The 10 Worst Final Bosses in Video Game History
Games are about challenges, and one way designers like to test their players is through boss battles. These ultra-hard enemies require you to deploy every skill you’ve learned throughout the game to conquer them, but balancing them can be a difficult task. Make them too easy, and players will feel let down. But if you make them too hard, they’ll find a place on this list of bosses that pushed past “challenge” into frustration and insanity. Here are 10 of the absolute worst final bosses in games.
Fighting games are supposed to be a level playing field, where reflexes and reads win the day. But in a single-player mode, there has to be a difficulty ramp to get people feeding quarters to the machine, and many brawlers have obscenely difficult last bosses. One of the absolute worst came in Kaiser Knuckle, a relatively obscure 1994 game from Taito. Like many such games, the action centers around a fighting tournament organized to find the greatest martial artist in the world. The organizer of the tournament—and the game’s final boss—is the green-clad General, who could be written off as an M. Bison rip-off until the round starts and he starts spamming massive multi-directional projectiles, invulnerable teleports, and long-range grabs until you die.
Battling the boxers in NES classic Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out was mainly a test of pattern recognition and timing. Once you figured out what their tells were, you could take them out relatively easily. That is, until you got to the big guy at the very end. The 8-bit rendition of Tyson might have been even more frightening than the real thing. In the first round of the fight, taking even a single uppercut from Tyson will put Little Mac on the mat, and blocking them still drains a ton of
Read more on pcmag.com
