5 Signs Of A Badly Designed Gaming Boss Fight

5. Bullet Sponge Boss Pants (He Absorbs Your Attacks For Eternity)

The ultimate form of apathy in videogame design - a boss whose only challenge springs from the obscene amount of hit points you have to deplete before it has the good grace to die.

There have been many egregious examples of this throughout gaming. The final boss of 2001's Star Trek: Elite Force springs to mind - a Lovecraftian monstrosity that took so long to kill gamers everywhere gave up on simply shooting it and assumed there was a trick to beating it. There wasn't - the only trick being played was on us by a vengeful development team who had apparently grown to hate their future customers.

RPGs are notorious for this too - who could forget Final Fantasy XII's Yiazmat? A dragon that drastically limits the amount of damage you can inflict with a single attack halfway through the fight, whilst already sporting the game's biggest life bar? Sadism in polygonal form. Or, for an RPG developed on the western hemisphere, look no further than Diablo III and its Butcher. Virtually impossible to lose if you chose the high-defense Crusader class, this "fight" amounts to nothing more than 15 sodding minutes of standing still and draining the Butcher's absurd pool of health points drop by tedious drop.

Developers - please ensure your boss takes no more than 10 minutes to beat. Our future sanity depends on it.