My Top 5 Videogame Weapons

It’s time for me to indulge my homicidal side and write about some of my favourite fictional weaponry. With modern military shooters setting a trend for obsessive recreations of real world firearms, it’s good to be reminded that weapons can be outlandish, satisfying and fun to use without being constrained by the parameters of realism.

1: Farsight (Perfect Dark)

Or the “science-fiction troll gun” as I like to call it. Rare’s classic FPS for the Nintendo 64 featured all sorts of crazy gadgets, including pinball grenades and a sentry gun that you could attach to any surface, but the Farsight trumps all of them. It’s a gun that can shoot through walls. Through the use of an X-ray mode, you can track down any hapless chump in the vicinity regardless of how much concrete stands between you and him. It can also kill targets in one shot.

This stupendously overpowered beauty of a gun can certainly liven up a four-player split-screen multiplayer match. Once one person gets their hands on the thing, every other player subsequently has to keep one nervous eye on that person’s screen if they want to avoid being evaporated by someone who isn’t even in the same room as them.

2: Cerebral Bore (Turok 2: Seeds of Evil)

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was another N64 shooter with a terrific arsenal of weapons. You start off with lowly pistols and bows but you eventually work your way up to a torpedo launcher and a goddamn atomic bomb.

The Cerebral Bore, however, is tailor-made for people who like things a little more personal. I’m talking about a weapon that will really get inside the enemy’s head...literally.

The weapon fires a small homing device that latches onto the victim’s head and burrows into their skull, spewing out blood and brain juice in a huge fountain with appropriate drilling and squelching noises. Then, on the off chance that the victim is still alive the device explodes, leaving a headless dino corpse that flops to the floor.

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil had remarkably advanced A.I. for its time, and the dinosaurs used quite a bit of grey matter when fighting the player. That is, until the Cerebral Bore started forcibly evicting it from their face. 

3: Magnet Gun (Red Faction: Armageddon)

A glorious gem of a feature in an otherwise mediocre third-person shooter, the Magnet Gun is violent slapstick comedy in gun form. You fire a magnetic bolt onto anything you want- enemies, scenery, explosive barrels- then fire a second magnet onto anything else and watch the first thing go flying towards the second thing with great velocity. You can tag an approaching alien enemy and send it soaring towards the ceiling, then watch it bang his head and let the ensuing fall finish it off. Or, you can tag a large piece of rubble and send it flying into an alien swarm. Best of all, you can tag an alien and send it hurtling into another alien, which is sure to make for an interesting conversation when the news of an alien soldier’s death is broken to its alien family back home.

“We’re sorry to inform you, Mrs. Alien, but your husband died in the line of duty”

“Oh my...was it...was it quick?”

“Sort of. He was killed by the force of another soldier being magnetically drawn towards him at 100 miles an hour”

It’s a shame that the linear, confined nature of Red Faction: Armageddon’s environments didn’t allow the player to experiment with the weapon’s full destructive potential. Still, we can hope that the next Red Faction game will see the return of the Magnet Gun in an open world environment.

4: Poker Chips/ Garden Furniture/ Pretty much anything that isn’t nailed down to the floor (Dead Rising 2)

You can’t take a zombie apocalypse seriously when your weapon of choice is one of those giant novelty squeaky hammers. Dead Rising 2 lets you pick up almost any wieldable item within its open-world shopping mall environment and allows you to use it as a means of self-defence. Lawn mowers and spiky baseball bats are obvious choices, but you would be surprised how much damage you can do with a cash register or a pot plant.

Around the time of its release, the game sold itself on the ability to attach chainsaws to a motorbike and wreck bloody carnage through throngs of zombies, which is cool. Yet my favourite Dead Rising 2 moment was watching a grown man wearing a one piece swimsuit and a woman’s hat, riding a child’s tricycle through a crowd of the undead, batting at them ineffectually with an oversized foam hand.

5: Frying Pan (Smash Bros. Melee)

It’s difficult to describe why I love Princess Peach’s frying pan attack so much. I think it has something to do with the sound it makes on impact. It just sounds so satisfyingly painful. I don’t particularly like the Smash Bros. games, but I do revisit Melee occasionally so I can break Pikachu’s face with Peach’s cold iron utensil of justice.

I'm sure I've left out some great gaming boomsticks, so do suggest your own favourite videogame weapons in the comments.