Know Thy Bosses

The Guardian Gamesblog has a piece on knowing your enemy to better pwn him. Specifically, they go through some tried and true rules about surviving boss battles. From the article: "If the boss stops, panic. Bosses usually move about - when they stop it means they're about to unleash their signature move, the aforementioned fist or laser blast. Try to avoid being parallel to them when they stop. Unless, of course, it's the sort of boss who blasts the whole screen apart from the thin corridor directly in front of them. In this case stay where you are."

Comments

"Blind fury" attack.

[Vo0k]

In most cases I found the "maximum offensive exchange strategy" works best.

I keep powering myself up during very cautious "level gameplay" and when facing the boss, just blow a full frontal attack, rarely dodging anything.

Bosses are meant to be "difficult to beat" so they often try to overwhelm you with firepower, so you have no time to strike back, they sweep the area with fire so what's the point of dodging, but they are meant to last about a minute or three of cautious gameplay with few, rare shots. Assuming some 20 serious shots per minute from the boss, during these three minutes you will take maybe 10 hits or so, dodge another 50. If you blow all your worth at it, own damage notwithstanding, it will take less than 20 seconds to beat. You may end up taking less damage than while dodging, getting hit by 7 out of 8 shots the boss gets to launch at you before falling dead.

Nice ending of "Chaos Engine": I accumulated 28 extra lives during the game, taking time to unlock every secret possible and killing every enemy that would bring cash, maxing out almost everything.
I just stood in front of the final boss and kept shooting. It went down when I was down to 22 lives.
Later I tried the same with dodging. I ended up with 18 or so lives left, failing to avoid the attacks and rarely taking a pot-shot at it.
Now playing Zelda: Majora's mask. The goddamn fish boss, why would I ever care to dodge it? I have fucking 5 bottles with fairies filling my 13 heart containers each! If I didn't move at all, it would take it half a hour to finish me off!
A fine old Amiga game of Perihellion. I took a bit different approach: built up defenses on one character to the level where he had over 100% of immunity to mostly everything outside some obscure, rarely seen attacks (like "extreme sound" ;) so I just backed off all the rest to the corner and put this one to exchange blows with the boss. Hitting him with a puny tiny knife because it didn't conflict with anything from the armour and took little time units. The battle lasted quite long but I didn't take a single hitpoint of damage.
XCOM: Defense. "As you approach the alien brain, before you shoot it, it says..." what a bullshit. I didn't approach the alien brain. I kept launching blaster launcher missiles from several rooms away, until they dug up enough passage to launch one directly at the brain. Half of the crew of 26 was armed with blaster launchers. The other half didn't because I didn't have room for all the ammo needed. (fyi a blaster launcher pops an explosion tha is ridiculously big and destroys most it finds on its way, including hard soil between rooms in underground bases (yay, new corridors!), alien alloys (making backdoors in alien ships), and whole houses ("in this house there is NO enemy now, for sure.")

The worst situation is with games that artificially limit your "capacities". Half-Life 2. 3 rockets, okay, rockets are big. But 3 energy balls, 100 armour (these batteries are small!), 12 magnum bullets(?!!), 10 crossbow bolts, 3 frigging carabine grenades, 3 reloads of the energy rifle, 8 seconds of shooting each! And you end up fighting the boss or a big battle with a shotgun... (and in the meantime, the enemies have infinite ammo but when they die, they drop less than one reload of given weapon)
Do I have to say I hate such "gameplay ballancing"?