- Landmines (Dark Forces I & II)
The fundamental flaw of this otherwise great sounding weapon is that it explodes as soon as you put it down, making it less of a cunning tactical device and more a m
ethod of instant suicide. You may at this point wonder why a weapon such as this found its way into the brilliant Dark Forces II?
Presumably because they needed a shitty explosive weapon to headline alongside the really good railgun, and therefore ‘bring balance’ to the weapon list. Well, that’s my guess anyway.
- GesBio Rifle (Unreal/Unreal Tournament)
You can forgive Unreal the Ripsaw and its chain-gun, since they underwent excellent modification for UT. However, a weapon standing at a consistent level of crapness throughout is the GesBio rifle, a launcher that fires globs of toxic waste at your foe. It damages you regardless of how you use it. If you use it while moving? Damage. If you hit someone at close-medium range? Damage. Long range? Well, if you can hit something from long range with what is essentially a glorified jelly launcher then I’d give you kudos.
- Knife (Soldier of Fortune I & II)
A weapon that you will never use, basically. It does the job it is supposed to, but there is simply never any call to use the damned thing. The pistol does all the work you need to in the opening levels, and after that you just stick with the other various weapons o’ destruction. The knife is always supplied, but rarely used. Rather like the knife in Wolfenstein 3D, but with marginally better physics.
- Absolutely everything (Ken's Labyrinth)
An obscure entry, I will agree, but I don't recall ever playing an FPS with such a painfully useless arsenal. Your main weapon was a tomato thing (pictured above) that had a range of...ooohh...six feet at least. Other than being horrifyingly bad, this game also presented its players with a huge selection of crappy weapons. Fortunately I was not able to play the game much because I hated it so much, but its weapons were dull, lifeless and should never be replicated.
- M.U.L.E Launcher (Gunman Chronicles)
‘It has’ the developers gushed when they were marketing their new Half Life engine based game, and came to talk about the MULE ‘Over 30 different configurations! It can fire proximity, heat-seeker or dumb-fire, you can choose its range, impact and number of rockets release, and many more!’ It sounded great at E3. Which makes it something of a surprise that this ‘wonder launcher’ is utterly hopeless in combat. Realistically, can you be bothered to take the time to test more than two different combinations? Or go through the six or seven status screens to set up your perfect config when you’re in the heat of battle? No, you can’t. The MULE is therefore an utterly pointless weapon in that it completely fails to make its use easy and essential. It doesn’t help that the thing looks like a hammerhead shark that has been repeatedly banged against the wall.
- Riot Gun (System Shock)
This cheerfully useless weapon is often celebrated in System Shock communities because of the extremely low level of damage it inflicts, juxtaposed with its rather confounding location - near the end of the game. The concept of accumulating a huge and powerful arsenal and defeating increasingly tough bad guys before you find the videogame equivalent of an inflatable hammer waiting for you on the floor is a staggeringly funny one to behold.
- Lightning Gun (Unreal Tournament 2K3+4)
I am unable to explain the decision of Epic Games to replace the fantastic sniper rifle with the lightning gun in Unreal Tournament 2003, but suffice to say they reintegrated the sniper rifle in the 2004 edition when they realised just how horrifyingly bad the lightning gun is as a sniping weapon. It has a zoom, yes – but that doesn’t matter. No, because its technology is so far ahead of its time, it doesn’t have to worry about those trifling little things such as ‘accuracy’. The reason the sniper rifle was good was because it required skill to hit, and when it did hit, it was deadly accurate. The lightning gun sort of fires vaguely in the direction of who it is you aimed at. It’s blindingly unsatisfying to use and its fire rate is extremely erratic, as if the gun keeps running out of batteries or something. I’ve had more fun games when all you have are GesBio rifles. Come to think of it, I think there are more fun tracheotomy operations than there are Lightning Gun games. A truly horrendous weapon.
- Nuclear Fusion Cannon (Turok: Dinosaur Hunter)
‘But this weapon is amazing!’ I hear you cry ‘It’s so destructive!’ Indeed it is destructive - and then bloody some. The concept of a weapon that fires a nuclear blast is a brilliant, but immediately impractical one. The weapon takes maybe ten seconds of charge time before it fires a glowing red projectile into your chosen target. The resulting explosion decimates everything in its path, and that does include the person who fired it. The problem with such a weapon is that firing in an enclosed or reduced space means an instant fiery death for the user of the weapon. Therefore this means in order to get one satisfying shot out of the gun, you have to have an open area of map roughly the same size as Woking. I think my point is made.
- Pepper Spray (Deus Ex)
In a game where there are high-tech mercenaries with infra-red, heat-detecting, night-vision visors, gas masks and huge automated gun platforms walk around the streets looking for trouble, you also have large quantities of pepper spray available to you. Yes, the same stuff teenage girls are given to spray in the eyes of molesters. Maybe it will have use with a few civilians, but the result of a soldier with his crowd-dispersing assault rifle aiming to shoot at your fragile skull while you charge him with your can of pepper spray is a somewhat predictable one.
- Cow Launcher (South Park: The Game)
This heinous weapon is just appalling on every level. It breaks every rule of shooter weaponry and not in a good way; it is hideously powerful and extremely easy to hit your target, it is based on a joke that is funny for about thirty seconds, but which ends up being repeated four hundred billion times for the rest of the match and you can pretty much use it on anyone anywhere on the map with no effort. It completely obliterates the need for any of the other weapons in deathmatch. The only reason it cannot always be used in single-player is that the endlessly re-spawning chickens cannot be attacked that frequently with it. The premise of the weapon is that it launches a cow, which lands on you with your head up its arse. It reduces your health quickly, and then you die. It sounds amusing for a while, but I’m fairly certain that cannibalism is also amusing for a while. Frenetic death-match games with such a weapon suck beyond every definition of the word. A weapon that frankly should never have been invented. Like the game, in that regard.
