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Today's Featured Trope

Obstructive Foreground

You're walking down the streets of crime. Thugs and hooligans lurk on every corner, ready to ambush you with baseball bats, lead pipes, and broken bottles, but they are no match for your kung fu skillz. Just as long as you make sure not to end up fighting behind a sign, lamp post, or billboard.

A form of Fake Difficulty, an obstructive foreground occurs in a video game when foreground elements make the player character difficult, or sometimes even impossible, to see in a normal manner. Common in older games that did not have 3D camera angles and instead added foreground sprites for aesthetic effect, the presence of these things can be downright annoying when your character seems unable to strike the guy who's 3 feet away from them because a tree that's 30 feet away is in the view of the puppet master's monitor.

MoreNewest Trope

Literal Data Transfer

When you hear "transfer", you think "moving". When you hear "data transfer", naturally, people make the intuitive leap that it means the physical movement of data.

Problem is, that's not what happens.

Data is not an object or a state of matter. Data is information. It's recorded on physical objects, but when we talk about data transfer, we don't mean the act of moving those objects; we mean creating a copy in the new location, while possibly erasing the copy of the data from the source separately.

Latest Trope Edits

Trope	Edit	Time
WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity	MarvelUniverse	Revision [27] 3 seconds ago
AscendedMeme	WebOriginal	Revision [36] 3 seconds ago
PlayingWith: CuttingTheKnot		Revision [68] 5 seconds ago
Recap: TheFlash2014S2E3FamilyOfRogues		Revision [96] 19 seconds ago
Recap: TheFlash2014S1E8FlashVsArrow		Revision [146] 19 seconds ago

Latest Forums Activity

Forum	Latest Post	Time
Forum Games	Guess the Disney Character 2.0	1 second ago
Forum Games	Our avatars are posting on a forum thread.	30 seconds ago
Forum Games	What offends you about the previous post V2.O	36 seconds ago
Video Games	Super Smash Bros.	36 seconds ago
Forum Games	How is the above avatar offensive?	51 seconds ago

Launch Pad Activity

Sinfully Delicious	Created 15 hours ago	7 minutes ago
NPC Battle Audience (Launching Monday)	Created 1 week ago	1 hour ago
Introspective Art (ready to launch?)	Created 4 weeks ago	1 hour ago
"X" they said, "Y" they said" Snark	Created 4 hours ago	1 hour ago
Food Monster	Created 2 days ago	1 hour ago

Latest Video Examples

Posted 12 hours ago	The Sprouts of Evil	Example of: Farts on Fire
Posted 12 hours ago	Trick, Treat, or Cattle Prod	Example of: Tim Taylor Technology
Posted 13 hours ago	Daffy Duck Joins the Marines	Example of: Armed Farces
Posted 13 hours ago	Albania Troubles	Example of: Foreshadowing
Posted 13 hours ago	What 9.4 really is	Example of: Wham Episode

Tropes Community Podcasts

Episode 434: Episode 384 - Lies of P: Overture

July 23, 2025

This week we're reviewing the first batch of DLC for one of our favorite games of 2023: Lies of P Overture! Does this icy-cold title live up to the main game that we loved so much, or is…