My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Games have rules. These rules aren't always fair: The average [[First-Person Shooter]] pits a single player against multiple groups of enemies, all of whom are trying to kill him.

 

{{examples}}

* In the original ''[[Civilization]]'', Triremes built by the player couldn't leave the coast without being lost. Computer built triremes had no such restrictions, allowing them to circumnavigate the world.

** Most of the ''Civilization'' games have AI that largely ignore some of the basic game rules when playing on the higher difficulty levels with the recent edition of ''Civilization V'' being the worst, where the AI can just ignore some of the game rules. For example, when a player founds a city it decreases the overall happiness of his empire thus resulting in things like lower production and a lower growth rate. This is done to prevent the player from expanding too quickly via settler spamming. Plenty of players have reported however, that on the higher difficulty levels the AI can more or less just do as it pleases and produce vast number of cities without any penalties, and produce units at a much faster rate then the player for no reason. The actual AI itself however, does not actually appear to get smarter, making this a perfect example of [[Fake Difficulty]] and [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard]].

* In later ''[[Disgaea]]'' games, you can merge your monster-type units into giant monsters with higher stats and increased range on their attacks, and you can turn monsters into weapons for your humanoid units to use (called "Magichange"). However, Fusion and Magichange normally only work for a few turns without a special ability. Unless you're the computer, for whom it will never wear off. (On the other hand, given the computer's tendency to fuse/Magichange on the first turn of battle, and [[Artificial Stupidity|its tendency to sit still doing nothing until player units are in range]], this can be seen as a practical way to keep the player from just waiting the fusion/Magichange out from the other side of the battlefield... but then, once the enemy unit is close and trying to murder your units, it STILL doesn't wear off.)

* In the [[Captain Tsubasa]] games every action costs guts. If a character has not enough guts, he can only do basic actions like pass the ball—unless he is AI character, who never runs out of guts. Expect AI forwards to spam special shots until your goalkeeper runs out of guts to do his special save moves.

* One of the minigames in [[Ripper]] lets the play with different rules. It's a chess-type game where you and the computer are trying to capture each other's kings. But while the computer can move all its pieces from the beginning, the player can only use their knights after all of their pawns have been killed. The computer knows this, and will actively go out of its way to avoid capturing your pawns.

* There are plenty of [[Roguelike]] games (like ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]'', and the first, but not the second, ''[[Izuna Legend of the Unemployed Ninja|Izuna]]'' game) where enemies aren't affected by traps. Most likely because their AI is so bad they tend to walk recklessly even into visible traps all the time, but it still can get annoying.

* The execrable ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]'' spinoff game ''Battlechip Grand Prix'' loves this trope. The game rules restrict the Program Deck size and slot-in capacity for the player, but these restrictions ''never'' apply to the computer—which leads to ugly surprises like Ring having Jealousy as her slot-in chip in the ''E-rank tournaments'', when you don't actually have the memory capacity for Jealousy until after you've beaten the game.

* In the ''[[Chaos Rings]]'' series, the harder bosses in the game all have the ability to take ''two'' consecutive turns while the player only has one.

 

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