Artificial Stupidity / Sport Games

• There are tons of silly actions the AI will take on your average baseball game in Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D:
  • Man on third. If you hit a grounder to an infielder, they will most likely throw to the plate in an attempt to put out the runner coming home, ^note who won't retreat to third unlike in real life, mind you but the catcher will immediately throw to first instead of wait it out until the runner gets home and tag him out. Sometimes this will allow both the runner and the batter to be safe.
  • Man on first, or men on first and second. If you hit a grounder to the shortstop, he will always throw to first instead of attempting a double play, even if his team is trailing badly and needs two outs desperately.
  • Man on second. You hit the ball to the gap, and when the outfielders get the ball, instead of throwing to second base to prevent you from getting a double, they will either do nothing (if you stand still at the corner bases) or throw to home plate if you attempt to score. Of course, the distance is so big from the outfield that the throw is always for naught, and you can exploit it to get to second base with the other runner.
  • While on base, the CPU runners can sometimes override the bases for no reason if you have caught a line drive and are throwing to the base the runner is retreating to. This shouldn't grant you a double play, but it does.
  • CPU batters can attempt bunts when they're trailing by a lot of runs. Gratuitous outs decrease the chance of scoring many runs in an inning. To make things worse, they can still do it when there's no one on base.
  • Man on third. If you hit a grounder to the first baseman, he will throw to the catcher to try and tag out the runner coming home. The catcher sometimes will start running towards first base and then throw the ball to the backstop, where there's nobody who can receive the throw. Maybe this was programmed in case the pitcher was covering the plate, but there's so little time that the pitcher can't get there soon enough.
  • When you have a runner on base, he/she will sometimes try and steal the next base if the pitcher attempts a pickoff. Without you ordering him/her to do so. Good luck getting back to safety.
  • Left fielders will consistently throw to first base after a hit even if there's a baserunner heading towards second base. They could get an out, but refuse to do so.
• In Backyard Baseball, if there is a person on third base, the fielders automatically throw to home. Usually it is an outfielder that does this, and almost always a run is still scored.
• In the NES baseball game Cyber Stadium Series—Base Wars, the CPU can be goaded into hitting easily caught fly balls by simply shooting a slow ball right into the strike zone.
• Invoked in FIFA 95 with the Stupid Team Cheat. Any team this was used on turned into the biggest bunch of halfwits ever to grace a football pitch. Most amusingly, goalkeepers would drop saved shots between their legs, allowing a player to tackle them to score a goal.
• For some reason the AI in FIFA 2000 (and its spin-off, The FA Premier League Stars) was totally incapable of dealing with set-pieces correctly. This meant that whenever you got a free kick, half of the time the computer team didn't even bother setting up a wall to try and block the goal, and when it did the wall tended to be completely out of position. Corner-kicks were even worse, as your own players weren't marked correctly and the opposing goalkeeper was far too slow to react, meaning that so long that you were able to get plenty of corners, you could ratchet up huge scorelines even on the hardest difficulty settings. And as the icing on the cake, the goalkeepers didn't always remember to face away from the goal whenever they were standing up from a ground-level save, meaning that they could end up holding the ball across the goal-line in the process of standing up, thus gifting your team a goal.
• A discussion of the AI stupidity in Madden NFL would take all night, but one that deserves mention is that the AI has serious trouble with quarterbacks doing rollouts. If the AI is tasked with guarding the receiver and the QB rolls to his side, the AI defender will often come up to play the QB and then get indecisive, leaving both the pass and the run wide open.
• In Mario Golf: Advance Tour, your doubles partner will always use a 3-wood for their second shot on par 5s, even if the green is less than 125 yards away.
• Mario Hoops: 3-on-3. You control one character at a time. Your two teammates do nothing while you desperately try to avoid getting the ball stolen. The ball falls right next to them? They still do nothing.
• NASCAR '21: Ignition has a sometimes game-breaking case of this as one of its signature bugs. Let's say a car stalls or crashes a full straightaway in front of the player car. Should be easy enough to dodge, right? One problem: the AI cars apparently weren't programmed to be able to dodge obstacles, so a car in the same lane as the stalled vehicle will pile in the moment they reach the obstruction. Then cars will pile into any lanes taken up by the cars that just crashed. Then more cars pile into those cars instead of stopping, as they were apparently also programmed to keep racing at speed no matter what was in front of them. Eventually, the player winds up staring at a track-clogging wad of wrecked AI cars by the time they get there - or get forced into the pile themselves if they get hit by an AI car in their lane.^note or if the spotter was glitching and the wreck was out of sight halfway around a turn Oh, and the AI will sometimes forget how to back up, so non-player cars will just keep trying to drive through the pile or stall completely, making the wad completely unmovable. If the pile-up reaches that point, unless the track/apron is wide enough to make a total blockage impossible, the only choice is to restart the entire race and pray any crashers in the new session go well away from the racing surface. This clip from a Bristol session is an example of this bug.
• The SNES NHL Stanley Cup release had a goalie that would advance out of the crease (which was legal at the time the game was released in the real league) if a shooter performed a slap shot further from the net. Ordinarily, a solid tactic (to reach a wider angle of shot). However, if the slap shot was a high shot from just past the blue line from near the boards, it would sail over the goaltender's head as he advanced, and it was merely a question of whether the player overshot the goal or undershot it - if the latter, the puck would then slide in for an easy goal. Regardless of the difficulty level, the opposing goalie would always fall for this, making it comically easy to pull off double-digit wins even with shortened periods.
• In Super Swing Golf Pang Ya, lower-tier opponents will make the most blatantly idiotic shots.
• In Pro Cycling Manager 2011, when a breakaway occurs, a team start chasing a group containing their own riders like it was one of their worst rivals. Pack takes them back in. New breakaway, some different riders, one from before mentioned team is in. Same team takes up the chase and wins. New breakaway, same teams, minus the one chasing before takes part. The team chasing before has stopped, because they weren't destroying it for their own team anymore.
• In Pro Cycling Manager 2014, and previous editions, the AI has a tendency to gang up on the player, refusing to do work whatsoever, even when it logically should. As an example, in real life, during a cobbled classic, if someone's on the break at the end, everyone takes part in chasing the person down, because they want to win. In the game, the AI leaves the chasing to the player-controlled rider, and decides to just suck wheel, even if there's a very slim chance that the player-controlled rider will ever chase down the guy on the break, and by that reducing their own winning chances to nearly zero — a chance that real cyclists would never take.
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006 gives excellent examples of this. The AI has a habit of making really poor shots (and almost always being unable to make a putt longer than 5 feet). This would range from always hitting the ball into the bunker to hitting the ball out of bounds. It gets worse during the December 11 event in RTE mode, when the opponent team, consisting of Jon Hozzle and John Dinkenbach, often makes really poor shots to the point of hilarity. The scores would range between Bogey to 5 over Par per hole. Your partner, Danny Wheeler, also falls victim to this, even if it is to a lesser extent. Even the PGA pros and legends can't avoid this trope, as the likes of Justin Rose and Arnold Palmer can hit the ball into the water hazard at times. It is because of this trope that some players of the game criticise it for not providing enough challenge.