Greetings fellow pistol whores.
Favorite moment - AotCR. Plugging the Elite halfway across the snow bridge who’s trying to scamper into his Banshee and then grabbing it for myself.
Least favorite moment - Halo 2: “Hey, where’d my pistol go?!”
The super gravity gun from Half-life 2 is great too. Nothing like grabbing a Combine soldier off a platform inside the Citadel and using him like a bowling ball against his own squad.
And, I’m up to 6 sliced and diced headcrab zombies at once with one saw blade launched from the normal grav gun. Good times.
For visual wonderfulness, I’ll always have a soft spot for the nuke gun from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for the N64. Big, heavy gun, could only load two shots. It took several seconds to build critical mass and fire. When it finally let loose, a glowing red ball approached the enemy, and then…a blinding white light, and a slowly spreading fireball. NOT a close-range weapon. The Chronoscepter from the same game was pretty damn fine, too.
Speaking of Turok, there was another great one from Turok 2: the cerebral bore. You get a target lock on an enemy, and fire. A homing drone flies toward the enemy, latches onto his head, and proceeds to drill into his cranium, ejecting streams of blood and brain matter as it goes. One shot was usually enough.
I like the razorjack from the first Unreal. Effective for straight-up fighting, but positively lethal if you’re sneaky: Bounce the razors off walls like you’re playing billiards to fire from safety, or use the alternate fire to put a little english on 'em.
Or just get sloppy and cavalierly fill an occupied hallway with criss-crossing discs of decapitating joy. That works, too.
I will never, ever, ever forget that part of Serious Sam just before the big boss at the end where you’re locked in that arena and the game throws hundreds of everything at you at the same time. Bowling over 30 werebulls at a time as you retreat from the herd’s charge was ridiculously over-the-top, and so damn much fun.
I will always fondly remember the crowbar from Half-Life. The scene in the middle where you lose all your weapons and then get back the crowbar? Genius. I actually said, out loud, “Hello, old friend!”
Rocket Launcher from Quake. Nice damage and useful for transportation.
The Shrink Ray from Duke Nukem 3D. Shrinking and stomping your buddies in deathmatch games was really entertaining.
The Chainsaw from DOOM. Bored? Try the “Ash goes to Hell” playstyle – enable god mode and use only the chainsaw. Giggling optional, but likely.
I actually used it regularly only in certain specific situations. When those skeletal dog things jumped at me, I’d sidestep, switch to a knife, whack them from behind and then go back to my usual gun. No ammo, monster gone in one swipe, no mess.
The only other times, really, were when I went on Rambo-style bowie rampages, just for the hell of it.
Red vs. Blue did a good bit on this, here is an excerpt from memory:
Tucker: Is the pistol still as powerful?
Sarge: We prefer to say balanced.
Tucker: Balanced? That doesn’t sound like powerful. Can I still kill in three shots.
Sarge: Yes, providing they follow three previous shots.
All time favourite - the pulse rifle from Alien vs Predator. Just sounded sooo cool and had the essential addition of an underslung grenade launcher when when things got tough.
The gun you switch to when all else fails - the chaingun from Quake 2. It’s not really practical to use as a gun all the time, but for those occasions when there’s just too many opponents about I would break out the old girl and have 13 seconds of carnage fun.
BTW, where did the BFG 9k come from? I remember 7k from Doom and 10k from Q3, but not the 9k. Is it from Doom3?
For fun weapons, any game that let me lob grenades around corners… that sound, “tink… tink… tink… pause … boom! AARRRGH!”
For realistic, the Medic unlock from BF2. Fast, accurate, reliable, and a good scope. It works better for me than either of the actual Sniper rifles as far as sniping is concerned. I still have to hit people 4-5 times to kill them, but it carries enough ammo that I can take out 3-4 people without having to reload.
The battleaxe of plague from the original Team Fortress. Medics could whack a member of the opposing team with it and unless they got healed by one of their own medics they were done for. Medics were sorely underappreciated :).
Ooh, also, the spy knife. There was nothing so grand as dressing up as an enemy sniper, hanging out in an enemy sniper nest and gradually killing everyone who was busy zooming in and scanning the battlefield. Bonus point because you could fake your death and unless the enemy team had a particulairly observant member keep on killing the snipers for a quite a while!
Of the ones not yet mentioned I really enjoyed the rail gun from Red Faction - It let you heatseek through walls and doors and actually had slugs powerful enough to take the enemies you spotted out without ever having to expose yourself. And if a couple of them lined up just right in a doorway or something the railgun would do to them what a hot knife does to butter.
both ones i was going to suggest, another great feature of the Cerebral Bore is if you approached any intelligent enemies with it, and their weapon was lower powered, they’d run from the area screaming and waving their hands, the sight of the Bore was enough to scare them…
in Star Trek Voyager; Elite Force, the Quantum Torpedo cannon (a personal Photon Torpedo launcher), nothing like vaporizing a group of Borg drones with a well placed Quantum round
STV; EFII, i believe there was a gravity based gun that had the alternate-fire effect of creating a miniature Quantum Singularity (black hole), if you fired it and you were within the area of effect, you could get pulled in as well as your target, typical strategy was fire and flee, come back once the singularity had collapsed, no more baddies!
For an oddball choice, how about the Anthrax-Infected Cow Head from Postal 2?
It actually puffs out a visible cloud of spores/poison gas (leaving trails of it when you throw it, or if you kick it), and if an enemy contacts it, they’ll run off screaming in terror—only to stop after a few yards, double over in pain, start vomiting blood, then crumple and die.
A FPS with poison gas “grenades” and ragdoll physics…it’s a beautiful thing.
The final boss in Serious Sam has my vote as Most Intimidating Enemy Ever. I mean, the graphics in SS were so very good at conveying space, and when that thing appeared over the city and casually brushed the spires and minarets aside, it was terrifying. I remember thinking, “OK, time for a cutscene where a fleet of spaceships comes and fights this thing or something. No WAY am I supposed to fight this monster.”
Well, I was thinking something along those lines, though I remember my exact thought was “HOLY F*ING ST! I am so screwed.” And that was before he pulled out his guns…all four of them.
I always sort of liked the Hornet Hand from Half Life. A living gun that fires heat-seeking insects, and regenerates its ammunition. Single-handedly (ha HA!) got me through those damn last few alien-world levels, after I wasted all my regular ammo killing the giant headcrab.
