Be Excellent To Each Other

Last week, Destiny 2, a highly anticipated online shooter that’s best played with friends, raised the curtain on a mystery it had been teasing for weeks leading up to the game’s early September release: the Leviathan. That’s the name of the game’s marquee Raid, a massive, sprawling level that explains almost nothing about how to beat it, and requires teamwork among six players to solve its riddles and take down whatever boss lies at the end. It’s both Destiny 2’s biggest challenge and mystery, and for the past week the game’s community of players has been racing to square off with Leviathan’s mysterious boss, six people at a time.

Until somewhat recently, it seemed as if the concept of the video-game boss was on its last legs. Bosses were effectively bottlenecks at a time where games were expanding. Open-world and online games flourished, player choice became paramount, and boss fights in games that felt otherwise wide open — like the notoriously underwhelming boss confrontations in otherwise acclaimed games such as Bioshock or Deus Ex: Human Revolution — ended up feeling like dead weight.

Then a wave of nostalgia brought the boss back. Demon’s Souls had already embraced the opaque design and challenges of classic games, adding names like Ornstein and Smough to the wince-inducing canon of legendary video-game big bads. Souls and its sequels/spinoffs inspired countless imitators, like Lords of the Fallen and this year’s Nioh, to such an extent that ‘Souls-like’ is now a genre descriptor. Runaway sleeper hits like Shovel Knight and Hyper Light Drifter nakedly emulated and updated 8- and 16-bit sensibilities, where challenging levels were par for the course and boss fights took center stage. And there’s Destiny, a series that brought bosses back in a big way by borrowing ideas from massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, making them nigh-insurmountable challenges that required teamwork from a large group of players.

What this big-bad revival reminds us is that we’re better off with bosses in our gaming lives. In a medium where individual experiences can now vary greatly — no two people play Minecraft the same way, nor do any two games of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds even remotely resemble one another — bosses remain a common experience, cultural touchstones for entire generations of games and the people who play them. Whether it’s M. Bison or Psycho Mantis or Atheon, they’ve all served as finish lines, final examinations, and feats of collaboration.

That goes most for these 100 bosses, who have been providing gamers with shared war stories for more than 30 years. Assembled by a committee of gaming journalists with various tastes, our rank factored in each enemy’s overall difficulty, the novelty of their fight mechanics, and their influence on subsequent games. Most important, however, was how vividly they lingered in our minds. A good boss encounter elevates the game it’s in. It’s not something you easily forget.

For each boss on SFII I had a character that could beat them incredibly easy. For Balrog use E.Honda. Hundred hand slap (using hard punch). All you needed to do was stand there, two perfects. For Sagat use Blanka. Crouch block until you see an opening in his attacks, then counter with the cannonball. Won't get perfects, but it's easy. For Vega use Blanka. Every time he "yahhh"s jump backward and stick out your paw with mid punch. Again you may not get perfects but it's easy AF if you time it right. For Bison use Zangief. Just continually move backward and forward with the lariat.

Joans and I never managed to 100% TTFATF on Easy in co-op.

I think I defeated it on Hard though.

When am I coming over to get those cheevos you owe me?

When I buy a 360 and guitars?

I've got an unused 360 and MANY guitars in my garage. Free to a good home. Or you.

I've got an unused 360 and MANY guitars in my garage. Free to a good home. Or you.

I could never beat Tom on Level 5 of Tom and Jerry on the NES.

He was laid at the bottom of a fireplace, whilst flames licked around your feet.

All you had to do was shoot marbles at him a few times like every other world, but on this level he refused to die, no matter where I hit him on his body. I looked up the game years later for a guide and it turned out I was doing it correctly, he just didn't ever activate the death animation for some reason, so the level never advanced to world 6. The shit.

This is typical mainstream gaming list fodder. Mostly 21th Century Games where gaming has been so easy. And lots of Dark Souls. Dark Souls!!! Did they ever told you how Dark Souls is hard? Yes, Dark Souls! DARK SOULS!!!

And there's the usual old tokenism of Nintendo games. No Shmups at all.

BTW, I'm a rubbish gamer and finished Dark Souls without summons.