The Symposium Ad Nauseum is a weekly roundtable discussion over meaningless video game topics but what do you expect? We’re emotionally stunted!

Feel free to join in the conversation!

This week’s topic: cheapest bosses, those level-capping confrontations that left you screaming in tongues at the TV and hurling your controller at the cat.

Dave:  Lots of cheap bosses have tortured me over the years, but few have pissed me off as much as Gill from Street Fighter 3.  He was some kind of god-like being who had cultish followers, a sexy secretary and lived in a heaven-like realm.  He also was very adept at killing me and making me want to place-kick my Dreamcast out the window.

They guy had a variety of moves specifically designed to increase my agitation: iceball projectiles that he can fire in the air, soaring headbutts, flying knee drops, dashing fists, all of which took a shockingly small amount of time to stun.

Worse are his super art combos.  He can rain down meteoric debris that will murder you unless you block (and even blocking results in big damage) and rise into the air, spread his angel wings and fill the screen with his holy mojo, which will bring death swiftly and in glorious Technicolor.  And even if you are lucky enough to drop the guy, if his super meter is full, he’ll resurrect, giving him a significant chunk of his life force back.

I was able to best the guy with Urien (repeated shoulder charges, cheesy but effective), Akuma and Ryu (spamming hurricane kicks) and, miraculously, Hugo (spinning body presses ad infinitum).  Everyone else I pitted against the guy ended in tears and futility.

Again, there are a lot of bosses who are cheap and irritating, but what elevates Gill and his infuriating move set to the top of my rankings is this: the guy was an astounding prick.  He was begging for a beatdown, with his Michael Bolton coiffure and pretentious loincloth that barely covered his god-junk and healthy opinion of himself and the trash he talked to you over and over and over after he won.

Seriously, @#$% you Gill and the horse you rode in on.

Steve: I could go on for days about fighting game bosses. Maybe a half a dozen or so. Seth, Gill, Alpha 3 Bison, Justice, Tekken 1 Heihachi, Tekken 4 Heihachi, but I won’t.

The most recent for me was in Heavenly Sword. The final boss, King Bohan, or Bastard king of assholes. I was taking it to this guy for several hours befored he finally kicked off and effing died! He’s one of these “multiple form” jerks, though with him it’s basically three bars worth of health and varying attacks while he flies around on black wings made of smoke. If the fight wasn’t so outrageously gorgeous looking i don’t think i would have held out. He flaps around, tossing fireballs  like there’s a sale. He cruises along the ground, knocking you on your arse, and he blocks half of what you throw at him. To beat the prick, you ultimately have to master the timing of Heavenly Sword’s counter system, and when he finally drops from the sky, his body broken and ruined, you are rewarded with one of the coolest, most dramatic video game endings i’ve ever seen. So yeah, in the end, it was worth the toil.

King of Bastards! Voiced by Andy Sirkis no less!

Erich: Word has it that the final boss fight with the Dark Queen in Battletoads was a real pain. I wouldn’t know because I could never beat the stupid Hypno Orb to advance past the second to last level. After spending hours punching ducks to build up extra lives (don’t ask), I’d end up wasting them all trying to control the “Clinger Winger” unicycle thing. I suppose I should be grateful I made it that far in such an infamously hard game, but it still stings.

She might not be the toughest boss in the world, but fighting Gruntilda the witch at the end of the original Banjo-Kazooie became something of a Sysiphean boulder for me. The first time I played through the game, I got stuck at the final showdown and set aside the game for a few months. One day, I decided to fire up the cartridge and give it another go, but my careless A button-mashing accidentally deleted my only game save. I eventually played through the entire game again, thanks to the free XBLA download code that came with my Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts pre-order. I made it to the end, and though it took several tries (mostly because of the crappy red feather flight controls), I finally beat that stupid rhyming witch. Now if only I could get those last few Jiggies…

Tim: When it comes to a discussion of cheap video game bosses, Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th on the NES is somewhat of running joke for gamers our age. I was going to bring this old game up last Friday because, well, it was the 13th, but it fits nicely into this conversation.

Battletoads, like most great games of the 8-bit era, was challenging, but rewarding.  The journey was worthwhile and if you manage to beat the game, you actually feel a sense of accomplishment. Friday the 13th… not so much. It’s the kind of game you’d rent, play for two hours, then give up on because it’s more work than the chores you were blowing off to play Nintendo in the first place.

Here's a screen you've probably never seen until now... I know I hadn't until I Googled it.

Ah... that's more like it.

Of course, the landscape of NES games is littered with some of the cheapest bosses in gaming, or as like to refer to them, “controller smashers.” Back then, games maintained replay value not with downloadable content, multiple endings or unlockables like achievements, but with a face-melting level of difficulty. Fortunately, those old NES controllers are very durable and can take a surprising amount of punishment.

As far as cheap bosses that I actually played and beat… I’ll have to think about that one a little more.

Steve: I was an 80’s kid, i owned a machete. My machete once, in a fit of Battletoads inspired rage, destroyed an NES controller in one fell swoop.

Battletoads was the game that destroyed my childhood. When i finally beat that Dark Queen , i lit up my first cigarette, drank a 40 of Jim Beam, and got busy with four prostitutes. I didn’t really though, but i swear i didn’t touch the NES for about six months after that.

Jon: Remember this peach from Mega Man 2?

Not Pictured: A young boy's lack of dignity.

Okay…for all you kids who aren’t in “the know.”  The reason Mega Man is wearing peach today is because he’s equipped with Crash man’s “Crash Bomber” weapon…a powerful, but ultimately worthless item that is probably used twice in the whole game.  Once to snag an E-Tank in one of the Wily levels…and here.  The reason the Crash Bomber sucks so much, is the fact that you maybe get 8 shots with it before its out of juice.  Those blue gates there that look like Tetris blocks?  They can only be destroyed with the Crash Bomber…same goes for the Disco stage effects behind each gate that all fire death rays in unison with pinpoint accuracy.  Count the targets.  Yeah.  The only way I could ever get past this boss was to blow up all the gates, and because they don’t regenerate after you lose a life…commit suicide.  Then trudge through the brutally hard level again, trying to fill the Crash Bomber’s weapon gauge again with measly power-ups for another go at the actual boss targets.  I was 7 man.  The boss gives me a snowglobe and tells me that my childhood is over because I know I’m gonna die.

I was told there is an attack pattern that will allow you to bypass them in one life…but I’ll be damned if my Hi-C Ecto Cooler soaked brain could figure that out.