Excellent twitch-gaming skills or a crap-ton of quarters are the only ways to deal with these Demonic Spiders.
- 19XX's fourth stage has an enemy that resembles a grey missile which enters the screen from the top and almost immediately fires a huge spread of multiple shots. Even if you can manage to kill it (it's not too durable), those shots will make avoiding the other enemy attacks tricky.
- The phoenixes in the penultimate stage of Abadox. Fireballs gather in the middle of the screen and then fly straight up in the shape of a bird. If you shoot any of these fireballs to try and prevent that from happening, the other fireballs will home in on you relentlessly, and trying to shoot them without powerups is like trying to throw a pebble through a doughnut that's being thrown at you.
- The parasites in Alien Swarm look like the facehuggers of Alien fame. They're hard to spot, hard to shoot, they always spawn in groups, and if they latch onto you, they'll sap all your health away. The only way to get them off is to get to some sort of healing, so if you don't have a dedicated Medic on-hand, you're pretty much screwed. Oh, and more than one can jump on you at once.
- The most literal and one of the oldest examples were the spiders from the video game Centipede for their tendency to come out of nowhere and erratic patterns.
- Chimera Beast:
- Literal demonic spiders appear in stage 4. These come in huge numbers, fire loads of spreadshots, and have a very good amount of health. Worse still, they swing about, causing easy Collision Damage. And there's also a giant tortoise to annoy you when you face them.
- The small rockets
◊ in the final stage. An instance of Bullet Hell considering your Eater's large hitbox, these rise from the bottom in large numbers and shoot an 8-way spread of shots very often. If you don't eat them and their shots, you'll get overwhelmed.
- DoDonPachi Dai-Fukkatsu has the rings of spinning turrets in Stage 5 that spew out bullets or lasers and are indestructible except in Arrange A of the Xbox 360 port. Often cited as the most hated part of the game, even more than Hibachi.
- Gradius III arcade version: The fireballs in the fire stage, which are present in large numbers and split into indestructible fragments when shot, accompanied by ships that seem to home in on you, making them harder to dodge if you're trying not to shoot; it doesn't help when the passage gets narrow and the fireballs can randomly erupt and kill you without warning. And of course, the infamous Cube Attack, where ice cubes fly across the screen and pile up on the left side, and randomly home in on the Vic Viper at high speed, so you pretty much have to have Jedi reflexes to beat this part; many expert players tweak them to stack up as to form a shield from further oncoming cubes.
- Of course, you can easily defeat many enemies with the Energy Laser and four Rotate Options as close to your ship as possible. If you keep charging, you can ram enemies to kill them with the energy build-up, effectively making you all but invincible. When you do this, you lose some of the energy you've charged, which means you're less likely to lose it all by auto-firing (which happens when you're fully charged). Of course, if you're swarmed, you'll probably still be killed unless you can maneuver so that you have enough time to charge some energy before touching each enemy. The four Rotate Options can charge energy, too, making this five times as good.
- There is the infamous Option Thief in Gradius II and beyond. In many situations, trying to dodge it will get you killed. Better to lose a couple options than to die and lose everything. At the beginning of V's final stage, there's four of them.
- The final stage of Gradius Gaiden has four of them appear from the right just before the final boss, so you're guaranteed to lose all of your options. It's a subversion, though, as the final boss follows the tradition set from the first game.
- While a good number of the Red Star forces in Heavy Weapon pose a threat, three of them stand out, mainly by being able to instantly destroy the player regardless of shielding in a game where Continuing is Painful. Worse still, these mooks have a good bit of health and require the player to focus attacks on them in order to survive, drawing attention away from the other mooks they always appear alongside:
- Havanski Atomic Bombers have a lot of health and drop Atomic Bombs periodically. If you don't destroy the A-bomb before it hits anywhere on the ground, you (and your whole party in War Party Survival) get NUKED. In order to survive, the player's forced to attack their bombs as well as them. To add insult to injury, they give a measly 3000 points for being a dangerous enemy (a less deadly Giant Mook, the Blimp, gives 25000).
- Romanov Attack Satellites make irritating sounds and will instantly fry the player with their deathrays if they fly over the player while firing it. To avoid getting vaporized, the player is forced to fire at them to push them away so they don't fire their laser over them.
- Shovak Bulldozers have a lot of health and will instantly run the player over if they so much as to graze their sprite. To survive, the player must push them away by attacking them until they're destroyed, again forcing the player to fire at them.
- The Mars People in the Metal Slug series. Not only are they considerably tougher than the standard soldiers (who usually go down in one hit), but their shots are either homing to an almost infallible degree or very fast and hard to dodge.
- The boulder-tossing Earth Demons in Chapter 6 of Phelios.
- Any target in Point Blank (1994) that the game instructs you not to shoot takes off a life if shot, but bombs are by far the worst offender due to how frequently appear, and will launch in ways intentionally designed to make shooting relevant targets more difficult. They're at their worst in Point Blank 2, where one stage requires you to shoot the parachutes off of parachuting bombs so that they can be caught in a basket, where the usual life penalty for shooting bombs still applies.
- In Project Root, the Executor heavy fighters, which start appearing in the second mission, are the bane of beginning players, even on Easy difficulty. They can take loads of punishment, fire barrages of hyper-accurate homing projectiles that deal heavy damage, and typically attack in groups.
- In the Raiden series and its spinoffs Viper Phase 1 and Raiden Fighters, not to mention several of the Toaplan games (like Fire Shark) that inspired Raiden in the first place, exist what the fanbase calls "sniper tanks": tanks that come from unexpected places (under a tree, from a garage, from inside a hut) and immediately shoot at you. Their "dead zone" where they don't fire is exactly as big as their sprite. As the Dynamic Difficulty increases, their shots become faster and more prescient.
- And if you think you're safe over the ocean where there are fewer Sniper Tanks, we have Sniper Gunboats, which perform the same role.
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows:
- Pretty much anything with lasers, being capable of carving huge chunks out of your health and shields if not outright killing you on higher difficulties. Worse still, the lasers are instant-hit, meaning that you must be out of the way if you don't want a huge hit on your health/shields.
- Enemies with Plasma Cannons are almost as bad, with one shot taking out a good amount of health/shield. But the worst are the ground enemies that fire them dual rapid plasma shots straight down almost as soon as they come into view, and the incredibly tiny window you have to dodge if you're in front of one can lead to a lot of cheap deaths.
- The Carvelus-class battleships in Shadow Squadron are the largest and meanest of the recurring battleships, with lots and lots of missile launchers that can easily overwhelm you if you don't approach the ship at just the right angle. Mission 5 starts the player right next to one, which opens fire before the player can even move, giving them only seconds to get out of the way before they get ripped to shreds.
- Spheres of Chaos has Tidddlers. While most common aliens either are all over the place or chasing player, these manage to do both while being rather fast too. This results in many deaths.
- Bacteria and Daisies which are left unkilled can replicate so fast that they cover pretty much most of the screen.
- Spy Hunter (1983) had Switchblades, who are as fast as you and attack with deadly wheel spikes, and the boat segments had Dr. Torpedos, who fire constant streams of well... torpedoes. The NES-only dolled-up sequel, Super Spy Hunter, had the barrel trucks, who dumped loads of Exploding Barrels in your path that left flaming debris, and the Made of Iron bullet-spamming jets in the plane shmup level.
- Star Force (at least the NES incarnation of it) had a strange enemy shaped like a diamond with an eye in the center. It moved slowly, but followed your ship everywhere. Of course you can't shoot backwards, so you have to hit it from below. Doing so would cause it to fragment into indestructible shrapnel which would hit your ship about seven times out of ten (moreso if you WERE NOT at a great distance). Even worse, this enemy would appear in groups of three to five.
- In Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II, it was disturbingly common in missions with lots of TIE Fighters at once (such as the Battle of Endor and the bonus Endurance mission) for one of them to randomly crash into the player, often killing both of them. While allegedly this is a side-effect of so many enemies being on screen at once that collisions are almost inevitable (and to be fair, players usually aren't looking when TIEs crash into each other instead), the "tactic" was so effective that many players were hard-pressed to believe it wasn't intentional, giving the AI the not-so-affectionate nickname "Darth Bob."
- 10tons's Tesla vs Lovecraft has the Spawn of Dagon. These are the 2nd earliest enemies to appear and they are going to be the leading cause of death of ol' Nikolai. The Shoggoths and Flying Polyps are more dangerous but they only appear in small numbers. Dagon's kids can take a beating from early guns, do a lot of damage per hit on Tesla, they have a rush attack that makes them a danger from a surprising distance and finally they can come in swarms. To make things worse, many levels that feature them are full of narrow alleys, making it easy for the Spawn to cut-off your escape. They do make a good source of experience whenever you kill one.
- Time Crisis:
- The series' signature red "marksman" soldiers, whose first shots are guaranteed to hit if you are not behind cover. While subsequent games give out red "Crisis Sightings" to alert you to a shot about to hit you, you may not be able to react fast enough to avoid damage at times. They're at their worst in Crisis Zone; even though the Crisis Sighting is accompanied by a warning beep, they fire faster than any other variant of red soldier in the series.
- Knife soldiers never have Crisis Sightings, and knives that will hit you are marked with a red tail is far too subtle to easily see in a fast-pasted Light Gun Game.
- Certain enemies in the Touhou Project games will fire massive swarms of bullets when killed, most notably in Perfect Cherry Blossom stage 4 and Subterranean Animism stage 5. This gets so bad, that it's actually a better tactic to simply not shoot during the majority of these stages.
- Tyrian has the green-and-purple rectangular ships, first encountered in Deliani. They have a very good amount of health, do huge amounts of Collision Damage, fire fast-moving dual aimed shots at the player very often, stick on the screen for a good bit of time (they slowly move downwards, then fly up to the top of the screen before charging downwards), and appear in groups of three. At one point you have to fight six at one go◊, which will usually cause many inexperienced players to get destroyed. On harder difficulties, even the strongest weapons will require multiple shots to deal with one of them.
