Contact Damage

[Gors]

For example, you're playing any of the Stiffvanias, and are playing the weave game no problem. Dodging all the projectiles and Medusa Heads or whatever coming at you. Then that one point happens when you jump, successfully dodge one or more projectiles and since you're stuck in that arc until you land, get hurt by something that just so happened to casually end up where your intended point of landing was.

I knew this would pop up here sooner or later

This is called 'reading' and you should've been able to dodge it had you been more careful. 80% of these are completely dodgeable if you wait and advance strategically, and the 20% is low enough for a pot roast to recover. It's certainly not easy to predict enemy patterns, but not impossible either

Also yeah - contact damage is not a bad mechanic at all. It does get aggravating when the game is poorly programmed and designed like some examples posted here, but it's totally acceptable immersion-wise. I've had fun with a shitton of 8-bit/16-bit games and I see no reason not to have nowadays