Opinion Blog: The Worst Bosses of my Gaming Life

 An all-too-familiar sight for Teen Me.

Look, I love games.  Of course I do.  My recent weeknights have been spent alternating between Hyrule Warriors, Bayonetta 2, Lego Batman 3 and a return to BioShock 2 (in case you were wondering why updates are so infrequent).  Real life is dull and exhausting and full of rules nobody can explain but must all be followed at all times.  Games are lively, untiring and make their rules plain.

Even so, if there's anything more guaranteed to sour my mood than a BOSS FIGHT~, it's...probably my actual job, honestly, but still, bosses.  A good boss can be many things: that one last hurdle before the triumph of the end credits, a despicable sod you can't wait to pummel, the final exam for all the tricks you've learned in the hours before.  Sadly, it's all too easy for none of these ideas to stick and you end up with a bad boss, one whose presence cripples the game around it rather than enhancing it.  We've all got our personal hall of shame.  Here's mine.

Honourable Mention: Mysterio, Spider-Man 2

 Before we get into the real top (bottom?) 10 list, a quick shout-out goes to the alter-ego of Quentin Beck, whose appearance in the Spider-Man 2 tie-in game, a.k.a. the first good one, is just perfect satire.  After Spidey thwarts his attempts at silencing his critics and faking a UFO invasion, a silent alarm brings the webbed wonder to a convenience store where Mysterio is holding up the cashier.  Upon confrontation, Mysterio draws himself up to his full height, gains a massive multi-layered health bar, and makes a bunch of threats.

Then nothing happens.  You can stand there all day if you like, and be unharmed.  Mysterio just yells a bunch, until you walk over and hit him, once, and he's down and out.  It's perfect both as a jokey reprieve before the final, Doc Ock-focused stretch of the game, and as a tie-in to Mysterio's own powers and methodology of stage magic and false images.  Is it objectively a 'good' boss fight?  No, but it's a deliberately crap one and that's a different matter.  Both Saints Row 4's Enter the Dominatrix DLC and Batman Arkham Origins' Electrocutioner repeat the same trick, but it's never been as funny as it was with Mysterio.

(10) Titan/Final Form Joker, Batman Arkham Asylum

Oh hey, speaking of the Arkham games.  That series generally does pretty good work with its various bosses (aside from another example that's further down the list), but the finale of Asylum rubs me the wrong way.  You have to fight the Joker, because this is a Batman game and they weren't so confident back then in the license that they could afford to take risks.  Uh, not that they've actually gone beyond Joker as the focus since then, mind you, but maybe for Arkham Knight?  Whatever, you're Batman, him Joker, you-made-me-no-YOU-made-ME, you know the drill.  Obviously, Joker - despite the game's assurances that he's a 'shockingly adept' hand-to-hand fighter - isn't a match for Batman in a straight-up brawl, being a stick-thin gimp in a bad suit, so developer Rocksteady needed to get clever if they wanted to make this confrontation something challenging enough to be worthy of concluding a very good game.

What they did was probably the least clever solution possible: they turned Joker into the Hulk.  Worse, they likely walked back from that idea to start with and crafted the entire plot around it, so in order to justify a stupid boss decision, they made the whole story dumb as a sack of hammers to boot.  Ergh.  It's not even a bad fight as these things go, even if it's not especially clever - avoid fighting Joker directly, punch his goons, wait for him to get distracted and capitalize with gadgets.  It works.  But it just doesn't say 'Batman versus Joker' and holy crap does Titan Joker look dumb as hell in that aggressively '90s way Rocksteady always seem to fall back on.

(9) Speed Buster, No More Heroes

 No More Heroes is built entirely around boss fights.  Everything else you do is just build-up to the next boss - earning cash for the entry fee, and murdering henchmen to brush up on your sword skills.  So it's just as well those bosses are uniformly great, with sweet designs, fun personality quirks, and intense attack patterns to learn and dance around just like in the good ol' days.

...and then there's Speed Buster.

Speed Buster - who is still a fun character, mind you, being a crazy old lady with a shopping cart that turns into Wing Gundam Zero's giganto beam cannon - is not a boss fight.  It's just another level, with Travis Touchdown chopping up the usual mooks in a selection of burnt-down houses, timing his runs across the street to avoid getting laser-fried.  As soon as you reach her, you hit a cutscene where you win.  No actual fight necessary.  Now, I try not to second-guess Suda51, because I respect his particular brand of genius/insanity, but was this really better than the old lady suddenly pulling out a machine gun and a jetpack and putting up some kind of fight?

(8) Pinstripe Potoroo, Crash Bandicoot

This fucking guy.  Look, it's been a long time since I played anything from the Crash Bandicoot series, long enough that I don't even remember when the series ended (it IS dead, right?), but as one of the first games for the original PlayStation, and a platform-exclusive title with a distinctive lead character, Crash in his heyday came off like the PlayStation mascot, as ingrained to the brand as Mario is to Nintendo and Sonic is to Sega.  The fact that he wore goofy trainers, jorts and fingerless gloves should, in hindsight, have warned us of his shelf life expiry date, but we were all much younger then, and with an ADD-afflicted mind that responded more to 'cool' than quality, Crash seemed a better alternative to Mario.

I do remember completing the first game - Neo Cortex wasn't actually that tricky - but hand on heart, I had to get a friend to beat this fucking guy.  Pinstripe Potoroo - Don Pinstipelli Potorotti if you're being formal - is a potoroo (it's another weird marsupial from Australia) mafia type in a sharp suit, who fights with a tommy gun because of course he does.  The battle strategy seems clear enough: make Crash duck behind some of the furniture in his swanky office until he stops shooting, then pop up and jump on his head.  Unfortunately, Pinstripe's attack patterns are at least partially randomized, the downtime when he's vulnerable is minute, and thanks to some dodgy collision detection, finding a workable safe spot where his bullets won't magically clip through the scenery to punch Crash's ticket is nightmarish.  This is perhaps the worst kind of boss error - where the fight makes sense on paper but coding cock-ups render it infuriating.  I honestly have no idea how my old friend got past this.

(7) Heihachi Mishima, Tekken 4

To be clear here, I am not dissing Heihachi as a character.  He's the foundation of Tekken and as a swaggering old bugger who behaves exactly like you'd expect a pensioner that can bend steel with his bare fists, he's great.  Not Nina great, but generally great.  And he was fine as the final boss of the first Tekken, back in those early days where we weren't yet sure exactly how mental the series would get.  And of course that appearance kicked off the Mishima clan squabbling that's been fuelling the plot for decades since.

However, a lot changed between the first game and Tekken 4, and in particular, there was a sense of escalation with the bosses.  Tekken 1 had Heihachi, ostensibly the toughest dude on the planet.  Tekken 2 had Kazuya, Heihachi's son, who beat his dad and took his crown in the first game, and can now turn into the Devil because of reasons.  Clearly an escalation of threat level.  Tekken 3 had Ogre, an enraged alien bioweapon hell-bent on murdering and assimilating the world's best warriors, and capable of turning into a fire-breathing dragon beast if needed.  Escalation.  And if we count Tekken Tag's Unknown, it's a spooky naked chick covered in oil with a legless werewolf following her every move, who can swap between the total skills of every other fighter in the game on the fly.  Escalation.

And then Tekken 4 is just Heihachi again.  He's got some new moves, sure, but he's nothing special, unless you count attempting to mortify gamers with the sight of his 60-year-old asscheeks showing through his sumo thong.  And given that the series would get back on track with the crazy bosses in Tekken 5 and beyond, Heihachi's return just feels wrong.  Not to mention I'd been kicking this guy's ass on the reg for 4 games before this one - why the hell would I suddenly have trouble with him now?

(6) Aparoid Queen, Star Fox Assault

Before you ask, yes, that IS the best picture I could find of this stupid, stupid thing.  And therein lies the problem.  To explain, Star Fox Assault was the second GameCube entry in the Star Fox series, and saw developers Namco Bandai (Nintendo had a period of loaning out their lesser franchises to other devs in those days) expand on the series' classic aerial combat with a greater emphasis on ground warfare, either on foot or in a revamped Landmaster tank.  Most fans of the series hated it.  Me, I actually liked the game: it's certainly no equal to Star Fox 64 but it's fun, and though the on-foot sections are a twitchy nightmare the tank is better, the aerial stuff is still solid and there's a brilliant score.

Unfortunately, the baddies let the game down badly.  Understandably, after three games on the trot of Fox vs. Andross, Namco wanted to shake things up.  Alas, their 'radical new idea' was basically the Zerg crossed with the Borg, and were rendered by a colourblind moron with an overbearing fondness for acute angles.  The Aparoids are like the enemies from an '80s coin-op like Galaga dragged into a 3D world without thought to what they would look like.  You keep hoping something more memorable will show up, but then the Queen appears and, nope, still just a big pile of shapes with little logic behind them.  Somehow, this seems dumb even in a series where the ultimate evil is a disembodied monkey head with free-floating laser punching fists.

(5) Bane, Arkham Asylum, or Rhino in any Spider-Man game, basically

Kind of a cheat on this one - I'm not so much complaining about a single boss encounter so much as a particular style of boss that's cropped up in a whole bunch of different games.  Let's just call them Charge Bastards.  Because they're bastards that charge at you.  How do you beat them?  Why, you take a step to the side and watch them plow into a wall like an idiot.  Maybe throw in some punches afterwards if that's only a stun impact.

Fact is, these guys represent the most deathly boring bosses I've ever fought against.  The first time it happened - probably some version of Rhino - it was kind of a novelty, and they made the character seem dumb so it was acceptable that he'd get beaten so easily.  But the more they trotted out this trope, the less I liked it.  Seeing it crop up in Arkham Asylum - and not just with Bane, but with all of the 20+ Titan thugs you'd fight over the course of the game - was a massive mood-killer that did nothing but get in the way of that title's otherwise glorious hand-to-hand combat mechanics.  No more of this, I say.  We can ALL do better.

(4) Boba Fett, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

This character likely needs no introduction, but if you've forgotten Shadows, here's the short version: an attempt during the 90s by the various Lucasfilm subsidiaries to create a single major 'event' story covering multiple forms of media.  There was a novel, a comic adaptation, a toy line, and, yes, a game - one of the earliest releases on the N64.  They all worked from the same narrative, taking place between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and though the books and whatnot only caught on with the Star Wars diehards, the game was a bigger deal, and featured the first convincing playable version of the Battle of Hoth, which became the benchmark for any future Star Wars title involving walkers and/or snowspeeders.

Of course, you don't use a snowspeeder to fight Boba Fett.  That might actually have been fair.  Instead, you - as the laughably named Dash Rendar, a.k.a emergency replacement Han Solo - must face the bounty hunter mano a mano and, well, he's more mano than you.  A lot more.  Again, this is another boss I had to get a friend to beat for me (though neither of us got past the level beyond it) - not only does Fett absorb a ton of damage before falling, but of course he's got some big guns to shoot back, and his jetpack lets him bounce around erratically like a kangaroo crossed with the Flash.  You'll likely waste all your bonus ammo on him - seeker rounds are a godsend here, but believe me when I say you WILL throw the kitchen sink at him until you're down to your feeble basic blaster.  Then, at last, he's down, falls into a pit...aaaaand then pops back up in his sodding Slave I spaceship and you have to somehow shoot that down, too.  Rrrrrgh.

(3) Ultimo, Iron Man 2: The Videogame

Quick, hands up if you actually played this!  No, of course you didn't.  It's a movie tie-in, and it's a Sega-made one, and trust me when I say Aliens Colonial Marines was hardly the first time they screwed up a movie license.  To be honest though, Iron Man 2 wasn't awful, just more limited and glitchy than it could've been.  The basics of flying and shooting stuff were handled deftly, and the story - an original tale crafted by comics writer Matt Fraction - was actually pretty neat.  In what now feels like a premonition of Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony Stark accidentally creates a malevolent AI named Ultimo, and at the end of the game, it builds itself a colossal mecha and threatens to stomp Stark Industries into nothingness.

Most of this boss fight works pretty well, actually.  You switch between both Iron Man and War Machine, and while Rhodey flies around outside, blasting Ultimo's gun turrets and whatnot, Tony infiltrates inside the mecha and confronts Ultimo's core essence, sacrificing his arc reactor to give Rhodey an opening to blast a vulnerable point on the mecha's head.  Makes sense.  Problem is, after fifteen or more tries, I could not cause enough damage during the tiny window of opportunity before Tony dies and it's game over.  I tried all of War Machine's possible weapon settings, I upgraded everything that could be upgraded, and still I could barely make a chink in the thing.  It's stupid to get worked up over a damn movie license of all things, but to this day Ultimo haunts me.

(2) King Dedede, Kirby's Dream Land

Shockingly, I'm less haunted by this crown-wearing penguin guy.  There's been a lot of Kirby games over the years, and I've avoided most of them because this, the original Dream Land for the original Game Boy, left a bad taste in my mouth.  Don't get me wrong, it's well made, Kirby handles with the smoothness I expect from Nintendo mascots, the music is terrific and the character designs and animation compensate well for the limitations of the system.  But it was just so easy.  Kirby takes a LOT of hurt to put down, the enemies are generally passive, and if you're somehow stuck by a platforming challenge you can just get Kirby to puff himself up and float away over it without being penalised.  Put it this way: I bought this game in a duty-free shop at an airport before a flight to the Canary islands.  I completed it on the flight over, comfortably.  And on the flight back, I beat it again on the hardest setting.  That's, what, 3 hours max each way?

King Dedede is symptomatic of that.  As final bosses go, he's not riddled with glitches or uninspired mechanics - he's just so damn easy to defeat.  He walks up to you, jumps, and crashes down; you step to the side before the impact (plenty of time to do so), then suck up one of the stars he creates on landing and puke it back at him.  Repeat, repeat, repeat until he dies.  Dedede, sir, you are not worthy of your crown, and shame on you for staging this fight in a proper ring as if you knew what you were doing.

(1) Goro, Mortal Kombat

Or, really, any of the 2D Mortal Kombat bosses, though I think I've lucked out against Kintaro and Motaro on occasion.  But Goro?  Ugh.  Stupid spinny multi-armed claymation mistake.

Look, let's not mince words here - the early MKs were to balance what a pesky cat is to keeping things perched on a shelf.  Stun-locking is way too easy, the low-sweep was overpowered or everyone, the canned combos can go on forever with only two buttons (or, god help us, just one) - and I suppose, in light of that, Midway felt the only way to truly challenge the player was for the boss to be cheaper than chips.  Goro doesn't flinch, Goro has more health than you, and Goro's moves do crazy damage and slap you silly, AND they come out so fast countering is near-impossible.  And he's not even the final boss, so you don't really win anything for beating him!  Just a pat on the back and ah, "nice job, now fight the shapeshifting Lo Pan lookalike".

Hand on heart, I love Mortal Kombat.  But apparently I'm insane for loving its PS2-era entries more than the 'classics' that came before.  All I'll say is that Moloch, Onaga and Blaze never pissed me off as much as these Shokan gits did.

...

Oh, you thought that was the end of the list?  Not quite.

(ZERO) Laccard Zimone, Ghost Squad

At last.  The bane of my existence.  And yes, that picture IS the boss fight in question.

For the uninitiated, Ghost Squad is a lightgun rail shooter that debuted in arcades (where it had an awesome SMG attached to the machine) before eventually appearing as part of the brief rail shooter resurgence on the Wii, and though I loved it in arcades the console port let me enjoy the finer points of the game, in particular the levelling-up system that was impossible without a memory card of some kind.  See, GS only had 3 missions, each taking 10-12 minutes to clear, but every time you beat one of the missions, you unlock a harder version of it, with more enemies in different places, and new branching paths to explore.

Mission 2 takes place on Air Force One, and climaxes with the President held hostage by one Laccard Zimone, a vaguely-French terrorist leader.  In the final set-piece of the stage, you confront him in the back of the plane, where he's just popped a grenade and is planning to escape in a separate jet.  You have one shot to take him down, only ten seconds tops to make it, and it MUST be a head shot.  Worse, the higher the difficulty is, the further away he gets (smaller target) and the less time you have to spare.  It's a nightmare.

But what's worst of all?  Every time you fail - every time - the same clip of him escaping plays, always with the same snide comment:  "Ha!  Don't you know how to AAAAIIIIMM??"

I do know how to aim.  I swear to Shuma-Gorath and all his tentacular buddies, I do.  But I have heard those smug words so many times that it's burned into my brain now, and at night, just as I'm drifting off to sleep, that's what I hear.  That's what keeps me awake.

"Ha!  Don't you know how to AAAAIIIIMM??"

...I'm gonna go ram nails into my eardrums to make it go away now.  But please, share your own boss fight horror stories in the comments.