Gray Fox in the original Metal Gear Solid famously claims that “only a fool trusts his life to a weapon.” He might be right, yeah, but he’s an anime-tier exosuit-wearing Cyborg Ninja who’s ‘roided to the brim with nanomachines.
We common folk might need some weapons in the predictable future when some wacky CEO tech bro inevitably puts our bodies in a video game scenario, so here are the best ones you can find.
10. BFG 9000 (Doom series, Quake 3)
Got no aim? Don’t bother training it. Instead, look for a “Bio Force Gun” 9000. Yeah, that’s what The Rock said it stands for in the Doom movie, so that’s probably the only meaning that acronym has ever had.
Pull the trigger once and every enemy that’s not a boss and whose name isn’t Marauder turns into mush. This is the quintessential late-game FPS weapon and one every player is sure to love even if only because of how useful it is.
Seeing it firing is also a thing of beauty, whether you’re playing the original Doom, Doom Eternal, or any Doom game that exists in between. I love it even in Doom 3, where overcharging it will lead to the player’s immediate demise.
The BFG even has a surprisingly simple but awesome story behind its design. Did you know that its model is just two toy guns glued together?
9. Gunblade (Final Fantasy VIII)
Everybody clowns on the Gunblade from FFVIII, but if you look at history, you’ll see military figures that actually used it to great success. One such person was one of UK Admiral Horatio Nelson’s top men who defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar, his only defeat at sea.
I imagine he didn’t decide the battle on a 1v1 against a gunless saber-wielding Napoleon, but that’s a more likely picture than imagining Nelson’s man using a Buster sword. Yeah, even though Cloud’s Buster Sword and Sephiroth’s Masamune get the spotlight when it comes to cool FF weapons, there’s no way in hell anyone ever got to kill anyone other than themselves and their team by taking either of those to an actual battle.
8. Railgun (Quake series)
Ever heard of Instagib? It’s an awesome game mode that spawned entirely out of the Railgun from Quake 2. How many weapons get to spawn their own genre?
The premise of the railgun is simple. The thing you click on gets pierced by a supersonic projectile, and, if you’re playing on Instagib mode, it gets “gibbed”, which means obliterated.
The Railgun is the exact opposite of the BFG. If you want a kill, you need to aim as precisely as you can. You’ll find no better weapon in the world of gaming if you want to see who aims the best. It’s also one of the most fun and rewarding weapons that you can get your hands on.
7. Cerebral Bore (Turok series)
Recency bias nearly made me go with the Lancer assault rifle from the Gears Of War series, but I think it just doesn’t get more unnecessarily over the top than Turok‘s weapon inspired by the Phantasm series of movies.
You can just tell that somebody needed to make a statement by creating the biggest gore-maker in the history of gaming, so they naturally went with something that makes your skull puke its brain out.
We tend to rewrite history a lot, so perhaps let’s start doing it in fun ways. How about we start making it so that kids in one or two generations max think that this is how America made the dinosaurs go extinct?
6. Dagger Of Time (Prince of Persia’s glorious ‘00s run)
This is likely the most overpowered weapon on the list as it allows its user to go back in time and hopefully prevent serious mistakes. The dagger of time lets you go back and correct mistakes such as jumping head-first into a spike pit or, perhaps even that preorder — you know which one(s).
Outside of that, the dagger of time also works just like a regular knife would, except this one also kills the undead. You’ll never want to go back to cutting steak with daggers that don’t control time.
5. Portal Gun (Portal series)
This one is a weapon in name only, but I doubt anyone who’s ever played Portal or Portal 2 would find it undeserving of a spot here.
If the Gravity Gun rocks because it gave players the chance to do something they’d all wanted to do since games began featuring objects, then the Portal Gun rocks because it gave players the chance to do something they didn’t know they wanted to do.
If you like the Portal Gun and don’t want to get older waiting for new places where you can use it, check out this awesome mod that allows you to bring it to the world of Half-Life 2.
4. Blades Of Chaos (God Of War series)
The Blades of Chaos represent the greatest victory for the cool factor in its eternal war against common sense and physics. Where does Kratos store all those chains? Does he have to tie the blades to the chains whenever he’s about to start swinging? Is there a mechanism or some magnet that makes the transition much easier? How come he never gets tangled up in them?
And yet, none of these questions matter because getting to stab your enemies from afar is just too much fun. They almost feel like an early and much less cowardly version of a military drone!
Also, credit where credit is due, the Leviathan Axe from the newer games also absolutely owns and is one of the main reasons why the series’ revival works so well — but it just isn’t silly enough.
3. Protec Grappler G3 (Just Cause series)
The Gravity Gun made games much more fun by allowing players to move objects around and even throw them as they saw fit. The Just Cause series upped the ante by allowing players to attach themselves to objects and even vehicles moving at dangerously high speeds.
The Grappler might not seem like much — it’s pretty much just a rope, really. Still, it’s one of the most fun weapons in the history of video games. It’s a true testament to the ingenuity of the devs behind this series. The Grappler is also, surprisingly, one of the most powerful. Don’t believe me? Ok, here’s a video of someone beating the final boss of Just Cause 3 in fifteen seconds just by using the Grappler to introduce it to the pavement.
2. Lightsaber (in the Jedi Knight series only)
This isn’t a video game weapon per se, but it’s in so many video games that I guess I just couldn’t ignore it. The lightsaber, when done right, is just one of the best and most fun weapons you can wield in a game. And by that, I mean the lightsaber from the Jedi Knight series, the one that allowed me to go on Dark Souls-style duels a decade before Dark Souls was a thing. The lightsaber that would down an opponent just by hitting it — you know, just like the lightsabers from the movies!
The lightsabers in the Survivor and Force Unleashed series feel less like a superweapon capable of killing anyone in one blow, and more like a shiny baton. It sucks when new games create problems for the solutions we already had.
1. Gravity Gun (Half-Life series)
Gaming was one thing before Valve revealed the first Half-Life 2 gameplay footage at E3 2003, and then it became something completely different — something better. Behind that shift is the “Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator”, aka gravity gun.
The gravity gun might be the most important weapon in the recent history of the FPS genre as it doubles as the tool that’ll solve most of the game for the player — not just by killing what stands in your way. This marvel allows players to use HL2’s physics engine to move objects in a way that can solve puzzles, but also in a very lethal and fun way. The gravity gun excels both as a weapon and as a way to put gamers’ brains at work without them ever feeling like they’re at risk of becoming nerds.
Published: Oct 23, 2023 12:00 pm