Level 5 - Boss Panic
The final level takes a slightly different form to the previous four. It consists of five boss battles. Before each boss, there's a barrage of easy-to-kill creatures which yield lots of power-ups so that you have a fighting chance. It's all set to a wonderfully dark, sinister soundtrack.Boss 1 - The Long-horned Cowfish
This boss, if I've identified it correctly, is actually a real species of fish, Lactoria cornuta. See for yourself in these photographs at http://www.divegallery.com/cowfish.htm.
There's a twist to this boss. Cowfishes are a kind of puffer fish, and the more you shoot it, the bigger it gets. Notice that it's slightly larger than before. The bigger it gets, the more powerful its weapon becomes.
Bigger...
...and bigger...
... but it can't grow forever. After a critical point, it can't absorb any more energy, and... er... explodes into three smaller fishes.
Then, it's just a matter of bombing them until they disintegrate.
Boss 2 - The Bat
A big bat. Don't know the species.
It fires circular bursts of eight glowing balls.
And, basically, it just flies around on a set flightpath. Not terribly interesting to screenshot, so here's a picture of me firing the stinger missile at it.
Boss 3 - The 'Oyster Gun'
A big, impenetrable oyster approaches.
It opens up to reveal a large gun.
It fires laser bolts at you...
...and can also fire expanding bursts of glowing balls. Basically, shoot it when it's open, don't get shot yourself.
Boss 4 - The 'Heart'
This is perhaps the most disturbing enemy in the entire game, on a par with the dead rat from the sewer level. It always reminds me of a bagpipe. Anyway, it's a mix between a live, beating heart, two grotesquely deformed human heads, and some kind of waving claw thing. It's hideous.
And what it has to do with spiders I don't know, but these little things emerge from the top and fall down like rain. The claw thing fires an upward spread of glowing balls at intervals.
And at intervals it spits out a couple of spider webs, which also fall down.
Final Boss - The Hornet
The last of them all. The music stops, replaced by the sonorous wingbeats of the hornet, from wings so powerful that your bee is constantly pushed backwards. The hornet has no weapon except for the swarm of insects that constantly emerge from its abdomen. All you have to do is avoid these whilst blasting the hornet in the eye, but you also have to fight against the force of the hornet's wingbeats.
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