One thing I hate about video games is the need for the game to "cheat" for the sake of difficulty. It's one thing for programmers to develop a game with quality AI. But, when programmers resort to cheap tricks to "increase the difficulty", it really ticks me off. Last night, Erika and I played Cars for 5 hours. I spent most of that time trying to get through two near impossible races. Since these races are in the latter part of the game, the programmers tried to make them more difficult. Here is their idea of making a race difficult:

• Make the player's car wreck for absolutely no reason near the end of the race.
  
  Near the end of a road race that takes about 10 minutes, my car would suddenly shift over and hit a wall. It was as if the game calculated that I had a good chance of winning, slammed my car into the wall and let all the other cars pass me with about half a lap remaining.
  
  
• Make the slightest bump cause the player's car to create exaggerated crashes with lots of flipping and skidding.
  
  This happened too many times to count again typically in the last half of the last lap. During the rest of the race, a little tap wouldn't do much other than slow me down and make me re-adjust my car on the track. However, toward the end of the race the same little taps I received previously in the race caused me to flip over and slam into a boundary.
  
  
• Ram the player's car into a wall and hold it there.
  
  This happened more on the NASCAR type races found in the game and made my blood boil to the point that I had to step away and cool off for a few minutes before the remote went through the TV. What made it even worse was that the lead cars weren't blocking my progress, it was the cars at the back of the pack that had been lapped. They never bothered any of the other cars that had lapped them, just me.
  

So to all of you aspiring game designers, make sure you learn how to develop games that "think" instead of resorting to cheap tricks to make a game more difficult.