Rick Dakan

I play a lot of games. I like a lot of games. I almost always hate the boss fights in games.

I just Rage Quit Prototype for the third time in the past 24 hours. It's a game I've enjoyed right up until the end when, like most games, they start to ramp up the difficulty in aribitrary ways. Games seem to suffer from this strange delusion that making them harder is the same as making them more fun. That sheer difficulty equals satisfying challenge.

There are some satisfying challenges in Protoype and in inFamous both, but they both suffer from the same serious problem at the end - a very challenging boss fight that's frustrating and uninteresting. In both games, the identity/nature of that final boss is pretty interesting and the setting is cool. But what you have to do to win just isn't fun.

Bosses almost always break the rules that you've spent the last however many hours of game play learning. They're invlunerable to some of the attacks you've come to rely on or just take very minimal damage. They have their own set of flashy, screen-filling powers that they use over and over again and winning just comes down to learning the pattern and hoping your reflexes hold up longer than your health bar.

Prototype commits the added sin of, once you're within sight of beating the boss it throws a timer at you, forcing you to throw caution to the wind in order to deal enough damage fast enough. I cannot express how annoyed I am at this. I'm kind of infuriated, it's such a fucking slap in the face to the player. The game designers have taken everything that's fun about Prototype for the last ten hours - I'm super strong, super fast, super awesome, and cut through enemies - and thrown it out the window. This is probably a valid character choice from a dramatic/story point of view, but having to play through it SUCKS. It's NOT FUN.

Which is why I'm not going to write a review of the game this instant, because right now I'm mad at the game and trying to calm down. If I'd reviewed Bionic Commando in the midst of it's awful, even worse boss fight, I'd have been spewing venom onto the keyboard. I like a lot of things about Prototype, but right now I'm not sure if I'm going to bother finishing it. Because, really, fuck you guys for sucking the fun out of the end of your game.

The final missions leading up to the last battle were much better - big fights against lots of dudes. Even though they had timers on them as well, I had more control over how they played out and was able to take advantage of my character's full range of abilities. I had to replay the last few missions a couple times to get the hang of it, which was a little frustrating at times but still well within the realm of "Challenging Fun." At this point, with all the plot twists revealed and the muddled Prototype story unfolded, I've little incentive to submit myself to more teeth-grinding, expletive hurling, controller twisting frustration.

All right. I'm done ranting for now. But seriously, Activision and whoever made Prototype (I just tried to go to your Flash-laden official site to get the developer's name but anything with an age barrier and a flash load time over 2 seconds isn't worth seeing so I left) - right now, all I'm thinking is "fuck you."