Artificial Stupidity/Video Games/Racing Game

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Examples of Artificial Stupidity in Racing Games include:

  • When presented with a y-junction or off-ramp, the civilian cars in Test Drive 6 will indecisively swerve left and right until they ultimately crash into the divider. Every car. Every time. If you don't pass civilian cars consistently and efficiently, you'll get caught behind an unprovoked 30+ car pileup.
  • The AI cars in many racing games, especially the Gran Turismo series, tend to follow a set pattern. Even in the most recent installment that was in Development Hell for five years.
    • This shouldn't be surprising and if you look closely on the more realistic games(like GT5), you'll find dark areas of the track. This happens in real life because there is an optimal, fastest path around the course(which of course, everybody wants to take). This is reflected in the game, and part of the reason A Is take a set path is because there often isn't enough cars to make crowding an issue.
    • In the B-Spec game mode, you take a role as an AI's director on a race. The problem is, your AI can't pull off the car's full potential. Even if you do well on directing the driver, the result of the race can still be bad because the AI is terrible at pressure control and slipstream.
  • In Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed, your opponents make no attempt to avoid you if you make a mistake and get in their way. This almost always results in you facing the wrong way and watching everyone pass you or worse, wrecking your car.
  • In Destruction Derby 2, there was a track where the road narrows just after the start. Stop here, or spin out an opponent, and everyone would jam in there and get stuck leaving you free to cruise away. Even if they finally got out, you were almost a lap ahead at that point.
  • Carmageddon. The battles took place on a number of large maps with easily avoidable barriers placed depending on which race you picked for the few people who actually wanted to drive laps instead of going into the city and killing everyone. The problem: the AI didn't get the memo about those barriers. Only Offscreen Teleportation saved the AI from inevitably getting stuck on them and never moving again for the entire fight.
  • The CPU characters in Mario Kart are pretty stupid, except when you're in first place and they suddenly decide to make all the perfect moves (and one of them always has a blue shell).
    • An example is Mario Kart 64, where the computers will often throw banana peels hoping for you to go on them, only to later slip on them themselves, though they will still be able to catch up with you, thanks to the Rubber Band AI.
  • Wipeout. Autopilot power-up. Ranges from magically good (XL, Wip3out where it would fly through the track boundary walls to keep you on course) to virtually useless (Fusion, where using it in any slightly difficult turn would cause it to plow repeatedly into things and finally turn around and leave you going the wrong way and headed at top speed for a ravine). Pulse was halfway between the two, usually managing to find its way around the course but at such an incredibly slow speed that it was virtually useless. One constant though has been the fact that if there are mines in your way it will always go right through them because it follows the same path as the AI ships that dropped the mines.
  • Midtown Madness 3 has some the dumbest cops ever. Drive into a body of water while the cop cars are chasing you in cruise, the cops will follow you. Then, they will respawn right near the water and drive into it again and again and again, even when you drive away from the water when you respawn.
  • In the battle mode in Diddy Kong Racing, AI characters have set move patterns, making them easy to defeat once you've figured out the direction in which they'll go.
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