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. You let off the gas for just a second. All of a sudden, formerly distantly AI cars zip past you! Surprise! The AI is a Cheating Bastard!
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 players on human 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.
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 Computer Is A Cheating Bastard does not include "fair challenges" of the game (wide pits, powerful/numerous enemies, etc.); those are Real Difficulty. Cheats that help the player are also not this, but either a Rubberband AI or plain old cheat code.
See also: Fake Difficulty, Rubberband AI, Nintendo Hard, Random Number God
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.)
... builds faster, or just has new units magically appear out of nowhere.
... acquires resources faster, starts with more, and/or simply doesn't need them.
... is able to instantly micromanage every unit and structure it has.
... can always see the entire map, and is not affected by the Fog Of War.
In RPGs, the Useless Useful Spell is always useless on AI enemies, but when used against you, it works every time. And that goes double for bosses.
In racing games, the computer ...
... has "Divine Driving Skills", making no mistakes unless you physically intervene.
... 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.
... will know the perfect line to take (the exact path to achieve the best time) and will take the best possible line - even if they crash into you.
... possesses 'rubber band' capabilities, meaning that no matter how fast you go or what obstacles you place in their path, if you are in first place then second place will always be close enough to catch you if you make even the slightest mistake.
... touching an enemy damages you but does nothing to the enemy. How incredibly one-sided.
Specific Examples
Note: Since The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard is so incredibly common, only especially egregious examples should be listed here, otherwise this entry would take over the entire wiki. Aversions or subversions should probably be left out as well, since that's (hopefully) the default.
Worst Offenders
Pokemon
If a move has an accuracy of less than 100% in Pokemon, you can guarantee that your likelihood of missing is the listed value, while the computer's likelihood of missing is half that, at best. Further, if there is a positive secondary effect that can kick in with a move, you can practically guarantee the computer will get it twice as often. And to top it off, the three status ailments that have a chance of preventing a Pokemon to act (confusion, paralysis, and attraction) will be much more likely to afflict a human player than a computer player. The frustration with this is so great, human players refer to Pokemon built to take advantage of these as "hax" and most are dismissive of those who try to use such tactics in Pv P environments.
If your Pokemon is confused then you're in for about a 50% chance of dealing damage to yourself. The computer does not go by this rule - although admittedly, Pokemon does a better job with this than some other RPGs, most notably EarthBound, where feeling strange affects your party members nearly 100% but almost never affects your opponents.
That's why this troper never teaches her pokemon Thunder. It's strong, but the listed accuracy(70%) can be ignored, better rename it "Very close to 0". This troper remembers using it a lot in fighting against a Galatic Commander, and NONE OF THEM HIT. The fact that the move has only 5 PP made it worse.
Thunder has 10PP...
This troper remembers having his Nidoking using Thunder, only hitting 3 times out of the 12PP he had (12PP due to a PP UP)! The percentage is a lie!
Rain Dance+Thunder= 100% Accuracy... Kyogre+Thunder=100% all the time, unless facing a Groudon, or a pokemon with Sunny Day, or the like.
This troper, back when he was seemingly the god of luck, almost always hit with Thunder, and very frequently hit with other mid-accuracy attacks (Blizzard, Fireblast, etc.). However, even in that stage, this troper dared not use Zap Cannon, and preferred to use sure-hit attacks to finish off a weak opponent whenever possible. It should be noted that having apparently gone from god of luck to god of suck, this troper now fears even Pv Ping, when each side's chances suck equally.
It doesn't help that random computer players with no plot significance tend to have Pokemon that learned powerful moves about five levels early, either.
And let's not forget that Gym Leaders don't seem to be governed by the same rules of evolution as the player. This editor remembers facing Lance as the Pokemon League Champion in one game where he had a couple of third-evolution Pokemon a good five levels under the required one. Considering that said third-evolution Pokemon smoked this editor's team, it was not a pleasant experience.
commonplace. in Viridian Forest, you find level 5 Metapods.
And level 9 Pidgeottos, but only in the first-gen games.
His Aerodactyl is definitely 'Sharked: it has Rock Slide, which it can't learn in the second gen.
So was pretty much every computer controlled Machoke/Machamp in the game. This made Chuck's Gym a pain to get through, to say nothing of Chuck himself, whose Poliwrath spammed Hypnosis and Dynamic Punch (which causes instant confusion by the way), with 60% and 50% accuracies respectively, and both hit EVERY DAMN TIME<
In later games, Pokemon learning moves early is actually justified - a skilled breeder can get level-up moved bred into level 1 Pokemon, so presumably the computer-controlled trainers bred their own. While the player can't do this at first, many Tournament Play fans abuse this in the Metagame.
The battle tower in the latest two games screws with odds to the point where your low odds of success never work and the AI's always do.
This is most notable with any instant-kill effect, which theoretically all have 30% success rates (in the newest generation, the right held item can boost that to 33%). Experienced Battle Tower players key in on anything that could conceivably learn Sheer Cold, Guillotine, Fissure, or Horn Drill first, or lose their entire team in as many rounds as they have Pokemon.
Pokémon Battle Revolution had an AI-controlled Gligar whose Guillotine hit this troper's Pokémon 4 times out of its total 5PP. Goddamn.
Later levels of the Battle Tower (usually 50 and up) also seem to include Pokemon with specific stats that exceed their possible limit, even with maximum EV training. It's pretty frustrating to have an entire fully trained team wiped out by a single Pokemon because its stats are inexplicably twice as high as they should be.
Fortunately, the Battle Factory in Emerald forces you to use three rental pokemon, all of which can be used from the other trainers. As an added bonus, you can even switch the three pokemon you're using after a battle with any of the ones the opponent were using. This Troper has barely made any progress elsewhere in the Battle Frontier due to this lovely shot at retribution.
The Diamond/Pearl battle with Palmer especially. His Miltic killed EVERY member of my squad. By using Hydro Pump. ALL of them hit. And on paper, my Luxray should have OHKO it. Grrr.
The simple fact that the random computer opponents in D/P are allowed to use Shedinja is cheap enough. Shedinja has a ridiculous ability that prevents it from being damaged by anything but super-effective attacks. If you didn't know about this beforehand(I sure as hell didn't) and don't have something super-effective against bug and your opponent sends out Shedinja, you'll automatically lose because the levitating exoskeletal bastard will be completely invincible to all your attacks.
On top of that, the AI's cheating is even worse. Moves that are supposedly "sure hit (cannot miss at all)" were seen missing constantly, as well as pokemon pounding on you with their strongest moves WHILE ASLEEP.
Maybe I'm a huge nerd for knowing this, but anyone can do that as long as one of their moves is 'sleep talk.' To be fair, I think it's only available on a handful of normal types, or as a very rare TM.
The Stadium games deserve special mention, where the most common (read:Only in all but a handful) method of loss for someone with a decent team is cheating computers.
In the first Stadium game, if you even try to use a Ground type Pokemon or any other Pokemon who is weak to water against Lt. Surge's Pikachu or Raichu in the Gym Leader Castle, they will use Surf!I wish I was kidding! Those Mons technically cannot learn Surf through the HM, but a hidden method within the Stadium game lets you teach a Pikachu Surf, which is the only way to do it without using a cheating device.
And while we're on the subject of Stadium, there is at least one trainer who has a Mew in their party. The kicker? You can't get a Mew within the game by normal means.
One of the NORMAL trainers managed to take out both a mew and mewtwo using average pokemon. Those guys cheat no matter what.
This troper swears on all that is holy that once, while playing Blue version long ago, one of the Elite Four somehow taught one of her pokemon Toxic right in the middle of the battle, there was even a message declaring that she had used a TM. It is still unknown whether this was a glitch or not, however.
When battling against the Elite 4, this troper noticed that they seemed to have infinite PP. This means that while your Pokemon can use Gyro Ball (PP 5) five times, the computer can just keep using it over and over and over.
In Diamond and Pearl, not only do all enemies have infinite PP, but Gym Leaders and the Elite 4 all have infinite Full Restores. So if you get a pokemon close to death, they will ALWAYS use a full restore. The only way to win is to use really powerful attacks, that either do 100% damage, or 50% twice.
Not only do status conditions seem ineffective on the computer, but they tend to wear off obscenely fast. This, compounded with the biased accuracy, means that your Hypnosis seems to have a 1/3 chance of hitting and might keep the opponent asleep for two turns, and his Hypnosis will miss once in a blue moon and make you sleep for ten turns- or enough turns to get K Oed.
This troper still firmly maintains that most Pokémon player reports of cheating AI (well, perhaps not in the Battle Tower or Stadium games) are purely psychological and derived from the general principle of noticing when the AI is lucky but not when you are. In fact, this troper generally observes herself to be luckier than the AI overall if anything.
This would be true, except for the next example...
Lance's Dragonite in the original games has Barrier. Go on. Check. Done? Yep. Dragonite's line has forever been incapable of learning Barrier. Another example of the games LITERALLY cheating.
This troper has noticed something; computer enemies can use Protect or Detect far beyond their level of PP... and it always works, when for you the chances of it working are supposed to go down every time you use it consecutively. He got more than a little annoyed when the computer used Protect twelve times in a row (he counted), all but one of them succeeding.
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.
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 star didn't provide the computer with extra speed. They just tended to switch it on as they breezed past you, to make it impossible to counter them.
Mario Kart Wii will hate you in the form of item distribution. The AI always cheats by always getting the most powerful items no matter what, but if you happen to be in the back of the pack, expect nothing but a variety of Mushrooms and occasionally a Spiny Shell or Bullet Bill while other items are much more rare.
This troper once got four golden mushrooms in a row. Golden mushrooms, an item that lets the player go ridiculously fast, but prevents the player from getting other items until it wears off (usually 5-10 seconds, a pretty long amount of time). This would be nice, but it was on Rainbow Road, a stage with numerous sharp turns and very few walls. Needless to say, they lost pretty badly. They cursed in anger every time a computer in a Bullet Bill passed them.
This troper had a similar experience with Mushroom Gorge. Imagine this: 70% of the track is nothing but mushrooms you bounce from and to over an abyss and using mushrooms or stars will make you overshoot the mushroom and fall down. Knowing this, now imagine yourself getting nothing BUT mushrooms in this track and unable to force yourself to use them while mushroom hoping because you know that you will throw yourself into the pit if you try to boost while jumping mushrooms. To simulate a heart attack, just watch the computer drivers use spiny shells and thunderbolts as you are jumping so they make you fall down. Got a bullet bill? Better pray that it will carry you over all the mushrooms.
Continuing the idea of Rainbow Road and other difficult courses, this troper has never once seen a computer bump into a wall, go off-road, be bumped while doing a wheelie, or go into a bottomless pit with the exception of if they're struck by lightning or some other attack while going over a jump. On the plus side though, they've never seen the computer use a shortcut either.
Mario Kart Wii. 12 Players. 11 AI. 150cc, any cup. Expect a BLUE SHELL to hit you ON THE LAST LAP BEFORE YOU REACH THE FINISH LINE. Even better, imagine one hitting you over a jump. And for more fun, try getting hit a Blue Shell, followed by a Red Shell, then Lightning, and, for kicks, a POW Block in the middle of all that action. Item Rape doesn't even come close to defining it.
Another ability the computers have in Mario Kart 64 and earlier is the ability to instantly recover from items as long as they weren't on screen when the item hit. This frustrated this Troper to no end when the best items would simply stop computers for a moment if you couldn't see them, while the same items used on you would make you fly through the air. If the computers still do this in more recent versions, it isn't as noticeable.
This troper never played Super Mario Kart as much as he did Mario Kart 64, so he believes that the rubber-band AI in MK 64 is the most egregious in the series. If you'd like to see for yourself, switch the map view to the lap mode (the whole track is in a square) and watch your hard-earned lead evaporate.
This troper had to resort to cheating against the computer in Mario Kart Wii when I wanted a 3 star rank on one cup that didn't have it yet. 50cc, Shell Cup, 10+ attempts and each one resulted in a 2 star rank due to the computer item raping at just the right amount so that I wouldn't finish quickly. Raping the computer with infinite stars and bullet bills lowered my blood pressure.
As if the Rubberband AI wasn't bad enough, the computer drivers in Mario Kart have an uncanny timing to hit you right when you are in the air over a Bottomless Pit (or a earlier part of the track, which is even worse), as well as having a noticeably better chance to get the really good items in the lower places than you do. And then you're hit with lightning from the last placed AI driver so you lose the item anyway.
Super Smash Bros.
While the AI in Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl isn't of Rubber Band variety, it still possesses reflexes well beyond any skilled human player, including, but not limited to:
Being able to parry/reflect any projectile with just the shield, something that requires frame-precision timing, thus rendering projectiles largely useless. Naturally, this is not an issue if the human player is using a character who does not possess a useful projectile.
This has been remedied in Brawl, where the computer AI, even on the hardest difficulty, is not capable of consistently pulling this off.
Being able to Meteor Cancel, even at ridiculously high percentages, meaning KO'ing them off the bottom of the screen is very difficult, further limiting options. Again, human players are much less able to consistently MC. This is circumvented by KO'ing off the side or the top, but that requires more work, because more damage needs to be built up.
Being able to stop immediately with Sonic and Pikachu's final smash
Wall jumping, a frame accurate act, after being hit by dragoon. While a normal human would bounce off the wall to their death, the computer will jump off and land a few feet away. So many battles lost...
The grab range of computer opponents seems to be far greater than when human players use them, meaning we aren't as safe as we thought we were.
The AI also notices when items have appeared off screen, resulting in it running off in the middle of a heated duel to grab an item that it shouldn't have even noticed until it came on-screen. On no stage is this act of cheating more obvious than on the Temple stage, where the AI will happily abandon the fight all of a sudden to run all the way to the other side of the stage to grab a Pokeball that only appeared just a second ago.
If Stereo sound is enabled, one should quite easily hear the tell-tale *plink-plink* of a Pokeball hitting the ground off-screen. This only applies to Brawl (where, ironically, the Pokemon are nowhere as good as they were Melee); in Melee the Pokeball makes no special sound, and you don't know that it dropped somewhere until they use it. This now applies to the Dragoon pieces, and they make no distinct sound upon impact.
When it comes to knocking out Dragoon parts and Final Smash Balls out of people, there's usually a high chance that you will drop it from even the weakest attacks and at low damage, but no matter how hard you hit the AI or how hurt they are, they will hardly drop the said items.
This troper's friend claims that this is because it depends on the number of times you've been hit, not the damage you've taken. Somehow, this seems unlikely though, since they once lost a Smash ball after falling onto some spikes once. ONCE.
Speaking of Final Smashes, when the AI uses Sonic's or Pikachu's, not only are you the prime target, but they have PERFECT control over their powers, as in they will only miss once in a lifetime.
To add to the frustration of the already cheap as hell Wario Ware stage, the computer always seems to get rewarded with invincibility for completing a microgame a lot more than you do.
This Troper once saw all 4 players (computer x3 and myself) win the stupid challenge somehow*, all four players of course received the prize. Star! Star! Star! Big. Greaaaat...
*To Clarify "somehow", the computer tends to even sacrifice invulnerability to screw with you, even knocking you out during "Don't Move" so you either forfeit YOUR power up, or don't recover and lose a life.
When Togepi appears and performs Night Shade, the screen goes COMPLETELY black. Not only you can't see what the hell you are doing, but the AI knows EXACTLY where you are in the darkness, making this Pokemon move more of a hindrance.
Also, when the Nintendog appears, nothing happens to the CP Us.
Also in Brawl, the AI have perfect bearings when the controls or the stage in Spear Pillar is reversed, making the fight much harder and cheaper than it needs to be.
Not to mention generally grabbing a Cloaking Device in any single player mode in Melee. There was an Event match that had both Fox and Falco permanently invisible just to drive the opposing point home. Evil bastards.
Also, in a Fast special match, the computer will have obscenely good reflexes and is able to make moves faster than a human opponent can react, since it's not limited by human reaction time.
And to top it all off, all this and more is characteristic of the AI on the easiest difficulty.
The final match before Master Hand in brawl is a Battle Royal... except for the fact that it's not. CPU characters focus on killing the player, instead of each other. This is even more evident with the Dragoon. It always focuses on you.
In fact, this seems to be the case in a regular free for all match. There will always be at least one guy who will stalk you no matter how much you try to distance yourself and when they do, it attracts attention from the other AI players, thus you get caught in the "brawl."
In one match this troper had, the level in Pokemon Stadium 2 changed to a mountain theme. Kirby has a final smash ready, but gets "stuck" behind a mountain, not even bothering to fully jump over and reach the human player. The other two AI players keep walking back and forth, ignoring Kirby when they could have attacked him many times over. As soon as the stage goes back to normal, Kirby goes after this troper instead of the other players that were next to him for a whole minute, proving the AI hates humans.
And this troper swears on all that is holy that when an AI player knocked him out with a final smash, the other AI characters actually taunted when I was knocked off, even though they didn't do anything! If this isn't proof enough that the AI hates you, I dunno what is.
The AI on level nine in free-for-alls will never attack their own, making it a team battle with friendly fire enabled.
An example of the above: This troper made a custom stage that was pretty much an upside-down U with a jump-throughable platform between the two walls. When this troper stood on said platfrom...Well, imagine his horror and disgust when the 3 AI characters stopped attacking each other and just ran around, blatantly trying to reach the player. Just...no.
Fighting Game
In the Street Fighter series, there are moves known as "charge moves" which require holding the joystick in a certain direction for a short period. The computer, however, doesn't have to do this and can often perform a charge move in the middle of moving in the opposite direction, such as using Blanka's charge-back roll attack while walking forward. This also applies to "spin" moves (moves which require a 180 degree, 360, or more cycle of joystick motion). Most obvious the 3,000th time Zangief hits you with a full-strength spinning piledriver (the "air" version, triggered by any upwards joystick click, is approximately 3/4 the damage of the ground version).
In the first Street Fighter II, Guile was especially infamous for this. He could generate Sonic Booms faster than any other character, taking advantage of his nonexistent recovery time. He also abused Flash kicks, making it impossible to jump.
This troper owns the original SF II, and there is actually a way to cheat Guile back and beat him ONLY by jumping. You can kick him at a certain point when he starts to do his Flash Kick. Rinse and repeat. The same goes for Zangief, though it only works with Ryu, Ken, and possible Dahlsim. Zangief will execute a jump every time you fire off a Hadoken. So, if you fire it at a certain range, he'll actually jump into it. Repeatedly.
Worse yet was Balrog. He could execute dashing punches faster than the player can recover from a block. He had the option of using them exclusively until the player's life was bled away. Only a perfectly timed Dragon Punch, Flash Kick or Spinning Lariat could stop the nefarious beast. This made him potentially the most difficult boss.
In the Mortal Kombat arcade series, the computer player often blatantly cheats. For instance, in Mortal Kombat III, the AI has the ability to throw the player as the player performs a projectile move; this simply isn't possible in reverse, or during a two-player match. The computer can also perform certain combos that human players are prevented from using, and some of the computer's combos do more damage than the exact same combo performed by a human player.
In Mortal Kombat 4, Jax's Multi Throw move is quite difficult. This Troper could only reliably get 2-3 hits. The computer however, could get all of them each time, and incredibly quickly.
Likewise in Mortal Kombat 4, it is possible to temporarily take control of the computer. This is done by getting within grab distance, and performing either a throw or bonebreaker, which about 90% of the time will cause the computer to perform the move.
In Mortal Kombat 2, this was true of most attacks, especially uppercuts and sweeps. The computer would invariably perform the exact same move as you, later than you, and it would take priority and own you.
In the original Mortal Kombat, this troper remembers computer characters ducking and slowly sliding across the floor to counter a barrage of player fireballs.
Dragonballlicensed games have this during story missions. For instance, some characters in later stages are programmed to automatically dodge most combo attacks (like throwing your enemy in the air and teleporting to hit them up there, more than one energy attack, etc.). This becomes a problem in levels where you can get a Ring Out. Because the enemy will doubtless be able to break your guard and counterattack whenever he feels like, you'll be easily knocked out the ring by him, while he can simply decide not to be hurt by your attacks. Also, the computer defies the rules of teleportation. normally, after attacking someone with a fully charged attack, you can teleport behind them ONCE that combo and knock them away. The enemy can do this up to and including three times from the fighting equivalent of a flick. This editor recalls one time the enemy instantaneously used this non-stop for four minutes, killing his character without a proper fight. This is probably because the enemy AI cannot tell the difference between being in maximum power mode and being energy-less.
Just try throwing a Ki Blast Wave at computer opponents in DragonBall Z Budokai 2. Nine times out of ten, they WILL flawlessly deflect it back into your face, with split-second timing. They will do this even when they are currently dashing at you with about 2 inches between the two of you, and you will get your own ki blast back in your face. They can and will do this at any distance, at any point in time, and in the middle of any combo. Speaking of combos, the computer seems to be able to cancel combos at any point. This troper has still not figured out how they do that.
Soul Series has their moments of blatant cheating, but Soul Calibur III has the most notorious examples.
The AI will suddenly block every throw, land their throws on your character despite being theoretically out of range, block or counter every move the player has used so far in the "set" of battles (even if the CPU character's back is turned, and it's not Voldo!). Read: The computer opponent will read your controller inputs. Every. Single. Time. This Troper notes that PC-controlled Mitsurugi, Zasalamel, and Abyss are the worst offenders for this.
If you get knocked down even once, you'll usually NEVER get a chance to fight back, unless the CPU decides to ease up.
SNK Boss Night Terror is an especially egregious example, nulling the time-honored Ring-Out defeat by flying back when knocked out of the arena (sure Word Of God stated they're trying to de-emphasize the use of Ring-Outs...), and a stance that rendered it invincible.
Setsuka, when controlled by the computer. Just... Setsuka. She is the destroyer of controllers and the crusher of souls.
This troper hates it when he has to go against Setsuka at any time during the Tales of Souls part of the game. 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!
This troper's also noticed that even when you DO actually have a good chance of winning, the opponent will suddenly go completely batshit insane in terms of speed and power, and will demolish your entire life meter in two or three hits. Really, really noticeable in Chronicles of the Sword. Chronicle 5 and onward will make you snap your controller in sheer frustration. Even worse is that you have to beat this mode once in order to unlock some of the custom parts for custom fighters that cannot be unlocked via abuse of versus mode.
Soul Calibur IV. The Apprentice, just... The Apprentice.
Soul Calibur II's Weapon Master mode starts placing incredibly blatant handicaps on you later on. ("Now defeat this character...and he only takes damage from being knocked into the wall!") One of them was to make the opponent invisible except for what they're holding or carrying—that is, their weapon. In other words, if you wanted the slightest chance of even hitting them, let alone hitting them enough to win, you had to keep your eye on their weapon at all times to so much as see which general direction they're in. In other news, the Playstation 2 version of this game included Heihachi from Tekken, who fights barehanded. See if you can tell where this is going.
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 MKWalking 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.
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.
Those who played SNK vs. Capcom (also known as "SvC Chaos") learned to dislike Goenitz, an SNK sub-boss with an attack targeting one of four areas on the screen (close, close-mid, mid, far) that always knew exactly where you would be, canceled projectiles, and was spammed constantly, making getting close enough to hit an exercise in frustrating patience.
Even Goenitz's bastardhood paled in the face of Ryu's, whose anti-air Dragon Punch special had easily abusable invincibility frames A player can learn to take advantage of this, but not with the CPU's efficiency. What made Ryu a nightmare was that he used it all the time and could counter literally anything but projectiles with it. This editor, unfortunately, tried beating him with Kim, who has only physical attacks, resulting in not only countered air attacks, but countered specials, countered pokes, countered sweeps, and point-blank countered super attacks. The only way to win against a late-level Ryu was to wait for him to attack and pray you could counter before his move ended (when he would inevitably Dragon Punch).
This troper thinks SNK took Goenitz's AI from King of Fighters 1996 and stuck it on max difficulty no matter which you were playing on when they put him in SNK vs. Capcom.
Eternal Fighter Zero is full of this. On 3 or 4 difficulty, CPU-controlled characters do things that simply are not possible, such as dodging your attacks the frame they come out. Also, CPU Akane seems to have the ability to combo any attack into any other attack, which never works when you play as her.
Fighting games in general have this when you have to fight new characters to unlock them. This Troper remembers fighting Wolf in Super Smash Bros and Li Long in Soul Calibur 3...it wasn't pretty.
In Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee, the AI opponents will often head towards powerups that are offscreen, that the player has no idea that they're there.
If your attack is blocked by the computer in Fatal Fury 2, the computer will throw you. Doesn't matter what difficulty level, or how strong the attack and the subsequent blockstun is - the computer will throw you.
The nigh-forgotten Eternal Champions games on the Sega Genesis and Sega CD were 2D fighters that took the unusual approach of requiring "inner energy" for all special moves. Theoretically, this forced the player to learn the characters and apply specific strategies in every possible matchup... Except against the AI, which could always execute specials with sheer and utter disregard of its own energy levels.
Even more, well, insulting, characters have an ability called Insult which allows them to sacrifice one piece of their special gauge to destroy a little more of their opponents. The computer, especially the final boss (bosses in the Sega CD version), is quite fond of repeatedly Insulting you from a distance to render you impotent — usually shortly before, with a blatantly flashing EMPTY gauge, they execute their ultimate full-gauge-requiring attacks, some of which doing things like rendering the character completely invincible (the final boss(es) have these, naturally). Did we mention if you lose in the final battle, you can't continue?
The SNES game Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story probably deserves a mention. Whether or not the Demon with the halberd represents Bruce Lee's historically unalterable death, it is basically invincible, there is no way to avoid it, and it will end up killing you no matter what you do.
While the Demon's abilities certainly are an example of this trope, it is possible to win that fight. Have full health and finish its health meter by using the nunchuck choke.
The Game Boy Color fighting game Power Quest has one character (known as the "Announcer") who randomly shows up out of nowhere and forces you to fight him. It's possible to run away from him, but he's slightly faster than you, so fighting him is almost inevitable. If this troper recalls correctly, he's harder than the final boss.
In that same vein, Richard Wong in the Psychic Force games can become unbeatable in a fight by spamming his magically-appearing sword move.
Having run out of ideas for making the player think, Wild Arms 4 just stops trying to add legitimate challenge by the end, especially in the fight with Lambda. His inherent fighting ability is that, and the game actually tells you this, he randomly takes no damage from your attacks. At all. It may not seem like a big deal, at first, but when you can't even hurt a boss 9 times out of 10 (from this troper's experience, that's about what the probability was), it stops being funny about 2 minutes into the fight.
The King Of Fighters suffered this terribly in the '94 and '95 incarnations. There was an ability called "Evade" that, if timed right, allowed the character to dodge attacks. This translated to "The computer is immune to projectiles". And in a callback to Fatal Fury 2, getting blocked when you jumped in would lead to an instant throw. '96 pulled Evade completely, replacing it with the trademark "Roll", one of many reasons it's considered the first high point of the series.
Tekken 5's Jinpachi Mishima was a great example of this trope. This troper fondly recalls trying to attack against the jerk, only to be countered by 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).
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. It got to the point where this troper was theorising that he wasn't quite as amnesiac as he claimed and that he remembered most of Hayabusa's moves from his time as Hayate.
In Castlevania Judgement, Dracula WILL put his back to the screen, and thus you will not see what attack he is going to make.
Puzzle/Board Games
Anyone who's played Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords has horror stories of random enemies erasing half of his HP in a single turn, attempts at forging rune items that fell flat when the CPU would spend DOZENS of turns refusing to drop an anvil, or attempts to learn a spell foiled because the board REFUSED to line up for a needed combo.
And then there's Spell Resistance. An enemy with 10% resistance to a mana type is supposed to mean "Your spell will be blocked roughly 10% of the time." In practice, it turns into "Your spell will connect 10% of the time."
Interestingly, the programmer for the game was asked about the problem with the CPU getting crazy combos earlier in the game, but it seems it wasn't any sort of malicious programming; the AI simply doesn't make human mistakes (such as not seeing groups of 4) and the random nature of the falling bricks is just as likely to help the player. As a matter of fact, he's stated that he doesn't even know how to rig the game beyond that point.
The truth or falsehood of that claim notwithstanding, there is one aspect where the computer demonstrably cheats. Every time either combatant makes a move, there is a small (5% or less) chance that they will get an extra turn. The AI knows when its "random" extra turns are coming and, when they are, it moves gems in ways that would directly conflict with its normal priorities if the player was going to go next. It also seems to know in advance what the "random" gem spawns will be.
This troper's friend has also noticed that most of the game's "hints" for the next move are actually 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.
Outside of violating the actual rules of Chess, nearly all Chess programs 'cheat' in a sense as well, since, being computers, they not only lack the ability to make stupid moves based on emotion (which can be a big part of Chess), but all their moves are actually planned out ahead of time. Programming Chess games for most programs is based around just churning out as many scripted moves as possible, so if you end up in a certain position, the AI will always make the exact same move. This can be interesting when the AI is unintentionally programmed with a stupid move, which means the player can just exploit it again and again and the AI will never correct itself.
This troper actually has done some work in programming chess engines, and can say that the above is an oversimplification, chess programs do not just have a database of moves that they look through for every position, except during the opening (and most humans have that too, any decent player memorizes opening moves). Even older chess engines work by generating every possible move in a position, pruning out the ones that are unlikely to provide the computer with any real advantage on a cursory glance, and then applying an evaluation function to the position resulting from each of the remaining moves to decide whether it's any good or not. While in theory this process is deterministic, and will result in the same move every time for the same position, to make things interesting many engines will randomly select one of several moves depending on its "personality" if they are similar enough in "goodness". Chess programs do have to "think", they just do so in a different way.
Watch the chess in Kubrick's 2001 very carefully. Or I'll tell you to save time: HAL declares a checkmate that doesn't actually exist, and his human opponent is either so bored or has so strongly assumed that HAL would win, that he doesn't challenge the mistake.
Actually, THAT'S how Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It at one point made a mistake, Kasparov assumed that there was no way such a machine could make such a stupid mistake, did not exploit it, and lost.
While we're on the subject of chess, the current Windows Vista Official Chess Game, "Chess Titans," is fairly good about following the rules, except when it comes to check: Whenever the Computer's King is placed in check and removes itself from check 5 turns in a row, the game officially declares the game a Draw, and marks it as such in your statistics. This applies whether you're in the middle of the game, and are simply using a pair of Knights to back its king into a corner, or whether it's at the end of the game, after you have taken ALL of its pieces aside from the king, and are hunting it down with a pair of queens. More importantly than this, once the game has been declared a draw, it gives you the opportunity to go back and undo moves, on the off-chance that you can find a way to checkmate it more quickly, but it doesn't matter; the game is already counted as a draw in the statistics, and even if you find a way to checkmate it, it wil not change that score. Suffice it to say that when YOUR king is in the same position, dodging checkmate for five turns does not grant you the magical ability to pretend you still had a chance at winning.
And again on the subject of Chess Titans, the game's help file says "En passant. If a pawn is about to capture one of your pawns that hasn't moved, you may decide to move that pawn forward two squares. If you do, it's more exposed for one turn. During the next turn, your opponent can move to the square where your pawn is, or to the square behind that, and capture your pawn. After that one turn, your pawn is normally vulnerable again. Both armies' pawns are vulnerable this way." That is NOT how En Passant works.
But that's not really cheating per se, as the game uses the en passant rule correctly in practice.
Even old handheld toys based on game shows like Wheelof 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. This troper has seen the AI perform 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.
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, there was a simple fix to this: shoot the bastard when he passes you. If the yellow car stops, the squealing stops and he goes back to normal. Granted, that's pretty hard when he blows right by, but it's definitely possible.
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.
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 unmercilessly, 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.
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.
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 (Mc Larenersatz "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. This Troper never got further than that in this game...
This troper once watched someone playing The Fast And The Furious: Super Bikes arcade game.. The player was at full speed, nitrous applied, a few feet from the finish line, in first. This was supposedly the maximum speed it was possible to go in the game. Except, of course, for the two other CPU racers who managed to whip past the player and gain a three-bike length lead on him before reaching the finish line. Incidentally, the game awards a free race for first place.
Not to mention the CPU bikers who would activate their nitro at the exact same time as the players, whether they could see the PC or not. And the racers you could pass without your position counter rising above 8th.
In Ridge Racer 6 for the Xbox 360 (and perhaps the other Ridge Racer games, this editor hasn't spent enough time with the other games in the series to know for sure), the computer cheats so often it's almost pointless to even try the harder difficulty levels and race types. Special races, for example, pit you against a car that you can win if you beat it. This car is always better than any car you have available at the time. Also, the "Reverse Nitro" races are well known for rampant cheating. In a Reverse Nitro race, your car cannot gain nitro from drifting like it can normally, so you are given an extra two tanks to work with and the only way to get them back is to go into what the game calls "Ultimate Charge" (coming out of a nitro blast while drifting). Somehow, all computer controlled cars in these races can gain nitro simply by driving in a straight line for a couple of seconds, completely ignoring all the rules for nitro boosts set out for you. This means they can, suddenly, blow past you with a fully charged 3-tank nitro boost just after they finished another 3-tank nitro boost.
Diddy Kong Racing: the computer in the original and first sequel is capable of perfectly handling Krunch, the heaviest non-secret character in the game. Of course, when a human player tries to play as him, he slips and skids all over the place.
The N64's Hot Wheels Turbo Racing's final challenge has you racing against two Race Ringer cars (twin-somthing one and two IIRC).
The main reason why Sonic Riders is so hard during story mode is because the computer players are not limited by the same air gauge that the human player is.
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.
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. This troper got so pissed off at the game when it first came out that he actually stopped playing it until he got to college. Then he got so pissed off at it one night and hasn't played it since.
This troper saw it happen in Knights Of The Old Republic. When fighting Darth Malak on levels above "easy," the player will not roll more than a 5 on a given saving throw unless it really doesn't matter. And it always does. This troper checked his feedback list, it is true. A massive string of 5s, 4s, and 2s.
There's also pazaak, a mini-game not unlike blackjack. The computer always plays second, which gives it a considerable advantage. But the player is just as likely to be cheating there, so...
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.
In Final Fantasy Tactics A 2, abilities are all learned by specific jobs. Blood Price, for instance, can only be learned by Spellblades, a Viera-only class. Now, there exists a job changing system, so you can use abilities from one class to another, so this means finding Red Mages and Summoners (both Viera jobs) with Blood Price isn't terribly out of the ordinary. However, AI units tend to ignore the exclusivity of support abilities like these, and you'll find plenty of enemy units with abilities they just simply shouldn't have. Illusionist (Humes and Nu Mou only) with Blood Price, despite lacking the Spellblade job necessary to get it? Sure, why not? And, whenever you compete in the "Cup" missions to get scions, some enemy units will have support skills that raise Magick/Resistance, or raise Attack/Defense, or support skills (not Evade Magick, that's a reaction skill) that allows the unit to evade all long-range attacks. Of course, your clan will never learn such skills, oh no.
The original Final Fantasy Tactics didn't have any exclusive jobs in the players' tree, because it didn't have any alternate races, but it did have incredibly awesome jobs and abilities that only certain plot-related bad guys have, like assassination skills that just outright instant-kill their target with a success rate somewhere in the high 90s, "Teleport 2," which is Teleport without the "chance of outright failure the farther you decide to move" restriction, meaning they can freely appear at absolutely any square on the map whenever they want, etc. The game's one saving grace is that Orlandu is on your side.
In defense of this, the game would be insanely easy if you had access to the Assassin job or the Teleport 2 skill.
Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 also features two wonderful AI-only support abilities; Impervious and Destroyer. Impervious renders the character immune to debuffs. Fair enough; the player can replicate that with the Ribbon accessory (of which this troper currently has five), so it's not like it's an unfair advantage. Destroyer raises every single stat, meaning you do half as much damage to them as you should be (based on their unit details), and they do nearly double to you. I can live with every single AI magic user knowing Blood Price. At least that ability actually exists.
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.
Hell, Final Fantasy Tactics is just plain cheap, even in the original version. It doesn't matter what the hit percentages say, you WILL miss the enemy when it matters most, and said enemy WILL hit you back and more than likely screw you over. This Troper has personally seen a Dual Wielding Ninja hit his Ramza, who had Blade Grasp and 97 Brave (i.e. a mere 3% chance of being hit AT ALL) with two hits. Two CRITICAL hits. Result: Ramza dies, match ends. I'd like to say that was the only time such a thing happened, but I'd be lying.
Final Fantasy Tactics has also detected a time when this troper was using a gameshark to make my characters not take damage from enemy attacks, so the computer started using petrification attacks on my characters instead, knowing that I was short on Soft potions. The computer wasn't being a cheating bastard (I was), computer just leveled the playing field.
That's pretty normal - by default, the AI won't take any action that has a 0% chance of success in the original (not Advance) Tactics games, so seeing that all attacks were dealing zero damage, they opted for status instead.
Don't get me started on the various Revive skills. If you've got a character a couple of turns away from turning into a crystal and your revival method of choice has a less than 100% chance of success, you will miss repeatedly. This troper has missed on 90% or higher chances two or three times in a row more times than he'd care to recall.
In War Of The Lions, this troper was in the midst of recruiting a special character Balthier when an enemy Thief used Charm on Agrias (causing her to defect to the opposing side) and then used Steal Weapon to relieve her of her sword. She was still able to use swordskills, at least until she was returned to her owner's control. Her damage output was negligible, and this troper was more amused by it than anything else... Until he found out the same is true when fighting Meliadoul, whose attacks destroy equipment.
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.
This troper hated the big battle at the end of Tales of the Sword Coast (the expansion for the first Baldurs Gate), because it had an ability that allowed a save—but blatantly overrode the results of the save to affect the target anyway, every single time to every single party member in over a dozen tries. And this troper knows this because thanks to judicious leveling and use of magic items, not a single one of his main character's saves was greater than 1 (and some were less than one). Without a save penalty on that ability of at least -10, it is...highly improbable at best that he wouldn't have made the save at least once. Oddly, though, around the thirteenth try, something weird happened at the ability ended up reflected at the creature... and it didn't make the save, either. Heh.
That ability was, if this troper recalls correctly, a gaze attack. A potion of mirrored eyes offers complete and infallible protection from it.
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'.
Amazingly, it gets even worse in the Throne of Bhaal expansion, where the final boss has to be killed four times, resting up to full health between each fight, while you have to fight things while she rests. She's capable of summoning dozens of creatures that are too powerful to summon per round, can teleport around at will, and hits far harder than epic level fighters despite being a caster type. Oh, and she can move during *your* time stop. This is, at worst, a Justified Trope. Amellisan'sXanatos Gambit has effectively turned her into a Physical God. This is like complaining that it's unfair that the dragon can breath fire when your human thief can't.
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.
For reasons never explained in-game (which is a rare occurance, believe me), the Krogan ennemies 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 badass in his kind) can't do the same. Basically, it's an auto-regen power that pops out of thin air.
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!
This becomes especially frustrating when you fight against characters who later become party members, only to lose their magical powers of ignoring the basic combat mechanics.
And after trying the battle 1000 times to steal the Flea Vest (there's only one Pilfer element in the entire game), you'll be seeing... red.
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.
Final Fantasy XI is full of cheating bastardery. Most of the time, when you take damage in ANY form, you wake up from Sleep. People will actually eat Poison Potions to poison themselves to defend against monsters that spam area of effect sleep techniques. As soon as the poison causes a player to lose HP, he wakes up. The boss Diabolos has a moved called Nightmare that casts Bio III on everyone in the area (basically strong poison and attack reduction) and puts them to sleep at the SAME TIME. The Bio's damage does not wake up afflicted players. If Diabolos uses this move, you lose.
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 pop a mana potion instead to get the same effect, and use the time saved to get a head start on blasting everyone.
The mass sheeping also works on players immune to polymorph, just as most boss events that stun the player or put him to sleep to let something happen (getting new weapons, resurrecting allies) cannot be broken by the tools specifically in place to do so. What's that? Insignias? Racial abilities? Forget about it.
Also, some monster abilities outright ignore the targets level and will affect a level 70 player as often as they did with level 20. Then again, you're not really supposed to fight them at that level, but still...
This troper decided to tackle an entire level 20-25 dungeon in level 70 endgame tank gear at once. Overkill, at first glance, of course, but considering that among his main defenses dodge chance plays an important part, he would have survived (and cleared the dungeon) had the enemy NP Cs not kept stunni
