Every August I get into a gaming funk. Since it happens every year I don’t get too worried about it and at the end of August a good game always picks me up out of it. For the last two years that game has been Arkham Asylum, once on 360 and then on PS3 because I’m strange like that.

This year however the perfect game was going to be Deus Ex. Nice deep storyline, plenty of stealth action and I’ll all be set for Driver, Space Marine and then Gears of War(the next few weeks of releases).

I started playing and it was sort of going OK. The music is outstanding and the graphics although a tad dated have a nice design that works so I started off with a stealth play through on the hardest difficulty level. When you don’t plan on fighting difficulty doesn’t matter right? After an hour I ditched that play through because of the glacial load times whenever I made a slight mistake and the fact that I wasn’t getting any younger.

I decided that a quick play through all guns blazing was what I needed and this was going great up until the first boss battle. Which was awful, but a quick delivery of lots of lead soon got me past that and I was back in the nice world exploring away collecting eBooks like there’s no tomorrow.  I do love a good collection mechanic, it fits with my play style of really exploring areas.

Then I hit the second boss. Before that room there is a storage room with a heavy rifle and the biggest stack of ammo I’ve seen in the game so far, and since this is one of the key indicators of lazy boss syndrome I was a little apprehensive as I entered The Boss Room. Where I promptly died. Again and again. Turns out I didn’t have the right weapons to beat her easily, the right augmentations to negate her damage and the videos on youtube showing how to beat her in my situation are edited down to 15 minutes and very, very boring. It’s a classic fight against somebody who just takes  lot of killing and running away from their attacks until they need to recharge and with my character and equipment I am, experienced game player that I am, I’m unable to progress. I just haven’t needed the extra damage resistance up until this point, I wasn’t getting shot much because I was sneaking and being clever but put me in a room and I can’t win. I really don’t want to replay the last few hours in order to get to that point again but this time bring the right gun and better abilities as I know it’ll just pull the same trick with the next boss fight as well. It has destroyed any good feelings I have for the game and such an obviously bad design decision as to add unskippable boss fights into a game has ruined the game for me. On top of that I’m not sure I could be bothered to do the sneaking play through now anyway as it forces you to  fight so I’ll be in an even worse situation if you are purely skilling up for the non-lethal play through (the achievement/trophy for which of course specifically excludes the boss fight kills).

Now all this is made worse by my summer gaming funk of course but I’m increasingly losing patience with games with obviously bad design decisions in them. I don’t mind boss fights in a game like Gears of War, they fit there and what would god of war be without the chances to make you feel like a god (new rule, “of war” games are still allowed boss fights), but when every single review says that the game shouldn’t have boss fights you know somebody screwed up the design somewhere. The otherwise excellent Arkham Asylum nearly ruins itself at the end by having the most brain dead, out of context for the IP boss fight imaginable. A boss fight against the Joker, who has been on the bane juice? What idiot came up with that?

I then decided to play a game I know I like, so started through the DLC for Enslaved. I’m right at the end and it’s making me fight waves of enemies in a way counter to the sneaking of the rest of the levels in the DLC. Again they have taken what I was enjoying and switched on me because heaven forbid you actually complete a game without shooting loads of things. Lots of games do this now, boss fights by another name where they use waves of enemies in a locked area that you have to fight off to continue and I hate that as well. I quit playing that too as I was beginning to lose my will to live, and considering a license system for games designers that I could revoke the moment they decided that they didn’t know what to do next so just throw in a locked room fight.

The worrying part is the fact that I suspect that it’s me that’s wrong and actually all that’s happening is that I’m losing the desire to play most games. I do hope I get it back soon or I’ll be down to just being left with driving games. Until they start adding boss fights to them of course.