Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!

I am off work for a week! And so while I could have used that time to come up with a more complicated, challenging, or just more long-winded topic, I largely flaked out and spent most of my time playing video games and reading comics. I’ll make sure to come up with something more convoluted next week!

For now, though, today’s prompt is on one of my favorite gaming topics: that trope of boss arenas that include the only way to kill the boss. You’ve seen this before. It’s a standard in traditional action games, whether that’s Bowser consigning himself to his own bottomless pit in Super Mario Bros. 3, Blind the Thief not boarding up his skylights in A Link to the Past, and ole’ Yhorm the Giant keeping his one weakness just out there for any Dark Souls III player to nab. And like a lot of things that exist to facilitate gameplay and rarely have narrative value, it’s an easy thing to joke about it. There are a ton of things in games that instantly call attention to themselves, and there are few that do that so loudly.

So joke away! That is part of why we’re here, is it not? I unabashedly love this trope, and partially because it is something that can really only exist in games, and partially it’s because it leads to a unique sense of mastery and storytelling through gameplay, but also because it’s just goofy and silly. Extremely so. Honestly, I feel kinda embarrassed that I couldn’t think of many off the top of my head, so that’ll be your job today. Show me some examples. Talk about your favorites. Heck, even come up with a version that hasn’t even been done.

And, as always, what did you play this weekend?