Hero-Tracking Failure: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

The hero is running from the baddies. He is unarmed. The baddies are not. They proceed to shoot everything they have at him, but for some mysterious reason they can't manage to track his position fast enough, with the result that bullets (and rockets, and laser beams, and...) hit juuuust where he was a moment ago without so much as scratching his clothes. Completely ridiculous, of course, since simple geometry dictates that swinging a gun a mere inch will result in the bullets hitting several metres ahead depending on distance, so the baddies must be moving their focus ''agonizingly'' slowly. You could argue that the baddies are bad at estimating the time the bullets take to travel, but even then, how long can this last before they decide they just have to [[Lead the Target|swing the gun a slight bit further]]?

 

 

This sometimes happens to bad guys too, but it's generally more often seen with heroes, seen as they can't possibly be hit and shredded to bloody pulp in a shower of lead. When it does happen to baddies, the shooters usually manage to get their act together in the end.

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

** Subverted later on in the movie by the gigantic spiderlike weapons platforms, which seem more than capable enough to track the flying armored suits and swat them out of the sky with more [[More Dakka|automatic gun fire]].

* Taken to ridiculous extremes in the anime trilogy ''Memories'', or, more accurately, in its 2nd part entitled ''Stink Bomb'', where half the Japanese army (tanks, aircraft and all) is unable to kill a guy going over a highway overpass on a ''bicycle'' (even though everything immediately behind the target gets blown to smithereens).

*** This doesn't quite explain why they didn't just try [[Lead the Target|shooting ahead of him]], blowing up the road and preventing him from advancing, but, [[Rule of Cool|whatever]].

* Justified in ''[[Trigun]]'': Vash isn't human, and has the reflexes to deflect bullets by throwing rocks at them in flight.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

 

== [[Film]] ==

* Captain Pirk screws up the killing shot in the epic battle of ''[[Star Wreck]]: In the Pirkinning'' by failing to lead his shots. He's of the opinion that the computer ought to do it for him....despite [[Too Dumb to Live|turning off the aiming computers less than a minute ago.]]

 

== [[Live-Action TV]] ==

* Carmelita in [[Sly Cooper]]

* ''[[The Elder Scrolls|Oblivion]]'' is a particularly glaring example of the AI failing because it is leads you ''too'' consistently and perfectly. Spellcasting has an obvious startup animation, so it's easy to bluff the AI by twitching to one side just as a mage lobs their fireball.

** Exception: try giving hitscan weapons to turrets. Their AI is only programmed for weapons that necessitate leading, and will do so even when equipped with weapons that do not. Result: flash cannons waste a lot of ammo (they eventually hit, but only when enemy vehicles stop their movement), while blast cannons are all but useless.

** She is, however, completely thwarted by running in tight circles, except for her homing attack.

* The ''[[Alien vs. Predator]]'' PC-games averted this in the case of the Marine and the Predator characters, but played it straight for the Alien when controlled by the players. Justified in that since it is fast and harder to see in Infrared the Alien is harder for auto-turrets to track, but it's mainly for gameplay as otherwise the Alien would be defenseless against such obstacles.

** Most of the time there was an alternate route around the auto-turret, allowing the Alien player to sneak up to it from behind.

* One of the cut-scenes in ''[[Resident Evil]]: Code Veronica'' has this with one of the characters outrunning the strafing minigun fire from a helicopter. Naturally it was knocked off for ''[[Resident Evil]] The Movie 2''.

** What made the least sense in this one is that the helicopter pilot decided to strafe rather than turn.

* Averted in the final boss of ''[[Spyro the Dragon|Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!!]]'', where Ripto aims his basic scepter blasts relative to the direction the player is moving.

* ''[[Ace Combat]] X: Skies of Deception'' has the Meson Cannon, which cannot track Gryphus One if he is flying above a certain speed.

* Averted in one level of ''[[Donkey Kong Country]] 3'', where you are faced with bolts of lightning. The lightning comes down slightly ahead of where you are when it tracks, forcing you to juke to avoid it.

* Averted in ''[[Crash Bandicoot]] 3'' during the boss fight with Dingodile, who shoots lasers where you are moving to instead of where you are at the time.

* The common FPS tactic of "circle strafing", orbiting your target while firing, largely depends on it actually being quite hard for the defender to correctly sync their rotation speed even if trying to allow for lead-ahead.

* Averted by the better bots in programming game [[Robo Code]]---a lot of effort is put into analysing the movement patterns of targets and trying to guess where they're going to dodge to.

** Nearly omnipresent in [[Robo War]], due to the limitations of integer arithmetic. There's a reason why most of the top robots [[No Range Like Point-Blank Range|get up-close and personal with their targets]].

* A [[Real Life]] example in games: You. You're probably gonna be doing this a lot when it comes to trueshot attacks in most games. Particularly RTS games.

** This tends to especially happen with analog stick aiming, where it feels like you ''should'' be able to move the sights faster than the target, but in the heat of the moment fail to realize that you're capped out by the control interface and start firing too soon.

* Mostly played straight in ''[[Hard War]]'', as the trope is the only reason you can survive the massive amounts of firepower everyone seems so eager to throw your way. However, ''your'' guns subvert it - there's no need to [[Lead the Target]], as they all automatically compensate for enemy movement, and the shots themselves have [[Homing Boulders|limited homing abilities]].

* Averted in the ''[[Halo]]'' series, especially on Legendary difficulty.

* In ''[[Freedroid RPG]]'' the [[Player Character]] can be hit by [[Painfully-Slow Projectile]] of the low-level shooter (139) only when standing still or walking straight toward or from it. Justified, since 139 is originally an utility bot that was never supposed to shoot anything with a plasma gun (nee trash incinerator).

* Most [[Shoot'Em Up|Shoot 'em Up]] games play this trope straight. Dodging such patterns with tiny motions is called [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEyKcTKQ-r0 streaming]. However, [[Tropes Are Tools|tropes are not always bad]]: Projectiles aimed at you force you to move, and while on the move you often have to dodge other bullets. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uOnHK-ZnsI&t=1m15s Touhou] brings us a decent example.

** Inexperienced players, on the other hand, frequently play this trope straight, particularly if the target is a [[Fragile Speedster|scout]].

* In ''[[World of Tanks]]'', depending on the tanks involved, tanks are often able to move faster than an opponent's turret can track, plus the shot takes a finite amount of time to get to target. "Jinking" when running away from or moving toward another tank helps to avoid being hit, and smaller tanks with faster turning turrets can fight heavy tanks by circle-strafing while the heavy tank can't get its gun on target.

* Multiple times in the first season of ''[[Beast Machines]]''. But apparently they can't even hit you if you are standing still but decide to duck.

* Villain tracking example: In the episode of ''[[Futurama]]'' where life becomes like a video game and Fry is fighting off an alien invasion styled after ''[[Space Invaders]]'', Fry finds himself unable to defeat the last ship due to this trope. The invading aliens even point his error out to him after landing.

* Any time Batman gets shot at (really, in any media, but [[The DCAU]] is [[Egregious]] about it).

** [[The Flash]], meanwhile, gets hit a surprisingly large number of times.