Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (video game)/YMMV

Literature

 * Magnificent Bastard: Popov, for setting things up so that if the terrorists he sponsors get defeated, he keeps the money he would have paid them.

Video Games

 * Demonic Spiders: Pretty much every enemy you encounter with their auto-aiming capabilities and their Instant Death Radius (particularly in Vegas).
 * In the first three games, Elite difficulty makes all enemies into this (they most frequently get insta-death shots, have incredible accuracy and range, automatically aim without directly facing you, etc.) In Rogue Spear and beyond, if a crouched enemy sees you, they WILL immediately headshot you.
 * Disappointing Last Level: Happens with the last few missions of the original game. Mystic Tiger, the finale, is where it really rears its ugly head, undergoing an Unexpected Gameplay Change to a sniper-filled linear gauntlet. And Yellow Knife and Deep Magic, two unexpected stealth levels in a row.
 * Any stealth level in the original games. To wit: it's Metal Gear on European Extreme. In first person, which just makes it harder.
 * Excuse Plot: The PC version of Rainbow Six: Lockdown did away with the plot almost completely, cutting out all the plot-related cutscenes and interactions between Rainbow members, making the entire game pretty much just you running down random corridors gunning down terrorists for only the vaguest reasons.
 * Nintendo Hard: The entire Rainbox Six video game franchise is known for its high degree of difficulty. Even on the easier difficulty levels it's common for a team member to instantly get killed because they walked into a terrorist's line of fire.
 * Older Than They Think: While Rainbow Six was the first to do it in 3D first person, the British DOS game Deadline featured similar planning-based tactical real-time anti-terrorist gameplay a few years earlier, only from an XCOM-like isometric third-person perspective.
 * The fundamental concept originated with Ariolasoft's forgotten They Stole a Million, a heist game from 1986 in which the player carried out a series of robberies, first selecting team members and then planning their movements with the aid of stolen blueprints before acting them out in real time. With the exception of gunplay the concept and many of the details were identical.
 * Ruined FOREVER: The reaction of a lot of fans when it was revealed that Rainbow Six: Vegas would do away with the planning phase and include regenerating health.
 * Scrappy Level: Every single damn level in Vegas 1. Low hit points plus distant saving locations equals an annoying, hard slog as you constantly have to clear the same levels over and over as you die. Vegas 2 is better about this, but not by much.
 * That One Level: The refinery level in Vegas 2 which you don't have your teammates to back you up.
 * The final level in the first game. It's really long, and there are a lot of blind corners with enemies hiding around them.
 * Villain Decay:, the Big Bad of the Rainbow Six: Vegas series, goes through this rapidly in the second game; as soon as he's revealed to be the mastermind behind the entire terrorist plot, his previously mysterious master plan and motives are rapidly revealed to be nothing more than a hissy fit thrown because he was the team screw-up.