time to time if they're going to close the gap... Never get caught cheating. Nothing ruins the illusion of a good A.I. like seeing how they're cheating."
— Jonny Ebert, lead designer of Dawn Of War 2 on video game A.I.

"Oh, and to add insult to injury, Seth is generally regarded as one of the least effective player characters in the game. That's right: He's only awesome when he's computer-controlled. Because the computer is a cheap, cheating bastard."
— Jeremy Parish on Seth from Street Fighter IV

"Cheatin' bitch." *pours drink into the computer to break it*
'Kurt Russel, The Thing

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. But you oversteer on one a turn and bang against the rail. Surprise! The AI cars zip past you as if they'd been drafting your rear bumper all this time. What — where — when — why — HOW!? The AI is a Cheating Bastard, of course!

The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard whenever the "game world's rules" are different between you and the AI-controlled opponents. When used as a quick-and-dirty substitute for good game design, this becomes a method of adding Fake Difficulty to a game, sometimes leading to Luck Based Missions. On the other hand, until computers replace humans, it's unlikely AI will ever be able to challenge human players on equal terms. Older games fall victim to this trope more often, since hardware and AI capabilities have evolved over the years, but modern games are often Cheating Bastards too.

In ZX Spectrum forums such as news:comp.sys.sinclair, this phenomenon (real or imagined) is known as "cheatingbastness".

Some games have even used the fact that their AI is not a cheating bastard as a selling point. Conversely, arcade versions of games often cheat more, to increase sales.

Sometimes, the computer only cheats at higher difficulty levels. Particularly conscientious games even tell you so. These are often considered exceptions to the trope: The Computer is still Cheating, but not a Bastard, since you asked for it, the equivalent of differing handicap weights in thoroughbred horse racing.

The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard does not include "fair challenges" of the game (wide pits, powerful/numerous enemies, etc.); those are Real Difficulty. Likewise, one should not accuse the computer of cheating simply because it plays to a computer's natural strengths (lightning reflexes, comprehensive mastery of the game rules, and so forth), or because you have a single streak of bad luck. Consistent bad luck, however, may be a sign that the computer is using the RNG to cheat. Cheats that work to the player's advantage are a Rubberband AI or plain old cheat code.

Note that this is not a place to complain about enemies that have skills you don't have, or bosses who have stronger skills than you, or about how unlucky you are and how many times you missed (unless the computer has a different chance of missing with the same skill), or about how hard a certain boss is, or how the computer is actually half decent at some of the game's more advanced maneuvers that you happen to suck at. This is only for scenarios where it would be expected for the player and the AI to be on even footing. For example, in the campaign of a strategy game, it would be natural for the computer to outnumber you and/or have more resources than you - that's part of the challenge of a campaign. However, in free battle or skirmish mode, a computer starting with more resources than you is usually cheating, since you would expect to be on even footing with the computer (unless you can set what everyone starts with).

See also: Fake Difficulty, Rubberband AI, Nintendo Hard, Random Number God, Rules Are For Humans

Note: Since The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard is so incredibly common, only egregious examples should be listed below, 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.

Got examples? Take it to Troper Tales.

Subtropes:

Generic Examples:

Note: These are generic examples. They give ways the The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard trope manifests, not specific instances in specific games. See the "Specific Examples" section further down for case studies.

  • In Real Time Strategy and Turn Based Strategy games, the computer ...
  • In RPGs, the computer ...
    • ... is always immune to the Useless Useful Spell, but when it uses one against you, it works every time.
    • ... will, when fighting as character who is also a playable party member, have stats far greater than the character has while on your side.
    • ... has infinite Mana, Vancian Magic or whatever system limits the use of powers and abilities.
    • ... forbids you from bringing more than 4 characters into battle at once, then puts up 10 for itself.
    • ... can call for reinforcements during battle while your own off-screen allies are forced to be Lazy Backup.
    • ... will just happen to get a high enough dice roll to do fatal damage, no matter how unlikely that is.
  • In Racing Games, the computer ...
    • ... has an infinite supply of fuel or Nitro Boost.
    • ... has a car which has superior performance to anything you can drive.
    • ... will apply "realistic damage modeling" to player cars, but not AI cars.
    • ... possesses 'rubber band' capabilities, meaning second place will always be close enough to catch you.
      • This is sometimes done not to cheat, but to save processing power. Rather than actually race all the AI characters all the time, it just makes a rough estimate where they are when they get far enough from you. This estimate, of course, may be biased toward staying near you (rubber band) or ahead of you (cheating bastard).
    • ... will, especially in pre-4th generation console games, go to their full speed instantly.
    • ...will never lose speed whenever they hit a wall.
    • ... will be exempt from rules by which a player is eliminated from a tournament.
    • ... will always get all the good positions on the starting grid, while you get stuck all the way in the back.
    • ... will team up against you, but never its own various NPC cars. The computer's interest is you. Losing.
    • ... will get a head start.
    • ... never makes a major crash on its own.
    • ... can turn on a dime
    • ... can brake faster than you can.
    • ... can pop out from under your front spoiler when overtaking, but block the entire width of the road for you.
  • In First Person Shooters, the computer ...
    • ... doesn't have to reload, or reloads instantly (assuming you do have to reload).
    • ... can aim for and shoot you without actually having to face you.
    • ... can shoot so far and so accurately that it can kill you before you can even see it.
    • ... starts with equipment you have to go find.
    • ... knows where movable objectives like the flags in capture-the-flag are, even if nobody on their team have seen them.
    • ... knows the state of weapons and power-ups at all times so it can go for them the instant they respawn.
    • ... has bullets which never drift or deviate, while yours seem to bend around the NP Cs.
    • ... has infinite ammo.
    • ... always knows your exact position, and can hunt you down/avoid you at all costs almost effortlessly.
    • ... can see through smoke grenades or any other concealing item, cloak, invisibility, camouflage.
    • ... can see in the dark.
    • ... can see through obstacles/cover of any kind.
    • ... works in a hive mind.
  • In Fighting Games, the computer ...
    • ... has unavoidable/unblockable attacks.
    • ... can use moves from impossible positions.
    • ... can move/attack faster than you.
    • ... can instantly use moves that require human players to execute a complex command.
    • ... can use attacks with magic priority to knock you out of even your fastest moves.
    • ... will always know exactly where all invisible characters are - both its and yours.
    • ... can use its special attacks more frequently than you, and its Desperation Attack with more health than you.
    • ... can deal more damage when using the same character and the same attacks you use under the same circumstances.
    • ... can do combos that are impossible for the player.
    • ... can dizzy/stun the player more often than he is allowed to do the same.
    • ... can revive itself after you went through hell to beat it.
    • ... beats you with ONE move (usually when it's actually about to lose).
    • ... reads your controller inputs and counters you immediately, when a human would have to predict/react.
    • ... is impossible to fake out.
    • ... does any of this for Boss opponents.
  • In action games in general ...
    • ... touching an enemy damages you but does nothing to the enemy.
    • ... you've got two sticks and a rock, but the computer has Bottomless Magazines.
    • ... isn't affected by all kind of environemental sutff such as sun light.
  • In pretty much any game, the computer ...

Notable Offenders:

Note: Since The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard is so incredibly common, only 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.

    open/close all folders 

     Civilization 
  • The original Civilization for the PC has a lot of ways for the computer to get a huge advantage over you:
    1) Improvements in the Emperor Level are about a third of the cost for the computer.
    2) Technologies are discovered at alarming rates.
    3) Wonders can be built almost instantly.
    4) The computer's caravans are transported instantaneously.
    5) The computer never has production penalties despite city-wide riots.
    6) Your Triremes sink if they end their turn too far from shore. Computer controlled ones can sail across the Atlantic with no problem.
    7) The computer can build spaceships without the required technology
    Et cetera.
    • In the Civilization sequels, the game manual actually details exactly how much the computer cheats and in what areas at various difficulty levels.
    • 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%. The question exists, does it work in reverse also? Sacrifice a dozen or so units for a run of good luck?
      • What you're seeing here is a bug in the game due to a programmer who doesn't understand probability theory. The displayed battle odds are calculated by the naive method of multiplying each unit's hitpoints by the odds of winning a single round of combat, and using that ratio as the odds of winning the battle. The actual odds of winning, based on the battle mechanics, are much harder to calculate, and can deviate significantly from the displayed odds: your "95% victory" fight might actually be a "0.1% victory". Once you do them right, though, it becomes clear that the computer isn't cheating in battle, just lying through statistics.
      • For context, units fight multiple rounds within a single combat until one dies. Thus winning one round in actuality only reduces the opponent by a certain amount of HP. So while a unit with low life may have a 50% chance of winning a round, if they can be killed with one hit, the first hit they take in combat (pretty likely at 50%) will kill them.
    • 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.
      • Often, the AI will have building towns in the middle of the desert for oil as a very important priority during the expansion phase.
    • Also in Civ 3, the Ai have their production phase after their turn instead of at the start of the next turn. This means that they can hurry units and have them produced before your next move, while you have to until next turn like a chump. You can tell when they did this because they haven't had the chance to fortify the unit yet.
    • If you cheat so that you can control the enemies cities, you will see that despite have far inferiorly built cities, they have HUGE commerce and production bonuses, making them far better than yours.
    • However, in the interest of fairness, the player can cheat mechanically too - one of the ways lower difficulty levels are made easier is by giving the player free Happiness and Health.
    • Computers in Civ4 will always know what you have access to, what you have explored, etc, and use this to become massive cheapskates in trade. If you have no access to horses and thus decided not to research Horseback Riding for awhile, the computer will do everything in their power to push the technology down your throat while making off with as much of your gold and technology as they can. And you can be sure that the computer will never offer their world map at a halfway decent price unless you've already explored everything they have.

     Final Fantasy Tactics 
  • Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has some boss enemies who are granted immunity from the game's law system, while you're stuck playing by the rules. Ice abilities are illegal for the battle? The boss will laugh while casting Blizzaga every turn and the judge will just yellow cards him repeatedly.
    • Weakly adverted since the game at some point tells you via notices in pubs that certain people obtained ribbons (it's never known how they got it) that grant them immunity to red cards so it's not exactly them cheating if you already knew ahead of time. Not to mention the balance would be broken further if you could force a boss to do nothing thanks to you rearranging the laws.
    • What's even worse is that in the Judgemaster extra missions, you almost got this yourself. But since Good Is Dumb, Marche and Cid bust the Judge before he could bestow you with it.
      • In fairness, after completing the main storyline of the game and continuing on the bonus missions you have the chance to add Judgemaster Cid to your party. Let's not mince words: Judgemaster Cid isn't just a cheating bastard, he's a cheating bastard who enables the rest of your party to be cheating bastards. Cid's most useful ability is hands down Abate, which skips the Judge's turn, allowing you to break any laws you want without any repercussions until the judge's next turn (given that judges average one turn to three turns for every other unit on the field, this adds up to a sizable chunk of the battle).
  • Inverted in Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 where you're the cheating bastard. You start each battle with an advantage of your choice (later ones can be pretty damn powerful with the right team), and the ability to use revival spells and items on fallen allies, two things none of your opponents ever get. You're only on par with your opponents if you break the law.
    • Then again, enemies will regularly be given 'bonus' turns at the beginning of a battle before you can act in any way, on top of their statistically unlikely shenanigans. Probably the worst of it is the fourth round in the Brightmoon Tor, where the enemy is given twelve bonus turns, Game Breaker abilities that cost no MP, and massive level advantages that did not exist in the previous stages. One of these abilities casts Haste and Protect on their entire party, resulting in an approximate minimum of twenty-four bonus turns before you can do anything. FFTA 2 could reduce a grown man to tears.
  • 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. They'll hit you back and more than likely screw you over.

     F-Zero GX 
  • Everything is stacked against you. Everything.
    • I'll let SA speak for me on this one..
      • And then you realize that that post refers to the easiest difficulty level, and that there are two more to beat. And those are the ones that net you the unlocks.
    • It should be noted that this only applies to Story Mode. Grand Prix mode is tough but fair.

     Mario Kart 
  • 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. For the items the player could launch, the AI opponent also had the ability to dodge by jumping the kart its own height above the track.
    • And they're invincible to the Thwomps, including the electric ones on Rainbow Road.
    • 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 computer was actually even smarter than simply choosing one "super-racer". I recall working out who the super-racer was in my grand-prix, and deliberately setting out to make sure they came last, and I first. After dozens of attempts, I managed to do this, which would give me enough points to have a bit of lee-way. All it ended up doing was making the character who came second in the first race the NEW super-racer. You just can't win!
      • The game is programmed by rankings. Every racer is designated to finish in a certain position depending on who you play as. When the game starts your natural position is always 8th, and by progressing you screw up the natural order that they try to maintain. You'll notice that if you spin an opponent, they will RUSH back to their natural position at lightning speed, even if that position is something useless like 6th. If the race is influenced so that a racer's place in the rankings shifts, that's the place that they'll fight for. So if your designated 1st is a bastard racer like a Mario brother (i.e. if you play as Bowser or Koopa Troopa), you should take advantage of the first race to smash them out of the frame at the last second. They'll recover quickly and come 4th, but they'll be much less of a threat from then on. The person who starts the first race in 1st is always the 'Super Racer'.
    • Here's a nice video.
  • Mario Kart Wii cheats, plain and simple. Players exaggerate it, but it's still there. This entry in the series gives the best items to people in the back of the pack. What separates human and computer players is the computer's timing and accuracy for hitting people crossing the finish line.
    • 12 Players. 11 AI. 150cc, any cup. Expect a Spiny Blue Shell to hit you on the last lap when the finish line is in spitting distance. Even better, imagine one hitting you in the middle of a jump. And for more fun, try getting hit a Spiny Blue Shell, followed by a Red Shell, then a Thunderbolt, and for kicks, a POW Block in the middle of all that action. Item Rape doesn't even come close to defining it. (Rapid fire attacks following a POW block warning are actually what you'd see with human opponents because POW blocks make you lose your items, so the computer fires them all off to make sure they're used for something instead of lost.)
      • And with the items? Guess what....all behind on the final lap in 150cc....and you might as well forget about getting any decent items. The best you can hope for is a Banana Peel...which is useless if you're anwhere but first.
      • It's not much better on the lower levels, where the computer usually lets the effects of one attack (usually a Thunderbolt or Blooper) wear off before immediately nailing you with a POW or Red/Blue Shell. One advantage of being hit all at once—you generally only spin out once, no matter how many attacks hit you.
      • In Mario Kart 64, computer players just used items at random rather than actually using the item boxes. This actually worked out well for the player (despite lack of realism since they would never use certain items), since the distribution was fair. In DS and Wii, they actually use the item boxes, which means the last-place players are constantly getting the good stuff. So this is actually an instance where having the AI follow the rules actually made the game seem less fair (though technically it's more fair).
      • The computer drivers are so cheap they will always manage to strip you of a powerup you're using for defensive purposes with the most lame brained maneuvers imaginable-maneuvers you can't duplicate for the life of you, such as taking out all three bananas dragged behind a racer by ramming them once.
      • And let's not forget the AI's tendency to ram you just as you're recovering from a crash (Super Star optional), along with the aforementioned sequence of homing items. For extra fun, you will just happen to be close to a ledge when they hit you...
    • Ever notice how the computer cheats with the race times? Usually when you finish a race in 1st place the driver who comes in second will be one to three seconds behind you according to the "score screen" that lists placing and time. Even if they haven't finished the race by in the five seconds it takes to get from FINISH to the score-screen. This doesn't always happen, but it happens a whole lot, and is very annoying when you're trying to get two or three stars in a cup and you need those time margins.
      • Oddly enough, I have seen it happen in reverse- On Rainbow Road, an opponent that was right behind me was listed as about 8 seconds behind me. It probably has something to do with the size of the course, but that doesn't make it any less annoying.
    • 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. 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 noticeable—though in Wii, they do tend to be able to avoid normally unblockable items with alarming regularity due to undocumented features.
      • The rubber-band AI in Mario Kart 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. This is particularly noticeable if you take one of the massive unintended shortcuts - Rainbow Road or Wario Stadium, for example - and the AI players will suddenly go like the clappers of hell to catch back up in record time.
    • Mushroom Gorge. Imagine this: 30% of the track is nothing but gigantic toadstools you bounce from and to over an abyss. 20% is a different kind of toadstool you drive across, rather than bounce off of. Using Mushroom powerups or Super Stars can give you too much velocity when you move from one toadstool to another, making you overshoot the next one and fall into the gorge. Now imagine yourself getting nothing but Mushrooms in this track and being unable to force yourself to use them while toadstool-hopping because you know that you will throw yourself into the pit if you try to boost while jumping. To simulate a stroke, just watch the computer drivers use Spiny Blue Shells (items that seek out the first-place driver) and Thunderbolts (shrinkage!) in the middle of a jump so they make you fall down. Get a Bullet Bill (ridiculous speed, invincibility, and guided driving)? Better pray that it will last you over all the mushrooms in the next batch.
      • Choco Mountain. The final part of the track involves a few item crates, a 90 degree turn, and then three "hills". You better be lucky and get a mushroom from those crates, else once you jump from the first hill, you'll collide with the second and third ones, while the CP Us that are right behind you (thank you rubber-band AI) magically have enough speed to jump both. Not getting a mushroom in those crates indeed makes the difference between being first or fifth in this race.
  • As if the Rubberband AI wasn't bad enough, the computer drivers in Mario Kart (all games) have an uncanny timing to hit you right when you are in the air over a Bottomless Pit (or an earlier part of the track, which is even worse as you lose all your velocity and thus can't make the jump, losing even more time), as well as having a noticeably better chance to get the really good items in the lower places than you do. (It should be noted that the physics in Mario Kart is greatly simplified—if you're hit with an attack in midair, you simply stop. Take That, conservation of momentum!) And then you're hit with Thunderbolt from the last placed AI driver so even if you're far back enough to get the good stuff and actually get the good stuff, you lose the item anyway.
  • Double Dash's AI seems to entirely ignore the weight system and kart stats - heavy karts (the only ones available to large characters such as Bowser) all have crappy acceleration but high top speeds. Go ahead, knock Bowser off the track. Invariably, he'll be right on your ass in no time flat - despite the nice long stall that getting put back on the track gives you, and the fact that his crappy acceleration should leave him far behind a cart that's already running at top speed with no slowdowns.
    • Ditto Petey Piranha, often a thorn in the side in two-player GP races at 150cc due to his ludicrous bursts of speed and acceleration.
    • In fact most of the karts in Double Dash can reach ridiculous speeds trying to keep up with a human player in first, which can give a second human player further down the pack an extremely hard time when it comes to clawing their way back to the front.
  • Apparently, the computer player chosen to be the first-placer in Mario Kart DS always has a maxed-out speed stat, regardless of what the kart they're driving should have. This makes characters that drive karts with already high acceleration (Dry Bones) nearly impossible to beat.
  • This sums all of the above up quite nicely.
  • This reveals how much Mario Kart one's played. Just gauge their reaction on the final panel.
  • The AI being a cheating bastard makes the bits towards the end of this clip so much more satisfying.
    • Unfortunately for that, most of the "satisfying part" is the part in Wifi. So it was against humans...
  • Let's put in this way. A recent episode of Robot Chicken had a skit where Toad does a parody of the The Transporter. His car has a dashboard with buttons for bananas, green shells, mushroom boosts, stars, and blue shells. As one might expect, such a layout allows him to absolutely destroy the police trying to catch him. Playing the game, it seems like all computer players have dashboards like this, except with even more features that probably work twice as well.
  • In Mario Kart Wii, the computers' finishing positions aren't actually determined by the order in which they cross the finish line; rather, it's what position they're currently in when the last human player finishes and ends the race. For example, you finish in 1st place and Mario is in 3rd, but falls back to 5th place before the results screen shows up. It will still show him finished in 3rd due being in that spot when the player finished.
  • With Mario Kart DS, there is absolutely NO. WAY. that the computer can go as fast as it does. Look at the kart stats of a kart the computer is using, and you'll find they are going at completely impossible speeds without even power-sliding. One time, when I was doing well, the computer sped up faster than the freaking staff ghost just so it could beat me. When I was right at the end, the computer conveniently got a red shell in second place (that's not very likely) and knocked me out near the finish line so it could finish first. A bad offender is that the cheating computer can actually prevent you from getting a *** rating (the maximum) because if you do well enough to get hit by a lot of items, then the computer destroys you with them and knocks you down to a ** , * , even an A rating. Another horrible thing about this game is that if you have a great start, putting you in first, then everyone is close together. So the person in eighth, about one second behind you, gets the same items if they had been way far behind, so expect to get starred out of the way, hit by a Bullet Bill, and overall screwed. Don't expect to get that lucky with YOUR items, by the way. When they're way behind you and spamming massively powerful items against you, reaching ridiculous top speeds humans are literally not capable of, they knock you out of first place, which is especially devastating when it's right near the end. So sometimes, it might seem like staying in back would give you a powerful item advantage. But don't expect that you'll get that immense luck, because in Mario Kart, this horrible game, THE COMPUTER IS A CHEATING BASTARD!
    • This may be because the designated top 3 are given boosts in top speed with the first placer given the biggest boost. If it happens to be a kart with high acceleration, your only chance of winning is to snake, simply put.

     Pokemon 
  • 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.
      • In later games, Pokemon learning moves early is actually justified - a skilled breeder can get level-up moves and moves the Pokemon otherwise couldn't know (egg moves) bred into level 1 Pokemon if the father knows it, so presumably the computer-controlled trainers bred their own. While the player can't do this at first, many Tournament Play fans use this in the Metagame.
      • Then there's the Pomeg glitch that allows you to fight with an egg (In battle it acts and has the same stats as the pokemon that it will hatch into) and level it up and similar, while this resets most of it's stats (Like levels) upon hatching, it's moves and evolutions are not reset, so it's perfectly possible to get a pokemon knowing moves or being underleveled and still evolve. However, that would mean the computer knows about it's own glitches...
    • 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 theoretically all have 30% success rates. 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.
      • Also in each Battle Frontier, if the match would be a draw(for example, both sides are down to the last pokemon. One uses Destiny Bond, and the other KOs it), you lose. The opponent states their winning message, and your win streak is snapped and you have to stop playing. In tournaments, a draw due to destiny bond, explosion, etc. means the pokemon that launched the damage to set up the draw wins or the exploding/selfdestructing one loses. Or, it's just a draw.
    • 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.
  • Lance's Dragonite in the original games has Barrier. Go on. Check. Done? Yep. Dragonite's line has forever been incapable of learning Barrier.
    • And it's not only in Red, Green, and Blue. In Silver/Gold/Crystal, he cheated extensively. Not only did he delevel his entire party from in the 50s-60s to the 40s with a cap of a Lv50 Dragonite, he EVOLVED his two Dragonair from the earlier games into Dragonites, despite the fact that they can't evolve until Lv55. What's more, his Aerodactyl knows Rock Slide, which it couldn't learn until FireRed/LeafGreen.
      • If Firered and Leafgreen (and RSE) take place at the same time as generation I, this might have an excuse. In gen. I, Rock Slide is taught via TM, and in gen. III, through a move tutor. Maybe Aeordactyls don't like Rock Slide T Ms.
      • Though Nintendo did at one point offer a Lv50 Dragonite at a Nintendo event for the Diamond/Pearl generation, which could be a subversion of this for players that obtained said Pokemon.
  • In Generation II, when you face the Rival in the Burned Tower, he has a Haunter... at level 20. Gastly is supposed to evolve at level 25.
    • Sometimes evolved wild pokemon appear at a level before which they actually evolve. It is not unheard of to find lvl 8-12 Pidgeotto or lvl 18-24 Haunter in which case it is quite worthwhile to catch them. So while it is kinda cheating this case is not nearly as bad or harmful as the previous Dragonite examples.
    • And while were on the subject of our favorite Jerkass rival. In the second battle with him (same game duh), and you chosen Cyndaquil, the rival has a Croconaw...at LEVEL 16, and Totodile doesn't evolve until level 18. At least they fixed it in the remakes.
    • Also, this may not be present for all generation II cartridges, but in sometimes if you meet the rival just before you battle the elite four, his Magneton's Thunder sometimes paralyzes and hits every time. As in 8 out of 8, approximately, not just 2 out of 2 or 3 out of 3. However, this may just be a bug, not a cheating computer.
  • The first time you encounter Mars, she'll have a Purugly at Level 16. Glameow doesn't evolve into Purugly until Level 38, more than double that level!
  • <Ace Trainer Ryan sent out Level 25 Pidgeot!>
    • <DICKS sent out Level 16 Raticate!>
  • Pokemon Colosseum has one particularly annoying thing that the opponent gets to decide his moves after you use any items or send out any Pokemon. It leads to the very annoying thing of not being able to cure a pokemon of confusion as, when you do, the opponent uses Confuse Ray on him again, despite that there's no way he'd use it normally!
    • Some of the Gen IV pokes will do this as well. This can lead to an entire team being put to sleep or poisoned.
  • Last Resort introduced later in the series is a powerful move usable after every other move has been used by the Pokemon at least once. Computers can use it early though.
  • Against some opponents with particularly strong moves, it is a decent, but inefficient strategy to constantly heal while they use said move over and over until they run out of PP with it. Against other opponents, the computer will actually ignore the PP limit and use it beyond when they should have been able to.
  • Try using the Mean Look/Perish Song combo on a Trainer with multiple Pokemon. When you switch your Pokemon out to avoid getting K Oed by Perish Song, your opponent does the exact same thing, despite the trapping effect not allowing switching.  *  *
  • The Battle Tower has always been very, very bad. The most egregious example is a Crawdaunt with Quick Claw and Guillotine.  * Guess what happens? Quick Claw and Guillotine both work at least twice in a row. Did I mention that you can only bring three Pokemon in? Also, it has actually been proven that the opponents will actively cheat the better you are, by using a hacked team of super-Pokemon that caused the opponent to cheat like mad.
  • In Heart Gold and Soul Silver, Lance and Clair prove themselves to be beyond rules. You know how moves like Thunder, Fire Blast, and Hydro Pump aren't supposed to hit often and can't be used that much? Say that to their 100% infinite PP moves.
  • In Pokémon Colosseum when you battle a Shadow Pokémon it will have all four of its moves, but when you catch it, you're stuck with only Shadow Rush.
  • Particularly in the Masters Battle part of the abominable Pokémon Battle Revolution, the computer players have an uncanny ability to know precisely what the player is going to switch to or use at any given moment.
  • The RNG seems HEAVILY favored towards enemy players. There have been many occasions where an enemy has confused my pokemon, and every single turn for 5 turns (the max duration), my pokemon will hit himself in confusion. However, if I use a confuse effect on an NPC, you can bet that it'll wear off after 2 turns, and neither turn will have hampered him. I know that random is random, but you see the same patterns time after time after time.
  • Battles wind up extremely stacked against the player against CPU trainers. This Troper confused a trainer's Kingler three times in a row using Crobat's Confuse Ray. Each time, it snapped out of confusion the next turn and used Protect. It seems that they get to skimp out on statuses like Paralyze and Confused a lot.
  • Pokemon Mystery Dungeon has some bosses(mainly legendaries) whose HP is somewhere into the thousands, but when you get them to join your team, they'll have a normal amount of HP.

Specific Examples:

Note: Since The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard is so incredibly common, only 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.

     Fighting Game 
  • While the AI in Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl isn't of Rubber Band variety, it still can always see everything in the stage and 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 been remedied in Brawl, where the computer AI, even on the hardest difficulty, is not capable of consistently pulling this off.)
    • The computer also knows what effect clocks will have. If you see a clock, and don't see the computer gunning for it, when you pick it up, it will slow you down. It can also tell apart mushrooms, which is difficult but not impossible for the player, as well as pokeballs and assist trophies.
    • This tends to work AGAINST the computer in Brawl. There are times when the computer will use Smash Balls to block attacks. Of course, this leads to them using Diddy's peanut gun to deflect the ball into a fully charged Aura Sphere...breaking it, and changing their problem from "Heavy hit" to "Intensely painful hit that's almost a surefire KO".
    • Cruel Melee/Brawl. The AI is practically perfect. But then again, it is meant to be that way; it's called cruel for a reason.
    • Either human-controlled fighters have butterfingers, or computer-controlled fighters have an iron grip; either way, while computers never seem to drop their items no matter how many times you smash their face in, it takes one flinch (not even a hit, a flinch, this troper lost a Smash Ball from the Bridge of Eldin bumping him back on top of it as it reformed) to make a human drop their item. This gets insanely aggravating in the case of Smash Balls and Dragoon Pieces. If the computer gets hold of either one, you're pretty much fucked.
  • 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).
    • Worse yet was Balrog. He could execute dashing punches faster than the player could recover from a block. He had the option of using them exclusively until the player's life was bled away. This made him potentially the most difficult boss in SFII Classic, where the player would still be hit when ducking under these punches. Only a perfectly timed Dragon Punch, Flash Kick or Spinning Lariat could stop the nefarious beast. Or just invert it back on him: use E. Honda and bulldoze him right over with the fierce hundred hand slap, the only punch attack faster and with longer reach.
      • Fortunately, Balrog was pretty dumb and would rarely do this. You could usually beat him by just crouching and sweeping.
      • His uber rushdown of doom is an anti-turtle tactic of his. He's actually easy to beat in a straight up fight. Chun Li and Guile, for example, are very good at fierce punching him in the face. But if you try and block and wait for an opening, you will be chipped to death.
    • Guile also became a game breaking character in Classic, due to him lacking any projectile recovery time for his sonic booms. With human players, this was balanced by the charge time. With the computer, not so much. Jumping forwards over one would result in a Flash Kick. Jumping in place or using a projectile against it and he'd have time to close the distance while you recovered. Possibly resulting in a flash kick.
    • The charge move behavior has been fixed in later Capcom fighters, such as Vampire Savior. But perhaps as a throwback to the cheating AI in Street Fighter 2, Little Red Riding Hood Baby Bonnie Hood has a super move that enables her to use her high-damaging charge attack, Smile & Missile, without charging (replacing her normal punch attacks) for a short period of time.
    • Seth Seth Seth Seth FUCKING SETH.
      • Actually, Seth is just too hard and his AI is almost perfect, but he is not exactly a cheater. None of his special moves require charging, so in theory you could practice a lot and be as tough as when he is under AI control. You can also trick him with jumping, break some of his moves - it is just too hard first time you get to him. Sometimes he gets stupid and can be beaten with repeating simple attack. The true cheaters are characters with charging moves (Bison, Balrog, Honda, Guile) and "button mash" attacks (Chun-lee, Gen, etc) - they ALL can pull their movies at instant, without pause/waiting, way faster than you can do it.
      • In Street Fighter IV's defense, you can unlock every character in about an hour (everyone but Seth in about half an hour) by setting the difficulty to "easiest", which is Capcom's way of saying, "We know our AI is ridiculously cheap and not everyone likes being frustrated by that. Just play it on easiest".* But at least the other fighters understand what "easiest" means, whereas Seth, the cunt that he is, believes himself to be above the rules and DOESN'T HAVE AN EASY MODE!
    • In Street Fighter: The Movie (the game of the movie of the game), when fighting M. Bison at the end, there was a fairly high chance that if the player was winning, Bison would stop taking damage from player attacks, or insta-kill the player with a weak attack, or the player would take damage from his own attacks. The game just starts making up rules as it goes along.
    • Another from Street Fighter II: AI opponents could deliver a barrage of crouching kicks at lightning speed. Fortunately for the player, the AI will usually only connect once, which sends the player's fighter flying away from the opponent.
      • They also like to attack from odd aerial angles, making it difficult to correctly guess which is "backwards" so that you can block... Which, naturally, means that the game always chooses the direction that you don't. This has been proven using emulator save states.
      • Link or it didn't happen. And if true, this only means there is in fact an attacking spot which is unblockable, not that it chooses which way is right after you pick. This can be verified the same way.
  • In the Mortal Kombat arcade series, the computer player often blatantly cheats. Given that this is the game series that gave the name to MK Walker, you will find a good number of examples here.
    • One textbook case vessel of the trope and a bane to most players is Jade in UMK3 who activates her invincibility technique the instant you throw a projectile at her. It doesn't help that when she activates this, she actually runs at you in the instant she does without any warning whatsoever and devastates you with her uber-long combo with no resistance and does so with impeccable timing.
    • In the original Mortal Kombat, computer characters ducked and slowly slid across the floor to counter a barrage of player fireballs.
    • Here are some gems for Mortal Kombat 2.
      • On any match after the first few, you cannot throw the computer unless it's stunned or immobilized. It would always throw you instead. In early revisions, it would even throw you when it was incapacitated. You could freeze the CPU solid with your ice ball, but if you tried to throw it, it would throw you back while still looking frozen'. An opponent dazed for "Finish Him!"? If you accidentally did a throw, he'd still throw you back. And if that took you to no life, you'd lose''. Absolutely hilarious, unless you are the one it happened to.
      • Whenever you did Scorpion's screen side shifting teleport, the computer would turn around and send a projectile your way... before you even left your side of the screen. Humans can't do this, but actually have to wait for you to wrap around before they turn around. However, if your screen wrapping teleport failed because you were backed into the corner...it would still turn around and fire the other way! Unless you were playing against a character with a really fast projectile recovery, this resulted in you getting a free chance to harpoon the computer. Hilarity Ensues.
      • Also, Heaven forbid your feet leave the ground. You want to jump forward? They will jump kick you out of the air. You want to jump back? Prepare to eat a projectile. (Though those who could warp attack like Smoke and Scorpion could jump back, cancel into the warp and smack the computer silly when they inevitably fireballed).
    • In Sega Genesis version of Mortal Combat 3, Kano and Liu Kang could pull their special charging moves almost instantly, sometimes several times in the row. Liu Kang could do several bicycle attacks and then finish you with combo. Kano could do his spinning attack twice, and sometimes when you were in mid-air.
  • Dynasty Warriors games have the bad habit of allowing the computer controlled opponent to recover or receive random power-ups in a duel...where there is no feasible manner in which they could have obtained these items, as there are no boxes or dead enemy soldiers in duel mode.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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 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. Not only is she incredibly fast, but she's able to land devastating combos while the player character is still in midair even when using air control, giving said character absolutely NO CHANCE of fighting back! She can also block almost all throws, exploits your weak points without mercy, and almost always makes it impossible to get to Night Terror, since you have to follow a certain path AND not lose a single battle in the process!
    • 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.
      • Thankfully, a handy fix for most of this can be found, Anti-Ai moves
      • Soul Calibur 3 takes this to a cruel level with a few bosses in Chronicles mode. These bosses take ludicrously low damage from attacks and never flinch. While this seems like it would lead to a long, hit-and-fade battle, it tends to lead to the computer MK Walking towards you, since you can't push it back, and knocking you off the ledge. Repeat for your whole army. You lose and have wasted the last 30 minutes.
      • Thankfully, there's a sort of fix for that too. Don't send all your troops at the foe at once. As long as at least one of your characters is still alive, your others will respawn, and you can keep sending them at the cheating bastard until you get lucky and win. It'll take a while, but since you can't logically lose with this method, you'll have to win eventually.
    • The AI's blatant cheating is why no one minds spamming the handful of moves (example:Iron Sword A+ B/L2) they can't block or dodge. Even when doing this, though, the above stipulation will still give you trouble; same goes for "ice," which tends to send your fighter careening off the edge of the ring at the slightest provocation, instantly taking 50% of your health no matter how high your level.
    • At least in SCIV, when your enemy Soul Crushes you, they rarely use Critical Finishes.
    • In Soul Calibur II, The last battle in arcade mode is with Inferno. He has a slightly longer reach than you, and his attacks do more damage than yours. He is a demon, so that could be forgiven, but then he can always block you as long as he is not in the air. Facing away from you? He can block. Knocked to the ground? He will mysteriously blink from prone to blocking faster than a human player could stand up.
  • Guilty Gear is very... well... guilty of this. On top of the usual array of unfair SNK Boss attributes for the "boss" versions of otherwise regular characters—dealing dramatically more and taking dramatically less damage compared to their playable counterparts, doing even the most absurdly impossible-to-input moves in the middle of combos completely at will, gaining a full bar of tension with a thought, etc.—all AI characters on high enough difficulty settings or close enough to the final match of Arcade mode gain the ability to psychically read controller input. Many characters rely on having a good mix-up game, placing continuous pressure on an opponent until they finally make a mistake in their blocking, and going from there. It works pretty well against humans so long as the attacker doesn't get too predictable. Against the CPU, though, mix-up characters are almost completely useless, as every attack is more or less a polite request for the computer to please consider allowing this next one to actually connect for once. Which is usually denied.
    • There is also, notably, Boss I-No from Guilty Gear XX — she happens to have a boss-only move (which has recently been added to the player moveset, but not in the game she's 7B{Tekken}} 5'''s Jinpachi Mishima was a great example of this trope. He had The Stomp, an auto-stun move that didn't do damage but left your character floating and unable to block for at least seven seconds, an eternity in a fighting game. This was even worse in Dark Resurrection, when the computer learned how to do juggles with three signature uppercuts in a row, which took off about half your health. The version of the character given to the player, of course, did not have nearly as much priority for the stomp, which also had to be timed with the enemy attack (unlike the AI version which could just be done whenever).
    • Jinpachi also gets a few 85%-95% damage attacks, which he will chain along with a teleporting backstep, which in the highest difficulty activates when an attack that would definitely hit is made by the player, it does it by reading controller inputs, but only at the highest difficulty level.
    • In a fighting game basically devoid of projectiles, Jinpachi has fireballs and teleports. The teleports are bad enough, since they're basically instantaneous. But the fireballs? Dear Lord. Unblockable, unjumpable, unduckable. He can toss them out with no charge-up and no cool-down. That means that, even if you get smart, and try to sidestep, he'll just keep shooting until you take the hit. Of course, they do about 50% damage.
    • Tekken 6's Azazel wasn't quite as bad, but had one very specific cheap cheat trick: he blocks while attacking. While attacking. Normally, characters are vulnerable when performing an attack, and an opponent can interrupt them by landing the proper hit on them first. The only way to reliably hit Azazel is to get behind him and hit him while his back is turned, where he can't (usually) defend.
    • To be slightly more specific, Azazel is twice your height, and you hit him in the legs when you attack. And his legs can block while his upper body attacks. It's still a violation of what has been a universal rule of Tekken until right then, and insanely frustrating. (To note: most previous Tekken games had bosses that where not too ridiculously powerful to be made available for playabler use, and who followed all the same basic rules that every other character did. Tekkens five and six where the first games to have bosses that where too obscenely powerful to give to players, or in Tekken 6's case, that didn't even follow some of the basic rules of the game.)
  • In the Xbox remake of Dead or Alive 2, if you are playing Hayabusa (yes that one), Ein will block and counter pretty much every move that you ever make.
    • While we're on the subject of Dead Or Alive, here's a message for whichever DOA4 programmer thought it would be funny to make the CPU opponent immune to throws during stagger animations: I hate you so much... so fucking much...
      • And I will KILL whoever made Alpha-152. 70% of my freaking HP?
  • Virtua Fighter's Dural will severely punish you for ANY mistakes, though without being an SNK Boss exactly. She's still bound by the game rules (she does have a mix of the best moves available and is terrific at juggling) and won't down attack you.
  • In Castlevania Judgement, Dracula WILL put his back to the screen, and thus you will not see what attack he is going to make.
  • In Naruto: The Broken Bond, not only will the computer use Substitutions with perfect timing, but they are also seemingly able to use the Rage Mode (which speeds them up and makes them take no damage from anything but damage-dealing jutsus) in the middle of a combo. Combine this with the fact that, if they beat on you enough, they CAN have Rage mode at full, or nearly full, health, and the game gets very frustrating.
    • Nevermind that if you make one mistake you get totally owned. They'll juggle you, never letting you even block. If the computer makes a mistake it doesn't matter because you have to have pretty much perfect timing to hit them at that moment anyway. Not to mention that they'll almost ALWAYS be able to charge up their jutsu but you'll never get even one chance.
    • The Clash of Ninja series (also Naruto) avoided this for the most part, usual computer tendencies aside. Then English releases began to be developed by American developers instead, and now we have story mode enemies who have no stagger animations and MK Walker mindsets- sometimes in 2 on 1 matches against you. These aren't even optional challenges- you HAVE to kill these people to proceed. The optional challenges involve similar things, only with the difficulty turned Up To Eleven by better AI.
  • Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: It takes tournament level skill to match the AI's comboing ability... on the default difficulty setting ("2: Very Easy"). One hesitates to think what it's like on "8: Hardest."
    • Not all that much different, actually. Eventually, as you increase the difficulty, the computer stops getting smarter, instead increasing the damage you take and decreasing the damage you inflict.
  • The first Samurai Shodown game was very guilty of this: The CPU could knock you out in as little as 2 hits/attacks, dizzy you repeatedly, connect more hits with the same attacks you used, stun you for more time than you could, or all of the above at the same time.
  • Super Godzilla for the Super Nintendo did this against, well, pretty much everyone. Your own fighting spirit (a measure of how strong your techniques are) rises pretty slowly, compared to the UFO which is nearly permanently at maximum, or Mechagodzilla, who can go from nothing to max in a heartbeat, and teleport-body-slam you in the process. He will then use eye lasers just to mess with you.
  • TNA iMPACT! the game. Anyone who is an established wrestler will automatically be twice as good as you, no matter who you choose. Certain matches in story mode can consist of you spending 90% of the match beating the hell out of them, only for them to come out of nowhere with enough counters to use a special move, hit it once, and win.
    • WWE Smackdown Vs Raw 2009's career mode suffers the same issue above when facing the "higher level" wrestlers.
      • Note that it's a Justified Trope in Professional Wrestling games: in the modern era, most actual wrestling matches have one person kicking ass for most of the match, then suddenly the supposedly beaten opponent busts out with their Finishing Move and wins.
      • ... Uh, it's only justified because the match is scripted to be that way. It's not scripted in the video games, not to mention that this sort of match doesn't happen ALL THE TIME.
      • Computer wrestlers cheating is a long standing tradition in wrestling games. The rule of wrestling drama is always in full effect, and if you curb stomp the computer too much before going for the pin, it effectively inserts another quarter and powers up so it can tag out, or just becomes unbeatable. Sometimes, there's a way to fool the system, though. For example, in Mat Mania, you can give the computer a piledriver, then throw him into the ropes and let him ram you to knock both down, but you will get up first, and you can then piledrive the computer again. Repeat until computer is weakened enough to not kick out of your pin.
  • GOOD LORD, STOP SWEEPING ME EVERY SECOND, SENNA!!!
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, the computer opponents don't have to worry about annoying trifles like "human reaction time" and can quite often display godly levels of blocking and dodging prowess. Especially annoying when you play a projectile specialist, like Terra, because blocking a projectile means reflecting it back at the one who fired it. And if the enemy is higher leveled then you are, the attack will do a crapton more damage to you than you could do with it, usually causing an instant break.
    • The enemy doesn't even need to be of a higher level. Got your projectile reflected by an opponent of the same level? It will do at the very least twice the damage it normally would, and that applies to basically every other Brave attack the computer does; Of course, you don't get the same privileges.
    • HOW DID HE GET 9999 BRAVE? WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN?!
    • The AI also ignores equipment and accessory rules. Every piece of regular equipment (swords, shields, etc) has a level requirement that your character must meet in order to equip it, but almost every AI opponent will be wearing at least one item above their level. Accessories work somewhat differently. They are ranked from D to Star. The higher the rank, the fewer of that accessory you can use at the same time. Many AI will have three or four of the same Star-ranked accessory.
    • Plus the way dodging works, even completely cornering an opponent so they have literally nowhere to move isn't enough to prevent them from dodging everything you throw at them. Add in the fact that computer also ignores ability equip rules, going up against a computer using the same character you're using at the same level with the same equipment doesn't mean that you'll be able to match the computer at dodging, no matter how good you are.
      • "How the hell did he dodge my attack by dodging THROUGH it?! How the hell did he still hit me when I clearly dodged his attack?! Arrrrrgh!" * ragequit*
    • And don't try to beat the enemy using Chase Sequences. They will dodge you almost flawlessly. If you do nothing for almost the full two seconds, and then use your fastest chase attack, they will dodge at the exact moment you press the button. In fact, the computer has a far better chance of dodging your attacks if the one you used is the better option. Do you have no brave? They will dodge all HP attacks (which would reset your brave to its normal value) and get hit by your brave attacks, which do piddling damage. Are they in danger of a brave break? They will dodge all Brave attacks. It's like clockwork.
    • The speed of the computers reaction time on max difficulty cannot be overstated. It literally dodges the moment its attack animation ends, making attacking it nigh impossible with all but the fastest characters. If you launch an attack at any point it isn't attacking or dodging you will be blocked and then most likely Instabreaked. The computer is truly a cheating bastard.
    • And we won't even mention Chaos, who cheats like a cheating cheaty-thing, especially with his Summon. (Every single other Summon in the game can only be used once per fight, except in one specific, rule-based case. He however can use his purely at will, as often as he wants.
    • What makes Chaos even worse is that his attacks are extremely wide-ranging, and you have to fight him on an EXTREMELY small stage, making actually dodging said wide-ranging attacks next to impossible. His unique summon can be used as many damn times as he likes, and it can copy the effects of about fifteen other summons, but with more exxagerated effects (ie, his version of the summon that cuts your Brave in half, then raises it by 60 per second for the next 30 seconds raises his Brave by 99 per second instead), essentially allowing him to freely manipulate his Brave stat, allowing him to pull last-minute victories out of thin air. And his Hp attacks can get seriously ridiculous, including one that can only be dodged if you 1.Don't move when he summons a bunch of flame pillars around you and 2. Perform a dodge roll at the EXACT moment after the pillars disappear.He is also INVICIBLE while using the attack. That takes a while to get used to. And to top it all off, you have to beat him THREE TIMES IN A ROW TO WIN, with him getting a free heal between each fight. Naturally, you're not given this courtesy.
  • In Bleach: Blade Of Fate, the human character can only Flash Step or use RF Special Attacks when they have enough Spiritual Power to do so. The AI opponents have infinite Spiritual Power.
  • BlazBlue is guilty of this. Particularly Unlimited Nu and Ragna in Score Attack Mode.
    • Nu on her own is bad enough, she has projectile swords that basically fly out of the air. Many characters, particularly Hakumen and Tager, have no way at all to approach Nu in her NORMAL state. Based on tournaments, they have around a 20% chance of winning a match against a Nu player of equal skill. Unlimited Nu is Nu, except she summons 3 swords with every attack instead of 1. Yeah. It's hell.
    • Ragna isn't much better. He seems to take quite a bit less damage in his Unlimited state. He also has increased vampiric properties. He has them to a reasonable extent in his normal state, but his Distortion Drives in Unlimited mode can easily knock off around 75% of your HP (healing him for around 50% of his), and undoing all the work you've been doing through the entire match.

     Puzzle/Board Games 

  • Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords: From the item forging mini-game going dozens and dozens of turns before dropping a needed anvil to the same happening with the Learn Spell mini (swapping anvils for scrolls); every player, no matter the platform, has horror stories of the game AI basically flipping them the bird. There's "Random Chance" and then there's "LOL Player". Puzzle Quest is lousy with the latter.
    • And then there's Spell Resistance. An enemy with 10% resistance to a mana type is supposed to mean "Your spell using that mana has a one-in-ten chance of getting blocked." In practice, it turns into "Your spell using that mana has a one-in-four chance of getting blocked". It does not work the other way around.
    • 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. It also seems to know in advance what the "random" gem spawns will be.
      • And anyone who's played the game can tell you firsthand that falling bricks aren't just as likely to help the player. It has nothing to do with skill - things simply fall into place for the computer opponent five times as often as they do for the player.
    • Most of the game's "hints" for the next move are really bad advice that will either harm the player or cause them to make a less than optimum combination.
  • 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.
    • Watch the chess in Kubrick's 2001 very carefully: 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. That, in fact, is 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.
      • Actually, HAL really did have forced mate. Frank could have delayed it an extra move, but that's just nitpicking. Presumably, HAL was merely referring to the move obviously mating pattern, and didn't feel like listing every possible line.
  • Even old handheld toys based on game shows like Wheel Of Fortune and The Price Is Right had the computer cheat. If the game was based on luck, you would be screwed over quite often. If you went against a computer opponent, they would always know the answer to the questions very early in the rounds or simply be much luckier than you.
  • In Yakuman DS, a Mahjong game from the same people at Nintendo who make the Mario Kart and Mario Party games, the tougher computer opponents have ridiculously good luck. The AI performs Double Reach (only possible when your opening draw is one away from a winning hand) numerous times, often multiple times in a single match, not to mention a suspiciously high rate of Tenhou/Chiihou hands (i.e. when your opening draw is a winning hand. Tenhou and Chiihou are basically the equivalent of being dealt a Royal Flush in poker). More details on Double Reach, Tenhou, and Chiihou here.
  • In Peggle's Duel mode, the harder AI difficulties basically get a Zen Ball every single turn. In a game where the slightest adjustment in angle can mean a radically different bounce, this means the AI has a ridiculous rate of accuracy as to where the ball goes after 2-3 bounces.
    • The computer can rotate the ball shooter off the top of the screen to make shots. No joke.
  • This is the whole point of Bastet, a Tetris fan clone with a random piece generator designed to not give you pieces you really need always give you the worst possible piece for your situation.
  • In the NES game Anticipation, computer controlled opponents can guess the string's length of letters and can screw up as many times as there are letters in the word(s) while humans only get two chances to guess a letter before their turn is over. On the hardest difficulty, the opponents buzz in the instant the die shows the number of spaces they want to move and can guess the answer correctly without even knowing what the category is, how long the word is, or even before anything is actually drawn.
  • In the Dokapon game for DS you can the computer will get the exact roll it needs 99% of the time.
    • Savestates show that the computer always gives you the same predetermined "random" roll, regardless of any luck manipulation that would work in games with fair RN Gs. The CPU players are essentially saying, every turn, "I want to move X spaces". At least this doesn't carry over into combat.

     Racing 
  • 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, in this game you can be a cheating bastard too. You have Secret Player Moves: Weapons. Even at super turbo speeds, if the yellow car eats a missile or bomb, it goes boom and loses it's super turbo for a bit. What's worse is the late game tracks where EVERY car does this the instant they pass you up. If you don't blast them out of the starting gate, you can't win!
  • In The Simpsons Hit And Run, whenever you race the lead opposing car is always superior to any car you can access in the level. It's actually a simple observation - the player will notice in each level, the lead car in the races is the car the player starts with in the next level. So the player can actually look at the car's stats, and will see for themselves that it's superior to their old car in pretty much every way.
  • 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.
    • In Burnout Paradise, the computer drivers will always get a head start in race events, allowing them to boost past you before you even get control of your car.
    • Of course, this is done for theatrical appeal, as well as to give the computer a fighting chance. In most cases you will start in 4th or 5th rather than 8th like in most games, so there is that. Also, experienced racers will find literally dozens of shortcuts on a route to give them quarter mile leads.
    • Marked Man, on the other hand, is a bitch on Class A and Elite levels. There are way more parked cars, gridlocked traffic and they throw the best aggression cars in the game at you regardless of what you are driving. Sometimes you will be lucky to make it a mile in a four mile Marked Man.
  • In Crash: Team Racing for the PS 1, the final boss would literally start the race before the green light that signaled the race's start.
  • Abused to a bizarre end in the Super Nintendo game Super Off-Road: The Baja. Each and every one of your competitors had their own preferred place in the lineup, and Heaven forbid you should attempt to take that place from them. For example: Should you take third place from the AI driver who typically came in third, he would become a super driver fueled by rage; he would gain speed, cut corners, ram your truck mercilessly, and pretty much suddenly become the Uberdriver in his efforts to dislodge you from third place. Once you dropped back to fourth place, though, that driver would return to normal, and never challenge Mr. Number Two for HIS place. (Of course, then Mr. Fourth Place would have his turn at harassing you.) Coupled with the tendency for the AI in first place to absolutely obliterate you should you dare violate his sacred position AND stage last-minute comebacks at speeds approaching those of a low-flying jet fighter, winning any race at any difficulty level became far more based on luck (and your ability to keep from being rammed into oblivion) than skill.
  • The racing game Wipeout Pure is guilty of rubberbanding, starting the player in last place in every race and of unlimited item use - in the first lap of every race, every NPC racer gets unlimited turbo boosts, making a first place after the first lap a matter of pure luck in obtaining a Quake weapon in the first two or three weapon pads. Even if you do, you still have to contend with turbo boost-powered rubberbanding...
    • On the other hand, Wipeout 3 (not sure about the others) is nice enough to prevent the AI from even getting the two most powerful weapons available. Somewhat justified in that said weapons are extremely destructive, one of which is an instant kill. Given some thought, thank everything holy and sacred the AI can't get that. It would be too much, as instead of rubberband AI, they just have god-like skills all the time.
      • Imagine for a second Super Mario Kart where the blue turtle shells would insta-kill you. Yeah, I just crapped my pants too.
  • Sega GT 2002. While not necessarily rubberbanding, in the later races you can be assured that one tiny crash = no chance of winning. Even if you're driving newly-repaired, mint condition cars that are at the very top of your price range (and thus better).
  • Classic F1 racing game Super Monaco Grand Prix featured a version of this that kicked in only after you'd become World Champion. In order to speed up the process by which a driver rose in the ranks, the game featured a system of "challenging" whereby if you beat someone in a better team twice in a row, you'd be offered their place (and thus, a better car). Once you'd won the championship, you were automatically placed in the best team (McLaren ersatz "Madonna") and then promptly challenged by some unknown newcomer in a team halfway down the rankings. Scoffing as the first race of the new season begins, you can only watch in horror as his blatantly inferior vehicle accelerates past you and proceeds to completely destroy you. Two races later, he's driving your supposedly top car (even though he shouldn't need it...) and you're stinking up the field in the crappy blue and turquoise thing he started in.
  • In Ridge Racer 6 for the Xbox 360 (and perhaps other Ridge Racer games), 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.
    • In Ridge Racer 64, not only did the rival car have ridiculously effective Rubber Band AI but if you crashed into it, you stopped dead while the rival wobbled a bit but basically carried on unaffected. This was the case even if the rival crashed into you from behind, in which case it would drive right through your motionless car.
  • Every Tokyo Xtreme Racer series game has nearly invulnerable AI, with impossible handling abilities. "Boss" racers will always catch up with and pass you, regardless of your cars' relative stats. If a race starts with you slightly in front of another car, there's a chance you will accelerate faster. If you start a race behind the exact same opponent, they accelerate into the distance and are never seen again. Also, another game in which the traffic is actively trying to destroy your car, changing lanes to block you in and adjusting the timing of their lane changes to hit your car at any speed.
  • 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.
  • The game based on the Dragon Booster television show is guilty of this. While you only ever have five energy points, and have to recharge by getting powerups, the AI racers have unlimited energy, ignore obstacles (offscreen, at least; onscreen, they just charge into nearly all of them), and even have equipment that is unable to be obtained by the player. It's made up for in that the AI is dumb as a post.
  • In Red Baron Arcade (as with many, many flight/driving/racing type games), if there is any penalty to being rammed, you can bet that the computer has any number of planes or cars (or whatever) cheerfully lining up to ram the absolute crap out of you as soon as you start targeting the thing that will let you win that level.
  • Need For Speed Underground combined Rubber Band AI with your opponents always having just slightly better cars than you. Because of that it was easier to deliberately downgrade your car in the endgame by using a weak engine and so on. The AI would be downgraded as well so that relatively everything stayed the same, but the race would be a lot slower and therefore more forgiving.
    • Furthermore, Underground 2 and Most Wanted also had an egregious feature whereby even if you managed to build up a decent lead in spite of the Rubber Band AI, in the last lap of the race one of the opponents would make a miraculous comeback and pass you unless you managed to block him or had a lot of nitro to burn. This was presumably done to make the races more dramatic, but of course the end result was just more frustration.
      • Most Wanted was nowhere near as bad as Underground 2, but can be a lesson in frustration if you haven't mastered getting an apex turn or don't abuse speedbreaker.
    • In Most Wanted, it is possible to drag a car with it facing the opposite direction, because it got its rear wheel caught on your front end, and then not only free itself, but proceed to gain magical turning abilities where it obtains a zero-degree radius turn, and speed off. Past you.
    • The car damage thing is inverted, since cop cars can be taken out fairly easily while your own car is indestructible. This is balanced outweighed by the fact that the computer has an infinite supply of them, though.
    • The cops also rarely go after the computer players. There may be one or two occasions where if you deliberately slow down and give up your position so the other can get the cop first, they will actually go after the more egregious speeder. Otherwise, the cop will usually go after you, and completely ignore everyone else.
      • Speaking of cops, try this: Start a cop chase and go into reverse. The cop will drive alongside you. Now stop, go into first, and punch it. Even if your car can go from 0 to 100 in 0.5 seconds, the cop will stay right on your tail, despite having to make a J-turn to even drive in the same direction as you.
  • Speaking of Most Wanted, once the backup timer has run out, the cops are free to respawn anywhere they want. Nothing quite beats seeing a cop car flicker into view on the golf course. Of course, if you try to respawn by using R, it's an instant bust, no matter where the cops are.
    • Not to mention the effect in latter tollbooth challenges, where if you take the shortcut through opposing traffic, there always ends up being traffic there. If you take the long way around, surprise, surprise, no traffic!
  • Most Wanted even goes so far as to actively lie to the player. One of loading screen tips tells you that with a well-executed pursuit breaker it's possible to take out all your pursuers at once and get away easily. But doing that just causes a new police car to instantly spawn nearby. Following the advice and slowing down to allow cops to catch up and get them all can then easily have the opposite result than the tip claims, since even though the car is invulnerable, it can still get caught in the pursuit breaker and immobilized just long enough for that new cop car to bust you.
    • Need for Speed Most Wanted actually cheats in multiplayer mode. You can upgrade every car in the game to 100% on all three stats (acceleration, speed and handling), except for the game's signature car, the BMW M3 GTR which cannot be upgraded at all and is therefore pretty bad in single player. However, as bad as its ingame performance is, its listed stats are worse. And in multiplayer mode, the game attempts to ensure a fair race by equalising the stats of all cars in the race. The result is that your shiny Porsche Carrera GT that ordinarily blows the doors off the M3 GTR is detuned to a limping piece of junk with the same stats as the M3 GTR... at which point the M3 GTR is the better car and will proceed to beat you. This is probably a design flaw, but ironically the M3 GTR is driven in career mode by a cheating bastard who took it from you after rigging a race through sabotage.
      • Also, because of the craptastic way the game measures handling, the M3 GTR is probably one of the best vehicles you get in the late game for turning. The game's handling stat doesn't measure how well it turns, but rather how well your car stays gripped to the road, which can be really bad if your trying to make a tight turn at 140 MPH(~225km/h, for you metric users)
    • Every PSP version of Need for Speed seems to put a lot of effort in ensuring that its AI has a new annoying trick at its disposal. By the time of NFS Undercover, the cpu cars could drive faster than you, no matter what was your car and how well it was upgraded, were not affected by crashes (they were back on your tail in just few seconds), could TELEPORT if you somehow managed to make them stay really behind, or TURN MID-AIR! In one of the urban stages, there is a 90 degrees turn just after a really long straight that ends with a significant bump. To drive past it you simply have to slow down, but the cpu cars can drive into it at full speed, jump and turn in the air. Funny sight when you are looking behind at that time.
  • In Star Wars Episode I: Racer, the AI racers never crash, never run into walls, always hit turns perfectly, and never have to use the boost.
    • And they know pretty much every shortcut; if you miss one, they'll take it and get way ahead, such as the upper route on Abyss.
    • A good example is in one of the earlier tracks - a fairly simple track with multiple alternate paths that shave small amounts of time off your run and are generally ignored by AI racers, it is pretty easy to get a decent lead. Then, coming round the second last corner is a short run up to a huge jump. Boost as much as you can and pull back for maximum airtime - in a decent podracer (and that early in the game you do not have one) and you might just make it. And did I mention that the jump, which you just hit at maximum velocity, is followed by a hairpin turn to the finish line?
  • While most of the time, it doesn't really help the AI, computer players on Carmageddon 2 can sometimes do stuff human players can't, such as passing through the walls (when the player is far from them, their clipping is off), run past pedestrians without smooshing them, etc. Also, sometimes the AI can recover by themselves (which is normally impossible, except by a glitch of sorts) and can inexplicably change directions in a mere number of frames and speed up from 10 MPH to 250.
    • The same is also true in all other games in the Carmageddon series. However, the computer cars cannot make use of their "no clipping" cheat-ability when the player has the main map-screen up; their location is always shown and they move much more player-like.
  • Cel Damage's AI players can make sharper turns than the human player. This can be seen when the player is killed, and for the brief seconds until the respawn, the computer player (most likely the assassin) can make some incredible curves, even while standing on the same place.
  • Test Drive for PS 2, Xbox and GC. This game exhibits extreme Rubber Band AI. No matter how skilled you are or how powerful your car is, the AI will always gain a ridiculous speed boost and catch up, sometimes "teleporting", making races a Luck Based Mission. And they almost never crash or make other mistakes.
  • Midnight Club 3 seems to be malevolent and benevolent at the exact same time. In races, your opponents are always in better cars unless you have an A tier car(to the point that races can play out with you in a D tier and your opponent in a B tier BEFORE you've completely upgraded it.), you're opponents always have more nitrous shots than you (or in the case of bikes, HAVE nitrous shots.), and, somehow, obey the copenhagen interpretation, because even if you overlapped a car, if you are not watching him on the minimap, he will warp right behind you and be able to put you back into second place. However, you can outrun them on straight-aways, they cannot use slipstream turbo, and cannot use any special abilities.
  • On that note, Midnight Club: Los Angeles was criticized in an IGN review because of its rubberband techniques making the game often harder than it needed to be. Not only can they rocket off the line faster, but they have NOS by the bucketload, often blowing right past you. Another gripe by that same review was for markers being in places that are hard to spot, such as on corners you will often blow past.
    • A patch eased some of the Rubberband problem for the first third of the game.
  • Wii Sports Resort is a partial subversion. The Champions have flaws in their techniques, making them realistically beatable, but are still blessed with ridiculous reflexes and reaction times—they're Champions, after all.
  • Forza Motorsports 2 exibits several of the stated examples (not to extreme levels, but they appear). But the worse offense is when you end up with the car in 2nd place pulling a PIT Maneuver on you, giving them and their 6 other AI buddies a chance to speed off as you are forced to get back to the track WHILE THE PENALTY METER IS GROWING. The worst part is that you can have this happen with the AI set on Easy.
  • Forza Motorsports 3 is a little different. The AI players aren't bastards, they're assholes. Even on Medium difficulty, they'll bump you to-and-fro in a pack-like manner, cars in front of you will seemingly drive in a tandem formation to block you from overtaking, and they're not afraid to ram you off on their way to first place. Combine this with Realistic-level damage modelling, and you can kiss your credits goodbye.
    • When you hit an opponent, you spin out, but they remain unfazed. They can also brake later and take turns faster than you.
  • Gran Turismo 4. In the rally races, if you hit the wall, you get a 5 second penalty. If you run into the computer opponent, you get a 5 second penalty. If the computer runs into you, you get a 5 second penalty. And of course, the computer can pinball down the track without so much as applying the brakes, let alone catching a penalty for tapping the (occasionally invisible) track barrier.
    • The computer will also use cars that it specifically disallows you the use of. (Cadillac Cien and VW Nardo W12 Concept in a race specifically limited to Production Vehicles Only, for example.)
    • Back in GT 2 and possibly in 4, the AI would also sometimes use cars that exceeded the HP regulations for the races, eg the Vector M12 LM on the Trial Mountain Endurance Race, making it impossible for you to win.
      • Or it will pick a car that is within the regulations, but has some asshole trait making it nearly unbeatable, such as the vacuum-downforced Chapparal 2J.
  • Full Auto for the Xbox 360 suffers from this a bit. Rubber Band AI, while prevalent, is not the biggest problem - enemy cars in Career mode are also equipped with what appears to be much, MUCH stronger armor than the player's vehicle, making blowing them out of the way a time-consuming task. For example, it takes an enemy vehicle approximately 3 rough hits with the hood-mounted shotgun to completely annihilate the player (the same number it takes a player to destroy another player in Multiplayer mode), but it takes the player 5 precise hits to a single side of an AI car at minimum to take them down. Also, the player's car can completely lose its front armor after hitting only 2 mines dropped by an enemy and explode when hitting the third, but enemy cars can run over multiple mines and suffer no visible damage. They also may or may not be subject to the "Weapon Overheat" period resulting from firing a weapon too rapidly without a break. Factor in the AI cars' exclusive ability to destroy the player simply by ramming them and their unannounced ability to change their driving pattern while the Unwreck function is used (designed for the player to undo mistakes by rewinding time), and it's quite a bit to handle. Fortunately, the AI cars are also busy blasting away at each other, often leaving them damaged enough for the player to swoop in and finish them off.
    • The cheating AI seems to be exclusive to Career mode. Multiplayer and Arcade modes appear to give the AI cars the same speed, abilities, and armor as the player (only 3 shots from the shotgun before exploding, 3 mines = death, etc.), but Career mode steps it up with the cheating elements. Very odd...
  • On a number of car racing games the opponent drivers are essentially invulnerable. If your car hits theirs they are unaffected while you are sent flying. The AI drivers are driving a preset course and you are not allowed to interfere. The racing side missions in Brutal Legend are an example.
  • Motorm4x is one of the few games that feature Rubber Band AI in time trial mode, whereby at the end of each trial you're treated to a results table with the other drivers' times, some of which are likely better than yours. Beating those times, however, you find out that the other drivers have improved as well and you still didn't win. A particularly ridiculous example exists in one of the last races, where the developers even make a big point in the race description of how the best time so far of just over 6 minutes is extraordinary for this trial, the average being around 11. Finishing at just under 6 minutes, you find out that you've didn't even make the upper half of the results table, nobody posted a time over 8 minutes, and the time you really need is 5:30.
  • The AI opponents in Sonic Riders have been known to literally vanish from their previous position on the track in order to go zinging past you when you least expect it. Since aside from breaking the laws of physics the computer races flawlessly without outside interference, this makes the game particularly frustrating, as even without the cheating, there's pretty much no way to win if you don't take the lead in the first lap and race flawlessly from there on out.

     Role Playing Games 
  • An ancient (well, 8-bit) version of this trope is the way the AI put together bands of random wandering monsters in Pool of Radiance. If you created characters with maximised stat scores, you often found yourself facing wandering monsters more numerous and more powerful than half the "set" encounters in the game. Battles when simply travelling from place to place therefore often turned out to be epic struggles against 50+ goblins or kobolds compared with the typically 10-15-something encounters which were part of the plot. The reason was that the AI took stat scores heavily into account in generating random monster encounters.
  • 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.
      • There is a way to limit the ruleset, involving initiating and then canceling card games until your opponent offers to play by a different set of rules. Do it enough, and you'll spread favorable rules from earlier in the game to a new area. However, it took a disassembler to find the mechanics of this, making it something of a Guide Dang It.
    • The ever-hated Random rule. Exactly What It Says On The Tin, it picks out completely random cards from your collection for the current match. Whereas most players are trying to complete the collection and therefore have a LOT of weak cards and a few strong ones, it's to be expected that you'll end up with 2 or 3 (or more, if you're really unlucky) low-level cards, but you'll almost never see the computer with the same weaklings you just drew. There's a reason everyone loathes this rule, and god help you if you let it spread...
  • The big battle at the end of Tales of the Sword Coast (the expansion for the first Baldurs Gate) 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. Even when not a single one of the 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 to miss all the saves.
    • Various NP Cs have stats that should not be physically possible within their class. For example, Minsc's wisdom is too low. His case is justified in-story, however; Minsc is described as having gone insane following a head wound. Several characters suggest to him he get restorative magics for it. Don't ask us why the head injury never goes away despite how many Heal spells you throw at him.
    • In Baldurs Gate when you're robbing houses, there's a good chance of you getting that awful "Somebody has spotted you and called the guard" even when there's nobody on the floor. This is because the cats are spies for the Flaming Fist. Yes, that's right, you can be reported to the guard if a cat can see you.
    • From Baldur's Gate II and onwards, all high-level mages (and there are a lot of these) get something called a 'tattoo of power', which is a spell trigger that can activate any number of defensive spells instantly and without any action from the user and stacks on top of existing spell triggers and contingencies. Oh, wait, did I say 'all mages'? Silly me, I meant 'every mage except you and the ones you can have in your party'.
    • 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. (This is a result of the developers removing the spell and citing 'potential abuse' as the reason. Jerks. Fortunately, there is a downloadable mod, the D0Tweaks mod, that'll restore dimension door to the game for player use. Nonetheless, dimension door only allows you to teleport within a certain short range; how mage after mage uses the spell to teleport seemingly all over the world goes unexplained in-universe. (The game actually has them teleport into nearby shadows using the spell; they then dissapear.)
    • Teleportation Shmeleportation. Jon Irenicus at the end of Baldurs Gate 2 has infinite magic missile spells memorized. Not even the best MinMaxed builds in the tabletop game can pull that off.
      • On the other hand, if you've got the one magic item in the game which reflects spells back at their caster, it can make for a hilarious final battle.
  • For reasons never explained in-game (which is a rare occurrence), the Krogan enemies in Mass Effect can regenerate to full health in two seconds when you destroy their very last HP. Now, Krogans are clearly labelled as "natural super soldiers" by the in-game encyclopedia, but that doesn't explain why your Krogan buddy, supposedly a badass among the badasses in his kind, can't do the same. Basically, it's an auto-regen power that pops out of thin air.
    • The game does actually explain it, you just need to pay attention.
    • You can shut this little trick down with Polonium or Sledgehammer Rounds, though. Not only do these ammo mods inflict poison damage, they prevent regeneration. These mods are fairly easy to get.
    • It is explained in-game (somewhere in the Codex of the second game, I think) that krogans have two sets of organs—when you kill a krogan the first time, it's switching to its secondary organs. Although...yeah, I've got no clue why neither Wrex (in the first game) or Grunt (in the second) can do this.
      • It's explained in the first game too. And it's not just the organs, cellular regeneration is an adaptive ability in addition to the redundant biological systems.
      • It boggles the mind how the hail of bullets you send ripping indiscriminately through the krogan's flesh so commonly destroys all his primary organs while leaving the secondary set intact to take over.
    • Mass Effect 2. Just...the whole game. Sometimes you will come out of cover for no reason, other times it's simply ignored. The computer likes to Zerg Rush with super strong, hypercompetent enemies, they will appear from behind in areas that had been cleared, and they are only too happy to kill you while your attention is on other threats. On, and the kicker, you cannot even respawn upon dying until after the game is patched. Was this release broken?
      • They fixed that for the PC version...which is very strange, considering they were released simultaneously.
    • Oh, but Mass Effect 2 gives us the Praetorian, the electronic incarnation of Dick Move. To summarize: Praetorians have two health bars, a "barrier" bar and an "armor" bar. To kill them, you have to empty their armor bar, but to damage their armor bar, you have to empty their barrier bar. The Praetorian can instantly regenerate its Barrier bar an unlimited number of times, whenever it wants. Oh, did we mention that the Praetorian attacks by floating over your cover and shooting you with weapons that can kill you from full health in under a second? So, a praetorian fight usually involves you hitting it with a heavy weapon that kills its barrier, having to run to new cover because your old cover was rendered useless, and finding that as soon as you've found new cover the Praetorian effectively undid all the damage you dealt to it.
      • Unless you're playing smart, in which case a praetorian fight always involves you circling a large object, staying out of its line of fire while your squadmates shoot it. Because it never shoots anybody but you.
    • And here's yet another cheat: most games will pause if you need to reconnect the controller. Not this one, you're a sitting duck.
      • I found the easiest way of dealing with the Praetorian-the gamebreaking Collector Beam Cannon. It shaves down the barrier with two blasts, and one more completely disintegrates it. If you level up enough, and have the proper assault rifle, its also very easy to take it out *three bursts are all there is needed to take down it's barrier, and two are needed to take out is health*. Finally, upgraded sniper rifle? One Hit Kill.
      • Even in the first game, you'd still get a paused "Please reconnect controller" if, say, the batteries in the controller unexpectedly died. Now you still get the "Please reconnect controller" message, but the game doesn't pause and you're just sitting there spamming whichever button you happened to be pressing whenever the console lost track of the controller. (This did lead to an amusing situation for me when the batteries died while I was doing one of the Firewalker missions. I was fighting a Colossus, the message came up, the Hammerhead was still shooting. Meanwhile, I scrounged the house for a couple of AA batteries. When I came back, the Colossus was dead.)
    • Also in Mass Effect 2 your previously Bottomless Magazines became Forgotten Phlebotinum and you now need ammo for your guns. But nobody told the AI, so it still has infinite ammo.
      • Luckily, so do your squadmates!
  • Surprisingly enough, Chrono Cross suffers from this. When in battle, the party can only use their element magic attacks when they have generated enough "Combo" through basic attacks to charge their element grid, and they can only use each slotted element once per battle. Your enemies are not limited by this. It is especially frustrating when fighting bosses, because they can immediately use high-level elements without generating a single normal attack, and they can use any of their elements, even the unique special-attacks, as many times as they want. The longer the fight goes on, the less you have to work with as your element grid runs out... not so for your opponent!
  • 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.
    • That is, unless you play the Thief version of the fight and steal the old fart's Warp Scroll...and WIN INSTANTLY. WHAT?!
      • White Mages can also win by hunkering down and healing enough to outlast him (having to duck Asuran Fists somehow), and Samurais can win by performing a third-level skillchain against him (which involves switching between two weapon types and using many abilities with perfect timing). It's basically him saying, "Wow, you're so good that I'm just going to give up now." Except that outside of these very few jobs, the only way to make him give up is to get him to low enough HP (below 25% or so).
      • Quite possibly the worst matchup is Red Mages. Because he can use their 2-hour (which lets him cast spells as fast as he can mash buttons), he has basically as much MP as he wants, and he STILL uses Asuran Fists, it is quite commmon to see Red Mages boast that they only had to fight him 10 times before they won.
  • In Eve Online NPC ships such as pirates have no capacitor (energy) which means capacitor warfare is useless against them. This means you can't prevent them from firing energy-based weapons and can't stop them from running their shield repairers, armour repairers or afterburners. Additionally, they never have to reload their weapons. It's not THAT irritating because NP Cs are pretty stupid, but it is more than a little unfair.
    • Then Apocrypha introduced The Sleepers who have all of the above advantages, much more HP, and much better AI than standard mooks.
  • In Golden Sun, some enemies can use Psyenergy, and generally have huge amounts of PP. Now, you have an ability called Bind that seals it off and a Djinn that can do the same thing, but this only stops attacks that start with the word casts, and not with ones that start with used. Not to mention that attacks that start with used are more frequent that ones that start with casts and aren't tied to PP. Did I mention that some enemies can seal off your PP and you have no abilities that can be used after that?
    • This is subverted. The computer may seal off your psynergy... but by the time you got that late into the game already, you would already have enough money or would have found or forged the Infinity Plus One Sword and put a whole load of hurt on them that makes psynergy relatively irrelevant for anything other than healing.
  • In World Of Warcraft, 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 drink a mana potion instead to get the same effect, and use the time saved to get a head start on blasting everyone.
    • On this very same boss you used to be able to use a Pv P trinket to break free from his sheep, that suddenly stopped working. Rogues used to be able to use their Cloak of Shadows ability (a move that gives them a 90% chance to outright ignore harmful magic) to block the move, that too suddenly dropped to a 0% chance to ignore magic. Druids can change shape, removing any other polymorph effect, except his. The AI is a cheating bastard indeed.
      • Although the AI IS a cheating bastard in this sense, he doesn't break you out of the Polymorph, it wears off just as he casts. A sufficiently fast Mage, Rogue, or Paladin can Ice Block/Cloak of Shadows/Divine Shield themselves out of the damage at the last second.
      • This isn't the computer cheating, though, it's a deliberate Boss Event mechanic. The party needs to carefully interrupt certain spells Aran casts in order to conserve his mana. When he runs out of mana, everybody gets sheeped - which heals you back to full - and then he sits down to drink, and then he throws a full-party 'Must Have More Than This Many HP To Proceed' gear check pyroblast. The devs wanted the entire party to either kill Aran before he ran out of mana or be prepared to take 7500 damage to the face. Methods of interrupting him from drinking, thus preventing him from throwing the blasts, were seen as potential exploits, so if you interrupted him, he popped a mana potion and did the pyroblast anyway.
    • Later on in the same dungeon is a "chess event", wherein not only does your invisible opponent cheat, but the game even tells you as much.
      • Also, the "cheating" opponent is an idiot who is just as likely to inflict fire damage to his own pieces as yours.
      • This is also because the Chess Event was so very easy, it could be and was very often soloed.
    • Some bosses can be manadrained but exept for a few where keeping their mana down is part of the fight strategy. They can cast spells even at 0% mana.
    • At the Argent Tournament, the jousting opponents will run in random directions to set up a charge or a ranged attack, which is fine, except that sometimes they will choose to run right off the tournament grounds. Guess what happens. Hint: it doesn't end in a tie.
      • At the same Tournament, the mechanics mean that the player must maintain a small range to use power attacks, wait several seconds between using them, and execute slow, ponderous turn after one of said attacks. The AI can execute pinpoint turns(on HORSES), to execute both attacks at the same time while outside of attack range and immediately stop to attack you again.
    • The Faction Champions encounter of the actual Argent Tournament raid pits you against 6-10 randomly-assigned race/spec combo NP Cs that typically adhere to a set of Pv P-ish aggro rules (ignoring threat to focus-fire people with lower health/armor, etc.) While this would be fine on its own, to drive the point home, you are subject to the rapid diminishing returns on crowd-control spells typically employed in player encounters... and they are not. It's not uncommon to have such a spell last 2-3 seconds if its target hasn't already been rendered outright immune, while people on your side can be locked down for 30 seconds or more at a time by the enemy's spammage of the same skill.
  • Blue Dragon's Final boss is a God damn cheat. It summons a monster that attacks outside of its own turn, and it can use the same attack twice in one turn. Including full on, unique-to-that-monster attacks.
  • The RPG Metal Hearts: Replicant Rampage, is just this trope incarnate. First off, the attributes are not explained, and there's 18-20 of them. Each one covers something specific, in fact they're more like the skills in any other conventional RPG. For example Evasion does not affect your ability to dodge attacks, that's covered by luck, and for some reason applied mostly to firearms and only a few melee attacks. When the player gets to the first part of civilisation they will note the following: By moving, the P Cs will be penalised and completely lose their dodge bonus to range attacks - yes, BY MOVING THEY LOSE THE ABILITY TO DODGE ATTACKS WHICH WOULD NEVER HIT THEM IF THEY STOOD STILL. The local Stormtrooper knock offs must've have seen Star Wars and thought that hitting the enemy is better than flailing about and dying as they will hit the player nearly every time, excluding cases of a massive Luck stat, and when the guards are moving, the player has a better chance of shooting a single atom from the other side of the city with a handgun. The entire stat system and how things are calculated verges on the impossible as even after extensive play the game will throw up weird results like 1 when the observed action is determined by multiple dice... Or getting a 1 when the players bonuses after penalties is + 2 or higher. At least, that's how it seems, as the player isn't able to observe any numbers other than their stats. It gets better - small evil scorpions with a "Fuck You For Buying This Game" poison at the start are easier to hit lying down from about 10 metres away with a handgun than point blank with a shotgun, SMG, or Sniper Rifle. Allies with firearms are less likely to hit than the players, but they tend to have weapons and gear that give bonuses to marksmanship, have the weapons strong enough to hurt evil guards. The players can't use those weapons due to stat requirements.
  • Whilst technically not an RPG, the UFO series use RPG mechanics for pretty much everything in the first 2 games, UFO: Aftermath and UFO: Aftershock. The computer cheats when it comes to pretty much anything explosive. Grenades in Aftermath are chancy but if the character's Throw skill is high enough it can clear entrenched hostiles, but the character is still going to be using the shotgun as the grenade throws fail in spectacular ways. Most often the player's soldiers will fumble the grenade and drop it under them, throw it behind them into the civilians being evacuated, overshoot the target by half the map, Lob onto a higher floor inside a building behind them, with no windows or doors on their side. This applies to rocket launchers, unless the user is in a heavy exo-skeleton, which is a waste as there are better Machine guns that can only be fired with those suits and don't run the risk of failing the mission by destroying the objective and entire team in one shot. In Aftershock, these effects are applied 2 at a time and also to rocket launchers and grenade launchers (Actually by adding an underbarrel grenadelauncher to any weapon the player will have corrupted the savegame their running, and also result in a more explosive fumble when the character drops it from a fricking launcher). Needless to say the aliens, mutants and cultists from the second are immune to this and can be reliably expected to incapacitate if not kill at least one character a shot.
    • Worse still is the Reticulans in the first game have no weight-to-speed penalty with their launchers which are listed as significantly more accurate and faster firing than anything the player can manufacture and just better in all other stats.
    • Sniper Rifles in UFO: Aftershock are strangely inaccurate unless the user is a level 3 sniper, then combat becomes a joke, however hostiles are all able to fire them like normal weapons without any penalties for stance or injuries. On the plus side they don't get any bonuses for these either and Cultist psychics almost never wear Trueshot aura Bracers.
    • In Aftermath, there is a bug which stops the 'Retrieve a sample of Biomass' mission appearing. Given that without that and some research time, the stuff can infect the entire planet, or just the player's territory, thus ending the game. Even with the sample the player still needs time to discover biomass repulsers and 24 hours to convert bases to repulser bases, which leads to effective failure if its the last base/s the player has, due to the requirement of a single military base needed to launch missions that acquire territory or defend against invasions.
      • There is a way around this though, by initiating a mission over area with biomass by yourself by send a fighter to take on strong UFO so that it will get shot down over that area, initiating rescue mission.
  • All Yugioh games have a list of restricted cards, just like the real card game, and usualy matching the official one when said videogame came out. 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.
    • 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.
      • That's actually not cheating at all. You can get the cards too. Fusion works differently in that game (and Duelist of the Roses). The fusion system is mostly generic, and if the cards are within certain ranges and have certain types and attributes, you will get a specific new card, which is NEVER a fusion-specific monster, but a new normal (or effect) monster that is also available in single card form. It's quite possible for you to get yoru own millenium shields, twin thunder dragons, etc. The truly broken stuff is done with Rituals instead, and THOSE do not exist in non ritual form.
    • Another universal hax cheat that the CPU abuses is their complete and utter disregard for the banned/limited list. Oh, sure, you might expect the NCP duelists to use cards on the Banned list (such as Premature Burial), and they generally only use one copy of those cards...but then you duel against Jaden or Aster or someone else with a Hero deck, and they use 3 copies of a Hero card that's limited to 1, and you'd be want to scream at the PSP or DS in outrage. Heck, the only way the player can do this, is if they hack the game themselves and remove the list physically, which just shows you how bad this is.
    • In WCT 2008, you ca enlist the help of an AI Tag Team Partner. They hurt you when they can, like sacrificing your monster for their Grandmaster when they could play it for free. It often feels like they are trying to help out your opponent.
    • Most Yu Gi Oh games generally tend to have rather psychic AI - they always seem to have exactly the card to counter yours, and they always seem to know exactly what you have in your hand.
      • It's quite bad with Tag Force 4. Oh, you summon a totally awesome monster. You attack, and guess what? Your opponent uses 'Mirror Force' or 'Torrential Tribute' that destroy all of your monsters. Have a Trap/Magic card that is just plain epic? They have 'Giant Trunade' or 'Mystical Space Typhoon'. Oh, and there was an instance where an opponent's monster effect was able to destroy one of my face-down monsters, and it chooses THE strongest one that I had out of four monsters.
      • Oh, it's not really quite THAT bad. Yeah, the randomizer is a bit screwey, but you can get god draws too. In all the games where the computer has an annoying frequency of getting the same good opening draws, you can pull it off too if you tweak your deck right. It seems the computer and player get different deck shufflers, and with the right deck, you too will get a lot of god draws. However, Pegasus (in any game he is in) cheats so blatantly it's not funny. He DOES see not only your hand, but all facedown cards you have. If you think the others are psychic, you haven't played against Pegasus yet. He will move his monster into defense mode when a face down card will kill it AFTER elemental boosting, never attacks facedown cards when he would lose, etc. That said, he's just as much of a cheater in universe too, mind reading with his Millenium Eye.
    • Try to use Magical Hats to any effect at all against the computer. You'll just be throwing away four cards by using it—the two cards you pulled out of your deck with Magical Hats, the monster that the AI will pick out every single time, and the card you should've put in your deck instead of the completely useless Magical Hats.
    • In Tag Force 3 F.G.D. and all other dragons on its side of the field deal piercing damage (Their Atk - the target's Def) when they destroy a defense position monster, and no trap or spell cards can be activated when F.G.D. attacks, unless you're the one controlling it...
  • 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.
  • In the Star Wars Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games, all Force-using characters (enemies and friends) but you possess immense (though not bottomless) Force batteries, have bullshitime 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 lightsaber, since they will deflect blaster bolts and telekinetically redirect missiles and explosives straight back at you. (Theoretically, one could lure them into a heavily-mined area, but that's more trouble than it's worth.) 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.
    • 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, or if they had leaped high enough, you could then catch them in midair with a second blast. If you had a way to predict which way they would jump, you could also make them jump into an abyss.
    • Another lightsaber alternative: enemy Jedi can't be killed with Force Choke—they break out of it after a couple seconds. They can, however, be moved about while held. Jedi Academy, in particular, has a great many Bottomless Pits. . .
    • They can break out of it, but once your lightsaber throw is of a high enough level, you can immobilize with choke and then throw the lightsaber at them. Enjoy!
      • They also can't dodge the concussion rifle's secondary blast, as it's an area effect.
      • This gamer always used the Force Speed and then Force Choke into death pits method. Even then, you only had a few split seconds before they broke free.
      • If you time it right you can spin your lightsaber and then pick up the Dark Jedi with choke, which moves his sabre out the way and holds him just long enough to be hit by your spin (much more fun with 'realistic lightsabers' enabled; then they're usually sliced in two by it).
  • City Of Heroes has a whole slew of difficult enemies, although most of the difficulty comes from what they're supposed to do in the first place — for example, the Malta group would be a much easier enemy if the Demonic Spider Sapper wasn't included among its ranks. One clear example of the cheating computer, however, is when you face enemies that can teleport. Player characters can teleport too, but only a few hundred yards at a time and only line-of-sight, meaning you can't teleport through walls in mission maps. The computer has no such line-of-sight restriction, however - which leads to teleporting enemies going halfway across the mission map in order to escape. It's more prudent to sit tight and wait for the computer to decide it's had enough of being cowardly and teleport back to you to continue the fight, rather than run halfway across the mission to chase it down.
    • What's especially infuriating is when enemies teleport next to one of their allies the second they're injured, heal them, and then teleport away before you can even target them.
      • And you can't target about 50% of anything that's not basic floorspace for no apparent reason...
    • Even the lowest level mook can jump five stories straight up when either coming at or escaping from you, and will occasionally do this (or move away at full speed) while stunned, a condition that, for players, leaves them capable only of a slow stagger and unable to jump at all.
    • Not to mention several enemies have power combinations that are simply impossible for a player to have.
    • Ghost Widow cannot be beaten without several Break Free (anti-mez) inspirations or applications of Clear Mind (a defender anti-status power), as she has holds that are several magnitudes above any hold available to the player in a game. (Made up for, slightly, because in the new Mission Architect, you can have her as an ally with the same powers in your mission).
    • But perhaps the most irksome case of this trope can be found in the Carnival of Shadows faction, already annoying to begin with, feature the Illusionist and Master Illusionist enemies with access to the "Phase Shift" ability. Phase Shift is meant to be a "can't touch this" button, which makes a player invulnerable for a few seconds at the cost of being unable to use their powers on anyone else. Illusionists ignore this limitation entirely and continue to attack you even while phased. Master Illusionists can also summon more illusionists who can also use this trick. Needless to say, not many people like Carnival of Shadows missions.
  • 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.
    • He goes back into Devil-Triggered mode 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 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.
      • If you've ever seen any expert DMC4 videos, you'd realise that if the computer used Dante to his greatest effect, Nero would last about three seconds. Point stands, though.
      • Its also worth mentioning in the first battle against Dante in 'Dante Must Die' mode that Dante can use Pandora and is able to switch form at an impossible speed.
  • Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has a unique example, in that you can beat the computer at its own game. You see, by Spellbinding multiple Mons in battle, you only get the option to attempt to add the weakest to your party... but the mechanics of Spellbind are such that it's easy to only bind the one you want.
    • Hell, it isn't even good at rubbing it in your face - by turning down a pact, you'll get a useful item.
  • 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.
  • Fire Emblem also contains arena opponents that have stats higher than the stat caps their particular class is supposed to have...
    • Also, in FE 1 enemies have a tendecy to get silver weapons while you still get stuck on iron, to "balance" the damage output, so both you and your opponent do about the same damage.
    • Case in point:Solders (low level enemy only cannon fodder) with enough HP it can't properly be shown.
    • Fire Emblem also has numerous stages that are blocked by the Fog Of War. You cannot see enemies through this, yet they all know EXACTLY where you are.
    • Also inverted, Fire Emblem uses a two-RN calculator for hit percentage, this method generally favors the player as it means high accuracy attacks hit more.
      • Can not count the times that a 90-99% chance to hit MISSED (aka 1-10% chance to miss succeeded). Fire Emblem's RNG is a first class cheating bastard.
      • Well, sucks to be you.
      • That's not cheating, that's a RANDOM number generator. It works both ways—sometimes the computer pulls a miracle, and sometimes it's the player.
    • Additionally, all combat outcomes are determined at the beginning of the turn (At least in the first GBA Fire Emblem). That means that if you load the game to try to save a character from certain death, he'll just repeat his futile action over. And over. And over.
      • Now, hold on. That's not because The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard. That's because the game uses an auto-save feature. After EVERY action, the game saves. That's why you can turn the game off at any time and come back to the exact moment in time (or action) that you just entered/made. That's why you can't save a character from death; you are already dead.
    • The fourth and fifth games take this to another level, though. Enemy units have infinite uses for their weapons and staves (a Sleep or Silence staff normally breaks after 3 uses, though the weapons angle is almost a moot point in these games), and any boss or miniboss that is holding a weapon with range 1 (or a magic tome with range 3-10) will magically materialize a weapon with range 2 or 1-2 when attacked from a distance they wouldn't normally be able to counter from. As soon as the battle is over, the weapon they used to counterattack will be gone.
  • Final Fantasy X has this in a few areas, but the most obvious use of this trope would be the Blitzball mini-game. Though at first appearing to be a pure sports-like mini-game, it actually relies quite heavily on numbers. Also, during skirmishes against other players, the numbers aren't always accurate; the actual value in the calculation used is partially random, being anywhere from half the listed value to getting a 50% increase. Naturally, the computer will favor the enemy by lowering your values while giving the opposition favorable boosts. To no one's surprise, it happens far more often in close matches. And if that wasn't enough, one team in particular, the Al Bhed Psyches, are so ungodly powerful that playing against them is just asking to lose unless you're very, VERY good (or several levels higher with cheap techniques).
    • The Blitzball game is fairly counter intuitive with what players end up having the best stats, since stat growth always is more important than starting stats (one of the best goalies starts out as one of the best shooters, then becomes one of the better defenders, and then only later becomes a good goalie due to his stat growth). It seems far more likely that most people simply don't get past the early point where the player team is actually the worst in the league (this is a storyline point, after all). Under fairly even conditions a competent player should almost always win because the computer is actually quite reckless about shooting and passing.
    • One minor way the computer does cheat is that in computer vs computer matches, goalies tend to get more xp then seems logical compared to what the player goalie tends to get during matches (unless you are getting shot on a whole lot). This isn't too big of a deal since the player can poach goalies from other teams and most goalies can respectably play other positions to earn xp.
    • The player also hands down gets the characters with unique shooting abilities that are absurdly powerful, while the computer characters only have the generic abilities. Tidus can eliminate defenders from blocking shots and Wakka can potentially boost his Shot stat to ludicrous levels if the original Aurochs are on his team.
  • 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.
  • Two Words: Forced Evasion. For those who haven't played OG Saga: Endless Frontier, let me clarify. Forced Evasion is a Scrappy Mechanic that kicks in when an enemy either hits or is about to hit the ground, whereupon three things will happen: First, the rest of the damage they receive during that character's turn is reduced to 0. Second, the character's turn ends immediately, ruining any chance of a combo and bringing the otherwise speedy pace of combat to a screeching halt. Finally, it allows the enemy a chance to counterattack, every bit as powerful and unblockable as their normal attack. Meant to be a mechanic that punishes players for not juggling enemies in the air well enough, it's partly-justified that only the enemy gets it - after all, they don't get to use items or Spirit commands to heal, and can't combo with their allies. It becomes ridiculous, however, when enemies hit Forced Evasion without ever being knocked up into the air. How exactly does a juggled enemy hit the ground if they were never juggled in the first place?
    • Whether or not they look or feel like juggles, the fact is that every single hit that your characters make bounces the enemy upwards, meaning that every single combo you try to do on them is ultimately a juggle combo and as a result, the enemies can always do a Forced Evasion regardless of how and where you hit them. What's even worse that if the enemy touches the ground during a wallbounce (usually caused by the wallbouncing hit hitting the enemy too close to the ground), they can do a Forced Evasion off THAT as well. They really should've thought the system through more or at least made it far less severe.
  • Several enemies in Tales of the Abyss screw the rules on numerous occasions. You have to be in overlimit to use a mystic arte. Several bosses that have them can use it randomly. They may also not only go into overlimit numerous times in a row. The final boss does both - when you take out half his health and get a cutscene mid-way through the boss battle, he may use Celestial Elegy without even going into overlimit or immediately go into overlimit twice in a row.
  • The major antagonist of Tales of Vesperia , Alexei is famous for ripping out his Mystic Arte, Brilliant Cataclysm, multiple times in a battle. It Gets Worse, he can do it up to 10 times on higher difficulties. Did I mention that Brilliant Cataclysm has a huge area of effect and does enormous amounts of damage?
    • He actually cheats in multiple ways. First, he can use a skill that is a powerful attack and a healing spell at the same time without consuming TP, often spamming it to a point at which he heals faster than you can damage him. If you set your AI to stay away from the enemy, they will move in on him before he uses Brilliant Cataclysm to ensure that they are within the area of effect. If you get close to actually winning the battle, he can activate Brilliant Cataclysm without having to go into Over Limit, and it will override an All-Divide (that is supposed to halve all the damage dealt by both you and the enemy), usually killing your entire party in a single blow.
    • In Tales of Symphonia, you may often find yourself using Pineapple Gels when low on TP. However, it seems that the skill that you can use for 16 TP is also usable by the enemy for a quarter of that amount. Coupled with the fact that the enemy almost alwaysu're facing 10. The spell that could blind everyone in an area? Will blind 1 or 2. The other that would paralyze half a group? Now you're lucky when it paralyzes one enemy. The best part is that NPC casters now have super reliable spells. The same spell that won't paralyze a single monster of a group after several tries will paralyze your whole party, leaving you completely defenseless, in the first try. Needless to say, the only conceivable strategy here is to power up all of your party's speed and then rain down all the most powerful damaging abilities at NPC casters the second you see them, because they'll only cast a fireball that'll kill your mage and just mostly kill the rest of your party when you're lucky.
    • To be fair, this is because you're playing on the hardest difficulty setting. Novice gives the player the advantage. Normal is completely even. Expert gives the computer the advantage.
  • In Suikoden III, there are quite a few rune spells that, while they may seem like useful area-of-effect spells, are quite hampered by the fact that Friendly Fire Proof is not in effect; if your melee attackers are in the area, they're going down too, meaning that they will rarely see use by you. The computer, however? When the computer uses them, the enemies that would get hit run out of the way of the incoming spell. Exceptionally annoying in the boss fights against the big bad team.
    • This is actually the effect of a magic skill called "Precision". The higher the skill level, the less likely your own team is to be fried by a spell cast by the possessing character. The bad part? Only THREE characters in your entire army can learn this skill. The three main characters (i.e. the candidates for the True Fire Rune, which would be the biggest offender in the matter of roasting your own team with non-friendly fire) are not included in that list. It's still possible for your allies to run out of the way of your spell without the skill, but the chances are so low that most players plan around half their team dying if they need to cast one of these spells.
  • In the Mother series, it's not uncommon for higher level enemies (particularly bosses) to make two moves per turn, as opposed to the player's one per character. This is taken to egregious levels in Mother 3, when the Miracle Fassad boss can performs actions such as PSI Shield >> Luxury Banana >> Foul Smell. The Luxury banana being a healing item, this boss is absurdly hard.
    • You want more cheating from Miracle Fassad? How about this? "Kumatora tried PK Magnet Alpha! Miracle Fassad has no PP left to steal! Miracle Fasaad used PK Starstorm!"
  • The Struggle in Kingdom Hearts II. When you get your opponent down to 0 HP, they are frozen for a few seconds so you can collect more orbs, before reviving with full health. When YOU get knocked down to 0 HP? You lose instantly.
  • The wrestling minigame in Final Fantasy VII's Gold Saucer. It's set up in a rock-paper-scissors style of punch-kick-block, but at stage 4, the AI will land a hit when previously your attacks would cancel out. And if you manage to beat Stage 4, Stage 5 takes the cheating to a whole new level - the opponent in invincible, and all of their attacks cancel out yours, so it's physically impossible to win!
    • And the chocobo racing minigame. From time to time, Joe will race against you, and his black chocobo, Teioh, isn't slowed down by obstacles AND will always have higher stats, even if this means breaking the limit.
      • And yet you can still smoke him with a maxed out Goldie.
  • In Final Fantasy X, the final boss comes in with two minions that heal it every turn and charge up its Overdrive meter so it can use its ultimate attack. And if you kill the minions, they just revive a couple tu Fortunately the player can cheat by saving before each game!
    • Interestingly enough, if you read Atton's mind, it turns out that he counts cards as well. Admittedly he wasn't actually playing at the time...
    • A dealer droid seen in the X Wing Series is mentioned having "cheater prods" that are used on, what else, cheating players. This may be more of an example of the Computer Stopping Cheating Bastards.
  • In a season 3 episode of Lost, Mikhail says that the computer cheats at chess.
    • That doesn't stop Locke from beating it anyway (and if you notice◊, he didn't actually have a checkmate, it could have been blocked with two pieces, but if you follow White's best-case scenario, he'd have lost in two of Black's moves, anyway)
      • Maybe the computer resigned, though this would be unusual for a computer. A checkmate would have been notated as Re1# (or maybe Re1++ ) instead of Re1+ .
  • This is part of the premise of Extra Mode in Phantasmagoria of Flower View, the 9th game in the Touhou series. In Extra Mode, the AI opponent is invulnerable at the start of each stage, until a timer runs down to zero, with the timer getting longer in each successive stage. To compensate, it is also on an AI Roulette and extremely weak, so it will usually die within seconds of the timer running out.
    • A common flaw in the Phantasmagoria installments is that the AI can literally dodge like the machine it is, meaning that barring the use of an AI Breaker, a computer opponent can choose when to eat a bullet.
  • In Spyro 3, you have to race a gang of rhynocs to get a dragon egg. The good news is that you get a special skateboard that can do turbo boosts. The bad news is that they have this too. It's even more frusterating when you find out at the start of the race that they can automatically use the boosts whenever they want while you need to use tricks in order to fill up the turbo meter at the start and whenever it gets empty.
  • In every Splinter Cell game, enemies alerted to your presence will never miss when firing at you with a pistol, even if the enemy in question is outside the range of the player's scoped rifle... Even if the enemy is far outside the range of the game's draw distance. Oddly, they will occasionally miss if shooting with a rifle.
  • The flight sim IL-2 Sturmovik cheats a lot (even discounting nasty surprises from the random mission generator, like being strafed on the airfield, before you can even get off the ground). CPU planes ignore much of the hardcore similationist aspects of flight, no matter what settings you use: they never fall into spin (which allows CPU to pull fairly ridiculous aerobatics even on planes unsuited for that); their pilots do not suffer from blackout/redout and have 360-degree field of vision, allowing them to unerringly foil surprise attacks and notice you even in heavy clouds; they pretty much ignore the severe winds and other adverse effects of the weather; they also can fly at maximum engine power as much as they want, while human-controlled planes, on the other hand, risk overheating and damaging your engine on realistic settings.
  • ReBoot is a show about the inhabitants of a computer, where a lost game results in damage to the system and (what is effectively) death of the participants. As you can imagine, they will pull every trick possible to keep the user from winning games. This includes things that are so unfair that it's surprising the User even keeps on playing on that computer, like moving ammo and extra lives from where they're normally situated.
    • ... leading to Bob encouraging Matrix to break the game rules when caught in a game parody of Pokemon/Dragonballs and the user is clearly going to win. "You're a renegade! CHEAT!!!"
  • The "enhancements" to the Sentinel remake Zenith include fog, which can be so thick as to make it difficult or impossible for the player to see what's happening; the game can be totally unplayable because of this. Of course, the Sentinel and any Sentries are totally unaffected by even the densest fog...
  • Hearts (the card game) for Windows is an excessive cheater. Realistically, in a Hearts game you can expect to end up with the Queen of Spades 25% of the time, whether initially or by having it passed to you. When playing against three computer-controlled opponents, you will receive the Queen 75% of the time, generally when she is passed to you. The only times when you do not see her in your hand are when you will also have the King and Ace of Spades. The Jack, Queen, king and Ace of Hearts also seem locked to the player's position.
    • Are you talking about an earlier version of Hearts? The Windows Vista version doesn't seem that unfair.
    • Holding the Queen of Spades isn't a disadvantage, if she's properly guarded; just the opposite, in fact, to an experienced card player. More disturbing with MS Hearts is how the computer always seems to know the right moment to drop Her Majesty on the player's unguarded Ace, knows what other suit to play so that a different player can drop the Queen on your winning card, and knows when it should take the Queen (or a heart) before it's time because there's a chance that the player might shoot the moon. Yes, I've seen the computer randomly and unneccessarily take the Queen of Spades when I had a dominant hand that it shouldn't have been able to see.
  • Cartoons often have games cheating to exaggerate how hard they are. Especially if they're coin-guzzling arcade machines.
    • One example is in The Simpsons, when Milhouse is playing a Waterworld arcade game. He gets a game over after just taking one step, cries "What a gyp!" and just puts more quarters in the machine.
  • Teal'c encounters this trope in a season 8 episode of Stargate SG 1. He says a computer simulation is too easy and the computer takes him at his word. Hijinks ensue.
    • Notably the computer cheats so blatantly and repeatedly that in the end they resolve the situation by doing what any self-respecting gamer would do: exploit a bug in the program to cheese the system, sending Daniel in to help while granting him tactical precogniton.
  • The Doujin game Mikuman which is a parody of Megaman. Rin faces against the boss of the second stage, Mario, who literally cheats, by using SAVE STATES each times you hit him. In truth, you are supposed to lose, until Miku saves you.
  • And of course, there would be the time when the computer is on the recieving end of a Curbstomp Battle and decide to just blatently cheat by freezing, glitching and crashing the game. Not even Michael Jordan is that sore a loser.
  • A Nightmare On Elm Street: Dream Warriors for the PC and the Commodore 64 bluntly advertised it's cheating as a feature listed on the back of the game box, warning potential players "Freddy cheats!"
  • Wii Sports, seriously, Wii Sports, in the games, usually changing the path of the object in question, Baseball has to be one of the worst offenders, though, how do you get a foul more than 20 times!?!
  • In Anti-Idle: The Game, the Stadium part of the game, the Ai opponents will not only accelerate in growth much faster than you can but can also go over the cap allowed for stats. Trying to beat an opponent with a top speed you can't even approach is frustrating.
  • So you are playing the poker mini-game in Dragon Warrior VII, and you are having an incredible doubling streak: You have doubled 6 times already, and have 640 coins, and the current card is a King. You simply can't resist the temptation of doubling once again as the odds are just incredible. You naturally bet for low. The next card is an Ace. You lose. You scream in frustration and resist your urge to throw the controller at the screen. Well, more the reason for that because you most probably got cheated. You see, when you start doubling the game decides in advance how many times you are allowed to double, and if you get that far you will lose no matter what you choose (if you choose low, it will deliberately give a higher card, and vice-versa). This can be corroborated with an emulator.

     Real Life 
  • Many arcade games are programmed to only make the jackpot or grand prize possible to hit once out of so many games. This is usually set via some kind of mechanism inside the machine, behind the coin box, or in the operator menu activated by a button behind the coin box for games with a monitor. One common implementation is to have a setting can go from 1 (or some other small number) to some maximum value X, or alternatively a "difficulty level" with each level mapping to a numerical setting in that range. Every game, the machine rolls a random number from 0 to X-1. If the roll is less than the setting, the jackpot can be won on that game; otherwise, the machine rigs the game to be Unwinnable. The other common implementation is to allow setting a minimum number of games that must pass since the last time the jackpot was won before it becomes winnable again. This is why some arcades will have one of those "stop the light" games with a four-digit progressive jackpot that hasn't been hit in over 1,000 games in spite of skilled players who can hit the jackpot at least once every 10 attempts on the same game at other arcades.
  • On British pub fruit machines, when a player spins a winning combination he is given the option to go higher/lower for the chance to win the next biggest payout. The machine decides in advance how far the player will be allowed to go, and there will come a point where a player who chooses to go higher/lower is guaranteed to lose regardless of the option taken. This has been proven by the Fairplay campaign, who ran the fruit machine software on a PC emulator, saving the game state before the choice is made. The machine cabinets are now required to display the message "This machine may occasionally offer a choice where the player has no chance of success".
    • The British National Lottery online games do exactly the same thing. For instance, there is a game where you can guess whether the next ball from the machine will be higher or lower, giving the illusion that skill is required to win. However, whether you will win or lose the game is decided beforehand. Sometimes it's funny to deliberately choose the least likely answer and then watch as a highly improbable sequence of balls emerge - again and again.
  • Similarly, with many games on pub quiz machines, when a player gets to the prize board the game ostensibly requires manual dexterity - for example, on Bullseye a player must hit a prize segment with a dart, and Battleships involves hitting it with a revolving turret. However, even when aimed perfectly, the game decides whether or not the shot will hit.
  • Stacker machines actually decide—before the game has even been played—whether the player is allowed to win a major prize or not; this means it's possible to "waste" winning games, as well as make your way to the end but never have a chance of winning. Though this is understandable, as the major prizes tend to be expensive things like game consoles or MP 3 players, it is cheating nonetheless. The machine doesn't cheat for the minor prizes, but that's because nobody cares about winning hair scrunchies.
    • In case you had any doubt, there's no warning of this (at least in Canada).
  • Claw Machines. Good lord. It's amazing how many people don't know this, but almost all claw machines are rigged in various ways. For instance, many machines lower the claw slowly and then pull it up quickly, tending to drop the prize with this sudden motion. The most common method of rigging a machine is to rig the claw so that it only actually closes tight enough to grip a prize every so often. If the machine is set to grip a prize, an experienced player will almost always win...but these instances are rare. On some machines, you get a chance to win every X amount of plays. Someone in-the-know could let other people play until the machine is ready to spit out a prize, then swoop in and take it. However, most modern machines use a Random Number Generator.
    • Mechanics aside there are a lot of physical ways that claw machines cheat, the first is to have the prizes packed tightly into the bottom which makes it hard to get the claw around it, and harder for the flimsy claw to pick it up. Also, many machines put in prizes that are too big (stuffed animals) or too small (small jewelry) for the claw to pick up.
    • Compulsive gamblers often believe that slot machines will eventually get "hot" and start dispensing wins. Needless to say this isn't true, but Claw Machines are prone to malfunction. I know from experience that if you hang around watching other people play long enough, you will eventually spot one that consistently grips harder, or jerks up slower than it should. Then you can win with regularity.
      • Some claw machine setups cheat more than others. I saw one where the prizes were sunglasses. PLAIN SUNGLASSES. Even if you did pick one up, it was guaranteed to fall back down during the motion of the claw, which would first move to the wall, THEN to the drop-off point, always dropping the sunglasses when it hit the wall, bouncing it off said wall and back far away.
      • The claw machine that pays out only every so often can be subverted occasionally by finding a prize that is at its widest point as big as the OPEN claw. When the claw crashes into the prize and flexes, it slips past the widest point and then when it opens again (I.E. it is not a predefined winning pick), the toy is jammed within. Now two things will happen. Either it will fall only into the exit chute as the claw will not flex enough to drop it until then or it will become stuck in the claw above the chute and you can call someone to hand you your prize. Most places will actually allow you to trade wins for other toys in the machines and this can be used to build complete sets of series toys e.g. Pokemon plushies where the Squirtles have a wide shell that can be jammed into the claw compared to the much thinner Charmander which is impossible to pick up.
      • This troper is either extremely lucky or have some preternatural skill with these machines. After watching a child spend a fortune on a machine trying to win a pink mouse toy, I inserted two games worth of coins and collected two mice in succession. The child burst into tears and ran off to tell its mother that I was "cheating" at the claw machine.
      • In fact the rigged claw bit is so prevalent lately that many games have a notice saying that "the strength of the claw is set at the factory and not adjustable." This of course means that it's barely strong enough to win, in theory.
      • Subverted by some machines, though rare, that will allow you to play until you win. Granted, the prizes aren't always that great and you might be there a while, but at least you get something for your perseverance.
      • Usually the schtick is to drop too far and or close while rising up, thus ensuring it can never get a good grip. certain very early claw games would let you stop the descent when you want, then close before lifting.
      • Machines in Japan are even worse. There are two additional types of "claw games". One has just a hook that slowly rotates constantly and barely curves upward enough to hold onto the prize you grab, and another is a rod that has minuscule, flexible prongs poking out the end that you need to naviage into a small hole on the prize and delicately hold onto it until it reaches the prize slot. Needless to say, most of these prizes end up falling down almost immediately after you manage to snag them.
      • Some Japanese machines are set up to be literally impossible to win by conventional means. They have prizes in boxes that are bigger than the claw, with a small Post-It-like sticker on the edge of the with a small hole in it. The claw can fit in the hole, but it will not fully close - at best, it will lift up the prize a little before it drops it. The saving grace is that the prize chute is a couple centimeters away from the row of prizes, and it lacks the barrier around it. Thus the only way to win is a Guide Dang It: Over the course of multiple games, hook the tab several times so that the box slowly moves towards the prize chute until it's partially hanging over the chute, then use the claw to hit the portion of the top of the box that's over the chute to knock it down the chute.
  • Many video slot machines are programmed with weighted reels, so that some stops are more common than others. This is virtually always used to make "near misses" happen many, MANY times more often than an actual win, in order to make the player think he's close to winning and continue playing. For example, the "Red White Blue" slot machine pays out the jackpot for hitting a red 7, a white 7, and a blue 7, from left to right. But for one configuration, each reel only has a 1/64 chance of hitting the properly-colored 7, a 3/64 chance of hitting the blank right above it, and a 3/64 chance of hitting the blank right below it - which means the proper combination is 27 times more likely to line up just above the pay line than it is to be actually hit, as well as 27 times more likely to line up just below the pay line. (And this is a milder case; it's not uncommon to make the adjacent blanks each 6 times more likely than the jackpot space.) In addition, the white and blue 7's are 6-7 times more likely to show up in each of the other reels - red-blue-white is 49 times more likely to be hit than red-white-blue, and blue-red-white is 126 times more likely.
    • It got so bad a law was passed to stop this deliberate near miss programming. On the one hand, the fact that a jackpot is more likely to stop above or below the winline than on it is NOT near miss programming. That's simply a consequence of jackpot rarity. You will still see more jackpots above and below the winline than on it. This is because while those loosing combinations are no more likely than any other, they are still more likely than a jackpot showing up on the winline. That is legal. Also note that the reel positions must be decided independently. In other words, it can't avoid the white one on the second reel only when the red one shows on the first, but it can avoid the white one whether or not the red one shows on the first reel, and make red or blue more likely than white. In practice this means that any position of a single physical that guarantees a loss in itself must have the same odds on that reel, while the odds are permitted to be different for stops that are part of a winning combination. Also, when 3 blanks is a free credit, all blanks must be equally likely, even though they are part of a winning combination. Complain to the gaming board if this is violated now.
  • This isn't machine related, but carnival games are rigged to make them almost impossible to win. Ring toss games usually make you put a ring around a can or bottle about the same diameter as the ring itself, making the odds of ringing one almost impossible (Imagine putting a golf ball through a basketball hoop, then a basketball itself.) Milk bottles tend to be weighed down, making them harder to knock over. The worst offender tend to be dart games. The darts are filed down, the balloons are under-inflated, and the balloons are spaced so far apart, there's more empty space than targets on a board.
    • Actually, a study was done in 1978. Researchers threw 7,000 rings at a grouping of 100 bottles. Only 12 wins were recorded, and all twelve were bounced on; not a single aimed shot had gone over the bottles. In fact, the rings wouldn't stay on the bottle even if dropped from a height of three inches.
    • Same goes for the ones where you have to get the softball into the milk can. The opening is just large enough, and the surrounding area is angled such that if you don't get it to drop straight in it will bounce away.

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