Weapons. Gaming's full of them, from the relatively discreet to the utterly cataclysmic. So in honour of gaming's more destructive tendencies, we're counting through the best weapons in gaming's arsenal.
Oh, the hidden blade. The weapon made by nerds in their basements in what surely constitutes a violation of UK knife control laws. (Actually, I just Googled it, and it does; bladed weapons that operate upon the push of a button or through inertia are illegal here.) That doesn’t stop it from being really quite cool. Just walk up to your target, flick your wrist, and boom, they’re dead. It only comes in fifth, though, because I find it hard to imagine that using it wouldn’t get blood all over your sleeve.
You could take someone eye out with that (Image: Flickr).
This weapon was the first to come to mind when the phrase “top five weapons” was uttered. “Bio Force Gun”, “Blast Field Generator”, or simply “Big Fucking Gun”, this weapon is capable of making an entire room resemble the contents of a jar of strawberry jam. What more do you want me to say? It’s Doom, the game that popularised gruesomeness and fun side-by-side in a way that doesn’t involve torturing naked women *cough* Duke Nukem Forever *cough*. The BFG9000 is big, green, and could likely kill you, so I like to think of it as weaponised Shrek.
The Michael Bay approach to demon removal (Image: Bethesda Softworks UK).
Politically insensitive though it may be, the Fat Man is a weapon that is almost as iconic to Fallout as the Vault Boy or blatant hatred for China. Loses points for having a mushroom cloud that couldn’t actually exist with a blast of that (relatively small) magnitude, but gains points for killing most things in a single shot. Loses more points for including me in that list of things it kills in one shot. Recovers all those points for being awesome. Immediately loses them all again for having really rare ammunition. Third place!
Nothing says "get off my property" quite like a bitesize nuclear warhead (Image: Bethesda Softworks).
Good lord, the number of times my squad’s bacon has been saved by a soldier wielding this piece of kit, especially before the Enemy Within expansion was released. Prior to the nerf of the Sniper, one guy holding one of these could one-shot a really tanky alien from across the map while being boosted by a jetpack. For a while, I considered giving this slot to the Blaster Launcher (a homing rocket from XCOM), I decided not to. Partly because there were already two explosives on the list, but mostly because the Plasma Sniper Rifle is just so. Damn. Good.
It's over aliens. This lad has the high ground now (Image: 2K Games).
I was going to make my chosen Saints Row weapon the Dubstep gun and put it in third base – I mean place – butt fuck it. This painfully large weapon (in both senses of the word “weapon”) really shows that pain can be pleasure, in a schadenfreudian way. My only problem with this weapon of ass destruction is that, as a biologist, I cannot condone its usage as something to beat people up/off with, as it is simply too large. Additionally, it features in my list of Bottom 5 Weapons as well.
Saints Row 4, an exercise in irresponsible governance (also there was no way we'd be allowed to show the Penetrator itself) (Image: Flickr.com).