play the albert hall forever – and ever – and ever aka BOSS FITE!
So I got home from Finnish class tired, exhausted and filthy. I wanted a bath, but thought I’d have a quick game of Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time next. Mm yes that lovely blend of turn based fights and amusing characters and fun plot, yes just what I need. What did I get instead? A tedious boss fight that – I kid you not – took me one hour and ten minutes to conclude! The boss wasn’t even hard, but apparently had ENDLESS energy! And of course – and here’s the worst thing about the game – it never tells you how many hit points the enemy you’re fighting has left – you can be nearly about to kill him or you could go on for ANOTHER FORTY FIVE MINUTES. In the end stretch I was nearly in tears. The urge to smack the damn DS off and throw it out of the window was rising like a BLOODY COUP. But yet, showing my utter insanity I persevered.
And when I finally beat the boss, and cried tears of relief – what happened? A nice big restful cut-scene, some plot development to reward me from wasting so much time of my precious LIFE on this boring, endless boss?? No. I got to descend into a volcano and carry on, achieving NO significant level objectives – just… carry on there Mario.
ARRRRRRRRRUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
I take it all back, previous most-annoying-boss (Mazaal from the Minish Cap) – we have a new winner!! BAD Nintendo, BAD!
Writing this all up again has re-stressed me!
And more=zooom hasn’t worked either. OH perhaps that’s because I haven’t cut any of the text. OH SOD IT *smashes all computers with above hammer*
This is exactly the kind of thing that made me give up on the GBA incarnation. The battles don’t get more tricky or more interesting they just get longer. A real shame considering what fun the game is apart from the battles. Also, my girlfriend who’d never played an RPG like this before managed to get into a position after 6 hours of play where her characters were too weak to get anywhere and too poor to buy any health so she had two options give up entirely or spend another 6 hours trudging through the tedious combat and no longer fresh story line.
ARRRRRRRRRUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! indeed.
The same thing happend to me half way through RE:Code Veronica on the dream cast. Anyway, I totaly feel your pain.
Bosses in general are the worst development in the history of videogames.
We know yr not keen on bosses. Worst things about videogames sounds like a list we COULD do – unlike say “brands”. I’d vote for “blue key card/blue door” mechanics, and “talking meat puppets”
sarah’s 1st comment there reminds me of the angry german kid video :-)
A boss TASK is a good inclusion – all of the skills trained up for being lined up and so on. (GTA did this well – the big villain would be surrounded by defences, but would, in themsleves, be a normal character who could be taken down with a single headshot.)
A boss enemy, though, is likely to mean repetitive activity, and looking at the same screen endlessly, quite possibly waiting for some timing event.
In RE3, the boss creature was a reoccuring presence that intimidated thoughout the game (effectively too, apprently – I’m still on a hiatus at an earlier stage in the series), making the takedown all the more satisfying, I imagine. But the form seems to be bosses who are stumbled upon in their lair, and protect a treasure that is in all but name your key to the door out of there.
Yes obv. it’s use of bosses not ‘bosses’ per se that apalls me, though I use that as a shorthand. Magnus sums up the design issues very well I think.
I remember when ‘boss’ meant ‘BOSS KEY’!
“Legacy” hem hem gaming still encorporates this and I think more games should cheers cheers – ie your DS turns into a sheaf of important looking documents through fancy use of holograms. At LEAST there should be one there for spider solitaire.
I remember fighting that exact same boss for ages, and i eventually gave up. I checked a game walkthrough and infact the only way to kill the boss was to attack ONE of the four versions it splits up into, and the only way to know which variant to kill is that the right one has good teeth, the rest have messed up teeth. I thought that was really stupid.
And as soon as you direct all your damage to that one variant, you can kill it in one hit – so the second time i attempted the longest boss ever, because i knew what i was doing, i managed to kill it in under a minute. I think that kind of logic is bad game design.
other than that it was a good game