(Before I do the actual article, I'm not sure what's going on with the blog -- I started this blog four days ago but when I posted it five minutes ago it showed up ... four days ago -- I reposted it so sorry if it shows up twice)

Picked up a 360 a couple months ago. I never had an Xbox so I picked up Gears of War and three old Xbox games -- Halo, Crimson Skies, and MechAssault 2.

I've now played through all four of these games, and they all have one thing in common : a stupidly hard final boss.

A final boss should be hard. It should be different. But it should not be so hard and different that it's stupidly hard. Let's look at my final boss no-no's.

Do not make the player beat the hardest encounter in the game with a brand new mechanic

In Gears of War you kill the final boss with a sniper rifle which (if you're like me) you've never used before. Ditto MechAssault 2 : you beat the final boss with a mortar (which I'd never used before). Ditto Halo : the final level is a race. Like, in a truck. I've never beat a racing game but I'm guessing that most times the final level doesn't have you shooting aliens in an abandoned space ship.

These were, otherwise, good games. But the designers must not have liked them too much -- why else end the game doing something completely different?

The final boss should be hard. But not too hard.

As stupid as Halo Truck Rally was, at least it wasn't too hard. Gears of War and MechAssault 2 had insanely hard end bosses, however -- Fifty-Dollar-Controller-Throwingly-Hard.

Now, it's one thing to have a final boss that takes four or five hours to beat. It's entirely another to have a ten or fifteen hour game where the final boss takes four or five hours to beat. You should never, ever spend more than about 10% of your total game time on the final boss. In Gears of War, I'd say I spent more than a third of my time in game just working on the final boss. MechAssault 2 probably would have ended up the same way, but after about two hours I decided quitting was the better part of valor.

Do not make the final boss fight a ten or fifteen minute long encounter with no save points

While nice in theory, in practice you spend hours beating the same easy part of the encounter fifty times and it's boring. I'm looking at you, Crimson Skies.