If Halo 3 were going to have boss battles, who would your opponents be?

That’s an idea that occurred to me after participating in an HBO forum thread that started out talking about a rather idiotic article wondering if Halo 3 would suck, and ended up morphing into a discussion of boss battles.

I’m not really sure how boss battles got into Halo 2 in the first place. Perhaps somebody asked for them. Perhaps it was felt that Halo 2 needed “bigger” encounters than the first game; conflicts with individual characters instead of anonymous Covenant foot soldiers.

Whatever the reason, some of them worked fairly well, and others garnered a lot of negative feedback, particularly the fights against the Prophet of Regret and Tartarus. Most of the criticism stemmed from the arbitrary and repetetive natures of those encounters; how the rules varied significantly from how the rest of the game was played, and how they evoked stereotypical gameplay situations perhaps better suited for other genres.

With Halo 3, there are still a number of recognizable characters in the story who are potentially sources of conflict for our main characters, the Master Chief and, presuming he returns, the Arbiter. Might any of these be the subject of a boss battle? If so, how might Bungie alter the way those battles work compared to Halo 2?

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Russian news site Novosti says that the Russian government is planning on launching an unmanned mission to the Mars moon of Phobos in 2009. The vehicle is expected to arrive on the moon in 2010, and depart for Earth in 2011 carrying soil samples.

The story doesn’t say whether or not the Russians expect to find any leather goddesses on the small moon, but you can bet this is a prelude to landing on Mars’ other moon and beginning secret work to turn it into a colony ship.