What single game had the best weapons?

The Game Room
1

Should I post this in GQ? :wink:

OK, so I’m not talking about games with one incredible weapon, I’m talking about games that had the most great weapons.

My candidate: Rise Of The Triad. Here’s the list and explanation of ROTT’s weapons, pulled straight from the Wikipedia article, but I’m only listing my favorites. The last sentence on each of these is my own:

Flamewall - Highest possible ammo is five missiles; fires a straight-flying missile that eventually hits the ground, and when it does so, produces a swift-moving wall of flame that stretches as widely as possible, from one side of a room to the other, and explodes upon impact with an obstacle and reduces enemies that are in the way into heaps of charred bones. (Which was a great graphic. They’d sit there standing as a skeleton, then as they collapsed they’d play a xylophone sound effect).

Firebomb - Probably the most powerful weapon in the game. It can have a total amount of five missiles; fires a straight-flying missile that, upon impact, produces an X-shaped, earthshaking pattern of mushroom cloud explosions. You could also use this one to propel yourself over walls by firing at the ground (and taking hit points).

Split Missile - At most, can have seven missiles; if the key to fire a weapon is clicked once, this weapon fires two heat-seeking missiles that travel in opposite directions. If the said key is briefly depressed and then released, this arm will fire a single missile that would eventually split into two heat-seeking missiles. One of the first I believe to let you control how it split using the keyboard after firing it.

The Dark Staff - Maximum possible ammo amount is seven; an enchanted staff that fires a fast-moving, powerful projectile which penetrates every enemy standing in its fireline. Great network weapon - kinda like that electricity shooting thing from Quake. Hide in the dark and they’re dead before they knew what hit them.

The Excalibat - Ammo can be up to ten; an ensorcelled baseball bat that, when the key to fire a weapon is pressed once, is swung. When the key to fire a weapon is depressed for an appropriate duration of time, the bat launches a simultaneous series of baseballs that explode on impact. Great graphic here - the Louisville Slugger logo featured prominently, then it fired glowing green baseballs.

So what say you?

[sub](Incidentally, ROTT never gets enough credit for how great it was IMO. IIRC it was the first reliable TCP/IP network mode game. It also was the first to introduce the function keys that could taunt the other player over the TCP/IP connection. “Behind you!” Also memorably great bosses. “They’ll bury you in a lunchbox!” Power-ups were great - God Mode which was a glowing hand of God that would fire a ball of light that flew around the screen killing everything in sight. Dog mode which would turn you into a dog to get under small spaces. You could bark and bite at baddies to kill them. Sometimes with a bazooka blast the bodies of the soldiers would fly apart in chunks, while the screen said “Ludicrous Gibs!”

And my favorite of all: The bad guys would occasionally get down on their knees and beg for their life. “No! Don’t shoot!” Then they would fall over dead, but they were only pretending, and if you turned your back they’d get up and steal your bazooka. Good times.)[/sub]

2

Ooooh, ROTT did have pretty good weapons. I had forgotten. You didn’t mention the obnoxious dive-and-roll enemies either- they were tough to hit the first couple times you met them, and the net-throwing guys were tough too.

I actually really like the weapons in Unreal Tournament 2004. All of them can wind up being pretty darn useful on occasion and there’s not one weapon that’s unreasonably powerful. The Teleport gun can give you some interesting options, and the Spider Mine launcher’s alternate fire is a laser that the mines home on, allowing you to drive a herd of mines into an enemy base.

3

The original Half Life had great weapons. In multi-player, just about every weapon was useful in different contexts.

4

Hellgate actually has some pretty darn cool weapons. (My current character uses what is for all intents and purposes a magical beehive filled with poisonous homing bees, and she used to use what I think was an electric eel cannon.)

5

I played the hell out of the ROTT demo (The Hunt Begins), but I could never find a copy of the full game. I just checked and there’s not even a copy on eBay.

But someday I will find it, someday.

6

Gears of War had some sweet weapons, but the starting chainsaw/rifle combo was easily the best.

Symphony of the Night had my favorite variety of weapons. Everyone remembers the super slasher sword thing called Crysagrim (or something similar), but there were all kinds of neat different weapons with a plethora of effects, like the katana that could teleport you, or the shield rod and Alucard shield combo. What was even cooler is that you could dual wield a lot of these things. On top of these hundreds of weapons were the subweapons that ranged from pretty cool to totally awesome. I always ended up with the holy water, but the bouncy laser thing and the dagger were really good, too.

7

Hmmm. As it happens, I am a former DIP (intern). You want it, you got it. Fuck Broussard - he knows who wrote Kingdom Of Kroz. Send me mail :slight_smile:

8

There was a PC game called Armed and Dangerous that had a Land Shark Gun.

I repeat: A Land Shark Gun.

Seriously, how can you top that? It’s a gun that shoots sharks! On land!

But, the rules of the OP said it can’t be one gun, so I have to give it to Gears of War. The genius that is a chainsaw bayonet is beyond words.

9

I have it for the X-Box too. It is a cracked game.

But ROTT still has the best weapons. The God Hand was awesome. It also raised your POV off the ground so you were something like 7 feet tall or more.

I’ve never played the Ratchet & Clank series, but the ads I’ve seen for it make the variety of weird and interesting weapons its selling point. Anyone played those?

10

I liked Heretic with its Morph Ovum - it turned the target into a chicken!

11

I dug UT2003:

Rocket Launcher, with it’s quick fire, or cluster-fire modes, was really fun

Bio Rifle - if used properly, you could reaaaly mess someone up with this one - leave little dribbles of caustic goo all over the floor behind you like a minefield, or you could drop a big ol’ load right on somebody’s head from a level above. What?!? Did I say something wrong?

Minigun - miniguns will always make Baby Jesus smile.

Maybe this doesn’t qualify, but on Instagib matches, the Shock Rifle was reaaally fun. And in normal matches, if you could get that tricky secondary fire down (where you fire a big orb of energy, that on its own is not too damaging until you shoot the orb itself with the primary fire mode) - kablooey.

The Translocator, while not a weapon in the traditional sense, could lead so many WTF?! kills. Shoot it across the map in the general direction of the enemy spawn points, and teleport out of nowhere to mow them down with aforementioned Minigun. Fun stuff.

But the most awesomest toy. . . er, weapon, of all is the <<big voice>> Redeemer!!!! With a straight single-shot unguided nuke, it was pretty frickin’ awesome. But in guided mode, where you fly the nuke around via PoV camera, is was the nastiest thing since Ms. Jackson said “call me Janet.”

The funnest thing was to find grab the Redeemer, find a nice hidey-hole on a map, and then fly the thing around terrorizing the players, and hoping nobody finds you, or shoots the thing down. Then you find a guy running away frantically, and chase him down until you tag him right in the ass - mushroom cloud! And custom all-Redeemer indoor arena maps were awesome.

But UT3 nerfed all the weapons except for the <<big voice>> Redeemer!!! (at least in the demo). Not so fun. The Minigun seems to take several eons to spin up - if you take your finger off the trigger, fuggedaboutit. The Redeemer is still rock-solid tho, and the tractor beam is sweet.

12

I’ll cast my vote for Blood, an obscure FPS from about ten years ago. The first gun you came across was a flare pistol, and your enemies wore long, flowing robes. That was fun. Much later in the game you ran across a voodoo doll; while not a great weapon, it’s as cool as anything I’ve seen. They also had the tesla cannon, that either fired bullet-like electric projectiles or or a larger ball of lightning that would explode on impact and do some serious to anything nearby.

Blood was the first game I know of that had dual fire modes for every weapon. The shotgun could be used either one barrel at a time, or with both barrels. There was also a powerup that let you dual-wield your guns. Running up to a group of zombies and unloading four barrels into them was a lot of fun.

The dual-fire mode also made the rocket launcher shoot out a ball of flame that would bounce around and split into two, and so on and so forth for a while. That was a great way to clear out a room.

You can blow stuff up pretty good, but the weapons are pretty standard fare. They’re still fun games, so if you’ve got some time to kill, go for it.

13

I remember Blood! That was a pretty decent game compared to the rest of the FPS hash that was released around that time.

14

How about some 2D love…

Sega & SNES had “Zombies Ate My Neighbors”.

The default weapon was a squirt gun, but you could also throw soda cans, footballs, silverware (at werewolves of course), fire extinguishers, etc.

I think it is available for the WII download…I’ll have to look this weekend, fun game :slight_smile:

15

No love for the BFG?

Also, the Lancer (the Gears of War gun) is crappy. It’s incredibly underpowered compared to the Locust assault rifle. Easily it’s the most overrated gun in that game.

16

Any game (presumably LOTR) that features Anduril is automatically the best. :smiley:

17

There will always be a warm spot in my heart for Shadow Warrior’s portable tactical nuke launcher. Ammo: one shot. Here be a weapon that you fire, and if you see the initial impact it kills you. (And throws your corpse pretty far, too, usually.) Arm (with countdown!), fire, run, duck, and pray; then peer out to admire your mushroom cloud. Almost never useful, but glorious when you could use it (if you could find it). Ahh, good times.

18

I think it’s free now.

http://home14.inet.tele.dk/Bna-Info/DL_WinROTT.htm

19

“3…2…1…all systems ready.”

“Heh heh heh!”

BOOOOMMM!!!

“Heh heh heh! Just like Hiroshima!”

I love Lo Wang’s one-liners. That was the great thing about all those 3DRealms shooters - they were funny. Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, Shadow Warrior, and Blood (though that wasn’t from 3DRealms but still made with the Build engine.) They were packed with jokes and easter eggs in every single level. Every little room in the game had some kind of funny thing sitting in it, whether it was a painting on the wall of something ridiculous, or a bowl of shark fin soup, or a barrel in the back of a kitchen that said “Horse Testicles” or something. (Those games always seemed to have at least one level where there’d be a kitchen, and there would always be some gag in it.)

All the shooters now are so fucking serious. Those old games were so much fun to play because they didn’t take themselves so damn seriously.

20

Speaking of not taking onesself seriously, has anyone played Earthbound? You know, where Ness comes from? Where a yoyo or a homemade bazooka is unreasonably powerful?