Prototype

When Prototype gets hard, it gets absurdly difficult. I just spent two excruciating hours fighting one boss. I haven't yelled this loudly at a game in years.

The boss had three large (building-sized) tentacle-ish components coming out of the ground. Each of these had a small health meter, and when all three of them took enough damage, the main part of the boss would become vulnerable. Then after a short time the tentacles would recharge and shoot up again, and I'd have to repeat the weakening process.

A solid- and proven-enough mechanism, but:

• It shot a near-endless stream of green orbs that homed in on me, knocking me back on impact (making any kind of approach difficult)
• It also had a rock-spewing attack where a stream of debris would rape my health bar and push me back into last Tuesday (making a direct, ground approach completely impossible)
• It also had a shockwave attack that would push me forever away from it, and deal about half my health bar in damage (making it also impossible to stick around on top of it)
• And a host of other random attacks, like movement, would push me away from it even more
• Also, it continually spawned enemies that would attack me if I was on it, and hunt me if I ran (these enemies were a huge pain in the ass too, especially when I was already at low health)

I'm not above looking online for help, in the form of GameFAQs and YouTube game videos. Unfortunately, all of these were unhelpful, because they relied on upgrades I didn't have. I blew all my experience points on health regen upgrades instead - which sounds smart, right? but turned out to be borderline useless; the bar only regenerates up to about 40% of my max health!

I would happily have gone back to the overworld and farmed experience points to get more upgrades, but the game's autosave had put me right at the boss fight, and there was no way to exit the mission. Yes - I was trapped in the boss fight.

The game itself often advised me to use the military for help, e.g. steal tanks and helicopters. However, they didn't appear until I'd already taken off a third of the boss's health by myself. So until then I had to employ hit and run tactics, taking off little (or none) of the boss's HP at a time, and frequently retrying when I got caught by:

• A fucking dead-on rock spew as I ran away after one of the shockwave attacks
• The spawning monsters ganging up on me (they can interrupt my attacks, but I can't interrupt theirs!)
• Trying to climb a building, but getting stuck in an awning as shit continued to be thrown at me
• Accidentally leaving the mission area! A helicopter I was hijacking flew out of the mission range before I had any control over it, forcing me to retry

I don't feel proud or accomplished for having finished this boss fight. I feel pissed. There's no fucking reason why this part of the game should be a million times more difficult than anything that came before it. And if I'd gotten some better advice from the game on where to spend my upgrade points - or better yet, if the abilities I needed weren't so retardedly expensive - I would have been able to finish the fight in a tenth of the time.

That's the thing about Prototype; for all the stuff you can do in the game, all the upgrades you can get and tactics you can take on a mission, most of them are wrong. Every mission still has one or two golden paths. And they aren't always obvious, or even possible, depending on how you play the game.

I can only take solace in the fact that there aren't many missions left, and I would be incredibly surprised if anything else approached this ridiculous level of difficulty.

Progress: Shock and Awe