When I play a game, I am always up for a bit of a challenge. I look at some FPS titles and can’t help but whack the difficulty up to max and count the seconds it takes for me to get totally disemboweled by zombies or space aliens. Even though I do like the challenge I am never that great at it, Games are supposed to be fun at the end of the day, this is why I play them.
Ever since I have been sinking my teeth into curtain game genres such as Hack and Slash games and fighting games, I have come to realize that some titles seem to get to a point where the game stops being difficult and just becomes frustrating. This is typical of some hack and slash titles and some fighting games as well. I am of corse talking about cheap boss’s.
An example of a non-cheap boss and he is called DR ROBOTNIK not Egg man!
So for those of you who don’t fully understand the concept of a cheap boss let me explain. imagine Your pretty much at the end of a level/game and there is the final boss staring at you and you launch into battle. Next thing you know you are being pummeled by all sorts of over powered moves that you can’t block or find it near on impossible to dodge. So you find yourself dying time after time to beat this git, untill you A)extremely lucky and beat the boss out of sheer luck. Or B) Find yourself going to your latest video game retailer and buying yourself a new controller because the last one you had is now in tiny pieces scattered around your living room/bedroom.
So why do developers implement cheap bosses into games? Is it just to piss gamers off? Are the Developers trying to get 1 up on the gamers, thinking they worked hard on this game so we should work hard defeating it? This I cannot answer now, but what I can do for you is give you some warning. I bring to you the top three cheapest Boss’s in my opinion. This is hope that you can save yourselves from hours of frustration, or you can just have a go at these guys and see what I mean.
WARNING: The next bit of this article will now contain spoilers for Devil May Cry 3, Dante’s Inferno and Street Fighter IV. You Have Been Warned.
Arkham – Devil May Cry 3
This demonic blob from the demon realm has to be a pretty cheap ass boss because he just doesn’t let you get near him. His main trick it to push you backwards with demon power and then pummel you from a distance with things like flying demon tentacles and demonic eels sprouting from the floor. It’s only once you get close to him you can deal some damage. If you don’t have infinite DT then your pretty much screwed. You have to be very precise with dodges, so i suggest your best bet here is to use trickster and dodge like you have never dodged before. Then as soon as the eels come from the floor it’s a case of jumping and firing your rocket launcher at the floor.
Lucifer – Dante’s Inferno
It may come to no surprise to you that the lord of Hell is the boss in this game. When you first fight him your thinking this is easy. But it is his second stage you have to be aware of. He attacks you in his humanoid state, what really annoyed me about this was that my attacks were doing hardly any damage, and every now and again he would teleport and then spam an uber move on me leaving me incapacitated. Weather it was smashing the ground or firing hellish demon power at me, moves like that would take half my health bar down in one. So my advice here is get yourself the holy armour spell, equip it and spam the crap out of him, yes it may take you several years and a million tries but it works eventually.
Seth – Street Fighter IV
Now this is one of those cheap bosses which I have no strategy for. This is the cheapest boss I have come across in my gaming career. He loves to spam moves such as the pile-driver which takes a huge chunk of your health out, and the chain three shyroken. If your lucky he may do both at the same time. Oh and don’t forget the move where he kicks you and it suddenly becomes a million kick combo. That’s a doozy. So that’s what to watch out for, I suggest using maybe Bison or Dhalsim so you can teleport and dodge his attacks, or maybe fight fire with fire and use Seth himself if you have Super Street Fighter IV.
So there you have it, the top three cheap bosses in my recent gaming career that have really given my a hard time. There are probably more which I have blanked from my mind because they annoyed me that much. So with all this in mind, what are your top three cheapest Bosses and why?
Garv.
Fighters are often bad for it, mainly because they want to make the final boss tougher than all the rest of the characters.
Alpha-152 – Dead or Alive 4
This boss is as hard, if not worse, than Seth in my opinion – following the similar theme of “lab-based experiment with super powers and teleportation”, the boss can easily kill you with 2 or 3 hits, one or two of her grabs able to take off 50% of your health in one blow. I’d rather fight Seth anyday, but maybe that’s just because I’m more in my element with Street Fighter. Still, when she grabs you and starts to pummel you in the head it’s pretty demoralising.
Shao Kahn – Mortal Kombat
Really cheap, with his constant dash attacks and giant hammer. I played Mortal Kombat 3 recently, and spent about 80% of that time fighting him. Ugh.
Nightmare (particularly the third encounter) – Devil May Cry
Now I was struggling to think of a boss that I find *really* cheap, but DMC1′s Nightmare is pretty bad. The boss is literally a giant blob-like creature, and because of that fact you can rarely tell when and where you are going to get attacked. Not only that, but you have to keep rune-clocks around the room active while fighting him, or he sinks into an invulnerable pool of slime on the floor. But at least it was somehow… cooler… than Arkham.