Few items in this ever-popular online shooter have the power of the Flashbang. It can be used as a match-winning single move, blinding a whole team as your own team moves into position to mow them down. If it's botched, it can also blind your own team, causing you to totally screw up any hopes of winning. It's just as powerful in the Source Engine-powered Counter-Strike Source as well, where extra special effects give you a sound-killing whine and even leave an after-image of the last thing you saw before the flashbang went off. No matter how you look at it, it's just as important to use correctly as any gun in the game and is a corner stone of any good strategy for serious teams.
43. Stake Gun - Painkiller
Painkiller was kind of a strange game that gave you five weapons that each had a secondary fire function that didn't really make any sense. The Stake Gun was probably the most fun, and while it resembled acrossbow more than any other real-life gun, no crossbow I've ever seen had a grenade launcher attached to it. That's right - in Painkiller, you could fire out stakes, pinning dead enemies to walls, floors, and even ceilings, and toss out a grenade here and there with the alt-fire key. It was Painkiller's sharp visuals, hordes of enemies, and great rag doll physics system that made the Stake Gun incredibly fun, and the ridiculous grenade-launching attachment reminded you that clearly anything is possible in a video game.
37. Jeep - Battlefield 1942
Sure, you can drop bombs, fire an AK, pull out a machine gun, use an MP40 or toss grenades. You can fire tanks, shoot from choppers, stab with a knife, or cackle with glee as you plant C4. But in the Battlefieldseries, few kills were as entertaining as when you simply ran over someone in a Jeep while honking your horn like mad. The man who put the horn on the fire button in the Battlefield games was a genius. The results - which can be had in the immensely popularDesert Combat mod for BF1942 - would easily get you killed since your high-pitched laughing impaired your ability to see or breathe for a good 15 seconds. But dammit, even if you have to die 15 times for one good horn-honkin' Jeep kill, it's still easily worth it.
31. Galactic Colossus - Supreme Commander
It's kind of strange to call a massive, walking robot a "weapon", but in the massive scope of the strategy game Supreme Commander it's perfectly reasonable to do just that. This unit, only able to be created in the late stages of a match, has immense firepower and can do a massive amount of damage before going down. It's slow though, so unless you've got a way to protect your Colossus on the way to your enemy's base, you'll likely have problems keeping bombers and gunships off of him. But if you can get him in there, he's a force to be reckoned with. Colossus uses a massive beam out of his chest to kill almost anything instantly, all the while using both arms to literally vacuum up enemy units and destroy them when they get sucked in. And for those island map games where your enemy has the whole thing covered in shields, well, there's nothing like having half a dozen Colossi suddenly appear on the shore to strike fear into his little heart.
27. Hand Chainsaws - Dead Rising
It wasn't so much that the mini chainsaws were any better than a regular chainsaw - bigger is usually better, and the regular chainsaw is immensely powerful - it's the fact that you could boost the longevity of these little babies so far that you could become invincible. Even acquiring these things from the boss that drops them was incredible (and a little bit scary), but it was when you built up the book collection that let you hold onto these things 27x longer before they broke that they became unstoppable. There are plenty of weapons in Dead Rising that certainly had their uses, but when the zombie horde closes in on all sides, spinning around and tearing everything apart with nigh-unbreakable chainsaws was definitely the way to go.
25. ASMD Shock Rifle - Unreal Tournament
At first glance, the Shock Rifle has never been the most powerful Unreal Tournament weapon, but it was absolutely deadly in the hands of an experienced, accurate player. The regular fire was an instant Railgun-style shot that was always perfectly accurate, but a little weak. The secondary fire was a projectile that flew pretty quickly and also did moderate damage. It was when you shot that flying blob with the primary fire though, that you'd create a "Shock combo" - a big explosion that could easily take out anyone close enough to the blast. There's no other weapon on the list like this, and high-level UT players would make great use out of it, especially since the Shock Rifle was an easily accessible weapon on just about every multiplayer map. While neither of this gun's shots alone were much to scream about, players who could keep it cool and fire accurately while moving found a great friend in the Shock Rifle.
20. Cerebral Bore - Turok 2
The Turok games were always a little bit of a joke, but they always had the most awesome weaponry. Back when we were still firing our goofy rockets and railguns, Turok was blowing up whole sections of levels with massive explosions that filled the screen and more. But it was the second game's Cerebral Bore that really got our attention. Just home it in on an enemy's head and fire, and the tiny projectile would burrow into an enemy's skull and start drilling. Not more than a few seconds later, the head explodes in a shower of blood. Few gamers had seen this level of gore and violence on the Nintendo 64, and not many games have topped it since.
18. Bombs - Metroid Series
Maybe we just miss the days where the bombs inMetroid could be used as a tool for climbing heights of multiple stories or finding and grabbing the most awkwardly-placed and inaccessible powerups. Not even considering how useful the teams at Nintendo, and now Retro Studios, have made the Morph Ball and the bombs you could toss, this was always just a fun way to kill things. Even branching off into Super Smash Bros. Melee, bombs were a great way for Samus to leave a little "present" for an overly zealous enemy.
17. Pipe Bomb - Left 4 Dead
Blowing limbs off of zombies is all well and good, but watching them chase a high-pitched, blinking red pipe bomb and then marveling at the subsequent blood cloud afterwards is pure joy. Amid all the typical zombie zappers in Left 4 Dead, the pipe bomb stands out like the blood-red nose of Rudolph on a snowy night.
15. Shrink Ray - Duke Nukem 3D
You'd think that a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids-type gun wouldn't ever make it into this countdown, but it's the sheer badass-ity of Duke Nukem that makes this weapon what it is. If you can tag your enemy with this thing, it sends them to miniature size, causing them to run around hilariously little. Get close, and Duke will look down and squash him with his boot. There's nothing on this countdown quite like the Shrink Ray, and while we've seen weapons somewhat like this more than a couple of times, Duke most certainly does it the best.
14. AWP - Counter-Strike
The most loved and simultaneously hated gun in one of the most popular online games of all time simply can't be ignored. The AWP is the most powerful sniper weapon in Counter-Strike and CS: Source, able to kill anyone with pretty much any hit anywhere on the body. It was immensely powerful back when people used to be able to switch between it and the Desert Eagle pistol for maximum speed and killing efficiency, but even today, after being toned down more than once, it's still the object of so much hate. Maybe it's just that CS players seem to get so much angrier at a death than most gamers, but you can find probably dozens of game servers that ban the AWP completely. Other weapons probably have more use from an overall perspective, but nothing incites rage like this one does.
13. Gravity Gun - Half-Life 2
We'd seen physics in games before. It seemed like one of those goofy eye-candy features, like HDR lighting, colored lighting, or bloom lighting (seeing a trend here?). Rag doll physics were nice, but they only worked after you'd already blown away your foes. When Half-Life 2introduced the gravity gun, all of a sudden things changed. Now you're picking up toilets to shield yourself from bullets. Saw blades became deadly weapons. Exploding Barrels, a stereotypical FPS mainstay, were stationary and boring in past games - but when held up by the physics-enabled Gravity Gun, they offered up a great new way to destroy your enemies. And when that thing you were wishing for the whole game happens at the end, the Gravity Gun becomes the most fun thing you can remember (and you can't remember much at the time because you're literally giggling with glee). All hail the Gravity Gun.
11. Chainsaw - Gears of War
Sure, I could have mentioned DOOM's chainsaw in the place of the one seen in Gears of War, but let's face it folks: video game technology has allowed us to have much better chainsaws over the last decade and a half. With Gears, we can place saws right on the underside of rifles and use them to graphically slice our enemies in half at the shoulder. I can't deny that without the DOOMchainsaw, the whole long and sordid history of video game chainsaws (your sarcasm detector should be going off about now) would have been drastically altered. Still, it's the massively gratifying effect of quite literally taking an enemy apart - not at his seams but at even more painful places - that puts this weapon high in the countdown.
9. Energy Sword - Halo 2
Of the many melee weapons on our countdown, few were as welcome an addition in a sequel as the Energy Sword. It was so cool to see the Covenant Elites using it in the first Halo, and while the Master Chief's own gun-butt smash maneuvers were very potent, it wasn't the same. The sequel threw this in along with unpopular whole sections of the game where you not only have an Energy Sword but also play as the Covenant themselves. But you didn't have to deal with that too much online. Just grab the sword and take fools out with an awesome lunge that homed right in on your enemy for the last few feet, avoiding that awkward situation in many games where the victim moves at the last split-second. Then you're left staring a gun barrel in the face with a melee weapon pointed in the wrong direction. Thank you for saving us from that for at least one game, Energy Sword.
7. Lightsaber - Jedi Knight
The Lightsaber that LucasArts implemented in the firstJedi Knight really changed the way the game was played. After going through the original Dark Forces as well as the first section of this sequel as a rather conventional FPS, having lead character Kyle Katarn learn the ways of the Force and whip out a Lightsaber was extremely satisfying. All of a sudden, incoming blaster fire from the game's many gun-toting baddies was not a problem. Kyle would just automatically reflect the shots right back to their rightful owners - as long as you weren't in the middle of a big swing, that is. The mechanics were refined greatly in the sequels by Raven Software, but the first time you pick it up - the first time you really got to handle a Lightsaber - in what was then a "modern" PC action game, it was a treat.
4. Red Turtle Shell - Mario Kart
Auto-aim is always a sore spot for action gamers, but no one I know of has ever really mounted an overwhelmingly good argument against our friend the Red Turtle Shell. Matches are won and lost with a split second and one good attack in the Mario Kart games, and the red shell pretty much guarantees a solid hit. And when you get the power-up with three of them to throw, it's like Christmas morning when you were eight years old. Sure, the Starman was a lot of fun to use, but it wasn't the same as actually firing out a projectile and smashing your enemy with it. It was the perfect way to turn second place into first, but when the guy who just dropped back into second also has a red shell saved up, it's easy for him to turn the tide back around again.
2. BFG 9000 - Doom
While the "Big Effin' Gun 9000" was usually seen as a cheesy weapon in the early days of multiplayer PC gaming (back when no one knew what this "internet" was and LANs and direct modem-to-modem play were hot stuff), it's hard to deny its power. In the single player portion of DOOM, this thing fired out a huge green blob which would obliterate anything in its path and kill everything you could see at the time. And I'm even simplifying that; back when weapons in video games always fired in straight lines and stuff was simple, BFG damage required calculation of a few paragraphs and even some diagrams. This led to interesting strategies like firing it into a wall and then peeking out around a corner during the blast, causing instant death to everything exposed. It was marvelous and complex, and we should not hesitate to put this weapon down in history as one of the best.
Why? Simple, it has the ultimate muzzle velocity,
no need to adjust for ballistics or windage,
the round doesn't run out of energy no matter how far the range and the muzzle energy smashes through any Class 3 or 4 body armor like the proverbial white hot sledgehammer
through an enemies face.
Use this one well and you'll stack up the body count into mountains.