Discussion: who's your favorite video game boss?

You all know that feeling. You’ve just fought your way through hordes of smaller enemies. Suddenly, you walk out into a large, open area. It’s completely empty of enemies. Uh-oh. Boss fight time. But when you step forward into the trigger area and the ground rumbles and cracks beneath your feet, who or what emerges? In other words: what’s your favorite video game boss?

Mary-Anne: If you’re a regular indulger in end-game MMORPG content it’s hard to pick a favorite. There are a few boss fights that have stuck with me though, most being in World of Warcraft’s Karazhan raid in the Burning Crusade expansion. I ran Karazhan damn near nightly for about half a year and one of the fights I really enjoyed was Netherspite.

In the Netherspite fight, you face off against a huge dragon by making use of certain beams that project onto him. These three beams give buffs to healing and damage dealt, and raise the aggro on whoever stands in their respective ways. You need to make sure someone intercepts those beams at all times or Netherspite gets the buffs.

I once did a very stupid thing by standing in the damage buff beam and then using Shadow Word: Death. (I was a S. Priest.) My healer friend was puzzled for most of the raid until he realized what I was doing and started scolding me.

Netherspite was a boss that took an amazing amount of coordination amongst unseasoned noob raiders like my friends and I, but once we downed it, we continued to do so very easily each time.

Iain: Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid. Holy-breaking-the fourth-wall, do you remember the utter insanity that was the Psycho Mantis boss battle? A boss that taunted not the character, but the player themselves. He commented on your save games, changed your control layout and even performed a magic trick by making the original dualshock controller move across the floor.

To beat him you had to swap your controller to port 2 so he couldn’t predict your every move. Even now I still get chills when I remember this boss battle and the memory still remains vivid. Never before or since has there been a boss battle that affected me as deeply as the gas mask wearing Psycho Mantis.