- flamedude
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- Exalted Mythic Member
On Waypoint I'm rocketFox;
http://halo.xbox.com/forums/members/rocketfox/default.aspx
Old GTs; RebelRobot, Flamedude
Tartarus, on the other hand, is a boss battle. He can't be damaged except after his shield is dropped by Johnson's beam rifle. Why he has a shield when no other Brute has one? No idea. Why is his shield better than any Elite's shield, such that it is unvulnerable except to this one weapon? No idea. What's special about Johnson's weapon that it works against Tartarus' shield, where a supposedly identical beam rifle in your own hands is completely ineffectual? No idea. Why can't you take that rifle from Johnson and use it yourself once you've gotten tired of him taking shots at blank walls? No idea. How does Tartarus survive and where does he come from if you push him off the control room platform, off an edge that causes you to die? The same place that Barabbas came from during his boss battle in Oni: which is to say, we have no idea.
Just about everything wrong with the idea of a boss battle is embodied in this encounter: special weapons, special enemies, special rules. Everything you've learned about how to play Halo up until that moment goes right out the door, replaced by a mini-game where you have to repeat in lock-step a series of actions in order to reach your objective. The game that led up to this point was so good, that this way of ending it all just seems so wrong as to be sacriligious, whereas in any other game it would be par for the course.
Boss battles make no sense whatsoever. They dont follow the rules of the game, and hence completely destroy how immersive a game can be. If you are playing by a certain set of rules, for instance if you unload two brute plasma rifles into someones face they will die, and then suddenly the rules do not apply you question it and therefore the gaming environment.
If you're interested read this for the full quote..