Have you ever spent hours grinding for a weapon that you keep getting merk’d by? Have you ever said weapons are completely useless in your hands? The disappointment and shame are real. We’ve all been there. Evidently some of us more than others, hence the list below. Everybody likes a good list and everybody likes laughing at the misery of others, so let’s combine the two! Here’s a bunch of nerf guns that transform me into red mist in no particular order.
Anything Pointy in Dark Souls – I die a lot in these games… A LOT.
Needler (Halo Series) – I cannot for the life of me figure out how or when to use this ridiculous looking thing in single player (multiplayer duels, this thing rocks). It shoots purple needles that track enemies (to a degree) and eventually explode. It is supposed to be the Covenant version of a submachine gun, but if you spray and pray like a typical submachine gun, you die right away. Dual wielding them helps in Halo 2 and Halo 3, but they still are not meant for crowd control. So they must be meant for elites and brutes? Yes, if it is just one, but that is very rarely the case. While trying to land enough shots to kill one high(ish) tier enemy before you inevitably reload, the others will melt you. The needles travel relatively slowly and the covenant seems to be able to get out of harm’s way easily. Not me though, not this guy. The needler in the hands of the Covenant is guaranteed to knock out your shield. If you are trying to run for cover after your shields are gone, the needles track you around corners seemingly much better than they track your foes, so you die all the same. The only way to survive this purple death dealer is to kill whoever’s holding it before they have a chance to empty a clip or run for very large cover. You’ll still get hit, but maybe you won’t die… maybe.
Model 1887 (Modern Warfare 2) – Oh COD Mod 2 you just couldn’t help yourself. You made a pirate themed meme of a shotgun ridiculously overpowered and have the range of an assault rifle. I remember seemingly getting sniped halfway across the map by coked up psychopaths dual wielding these things with unlimited sprint. By the time I unlocked them, Infinity Ward nerfed them into something a tad more reasonable, so I never got to return the favor in full. That’s kind of the story of COD Mod 2 in a nutshell. Unbalanced cocaine induced murder fest that makes no logical sense and has a constantly shifting META, but you still couldn’t put it down.
Any Bow in Skyrim (Skyrim…duh) – Everyone that plays Skyrim plays as a stealth archer because it is positively broken in the right, patient hands. I prefer to sprint into action swinging a comically oversized battle-axe and yeeting bad guys off cliffs using the force push shout power while chugging health and stamina potions like fitness junkies and Monster Zero. I get bored easily so patience and hiding are not my go to and never will be. Be a man and go down swinging.
Grenade Launcher (Ion Fury) – This is 100% user error. I’ve played too much Quake and I’m too used to its grenade launcher angles. It’s a great weapon for crowd control, but difficult to hit smaller (often deadlier) enemies, especially the cultist soldiers that carry them. I have a hard time getting the angles right for precise bank shots, but that is an issue they certainly do not share. Ion Fury enemies all seem to have laser beam accuracy (most are hit scanners afterall), and the grenade launching dudes are no different. They usually hit you without a bounce too. Standing still in Ion Fury is already suicide, but you get gibbed (explode into meat chunks) much faster when these grumpy gentlemen are around. My advice is to run like Hell, just not directly at these guys.
Shotgun (Doom 3) – This is 100% not user error. This may be the only bad weapon iD Software has ever made, but boy did they mess this one up. They created the OG super shotgun 9 years before this game came out (sounds like God slamming a car door, hits like Thor’s hammer). They had already perfected the design and they come out with this absolute abomination, piece of sh*t excuse for a boom-stick. The Doom 3 shotgun is notoriously… inconsistent. At best, you can one hit a revenant. At worst, it takes 4 shots to kill an imp at close range as he literally rips your guts out. The spread is RNG based and usually absurdly wide. The only way to consistently deal decent damage is to be less than 6 inches away from your target. In your hands, it’s a BB gun that occasionally shoots a real bullet and sometimes hits a target by accident. In the hands of the shotgun zombies, it hits dead on every single time from any range and the spread does not matter. Oh yeah, they can fire it twice as fast as you can and it takes off at least twenty points of your health per shot (armor does f*ck all in Doom 3) and they don’t have to reload. The worst part of it is the way your crosshair shakes when you get hit, meaning you can’t recover and deal enough damage back to interrupt his next shot, so you will get hit at least twice. I hate this weapon.
Auger (Resistance Fall of Man Series) – This thing shoots through walls and deals high damage with a decent fire rate. Problem is, projectiles take a while to actually go through walls, so whatever you were shooting at has probably moved out of the way. The mobile shield is useful enough, but much better in the enemies’ hands whereas my shield gets broken rather quickly. I never quite have enough ammo for this thing either.
Homerun Bat (Super Smash Bros) – I should be good with this seeing as the only two characters I can use semi-competently are Captain Falcon and Gannondorf (press and hold one button, enemy dies). I always get hit during the wind up so I can’t land the one-hitter quitter like everyone else. To add insult to injury, I have been killed by thrown homerun bats an embarrassing amount of times.
Muay Thai Clinch (Pre EA UFC) – Arguably the most devastating strike you can land in these underrated gems is a knee from the Muay Thai clinch. Land two of these and your opponent will be rocked, three and he’s out (and possibly dead). There are two consistent(ish) ways to get this clinch position, either counter grapple a hard punch to the head and transition upwards or force your opponent against the cage and try to force the issue. A friend of mine, who also writes for this blog, was an excellent counter grappler and KO’d me in this spot too many times to count. (Blind Owl Editor’s Note: It was me) When I would try to return the favor, I would miss time the counter grapple and eat leather. I never bothered to get good at the grappling transition mechanic, so cage clinching wasn’t an ideal tactic for me if I was trying to win. If I ever did achieve this God-tier position, my knees always seemed to be countered into a takedown, where I would eat more leather from my back.
Chaingun (Quake 2) – Quick disclaimer, Quake 2 is my least favorite Quake game. I played the heck out of it growing up and I like it less every time I go back to it. To avoid a full-blown review of a game from 1997, I’ll summarize one of my bigger gripes with it. Every weapon has a major drawback. In theory, it is supposed to give each weapon situational usefulness and encourage the player to use their entire arsenal. In practice, it encourages you to only use the weapons that piss you off the least. The chaingun (in your hands) has a “warmup” and “cool down”. Put simply, your gun starts firing slow before reaching its full rate of fire. When you are done firing and release the trigger, you will continue to fire (at a slower rate) until the game decides the gun has cooled down. This makes a weapon that already burns through ammo at a ridiculous rate, burn through even more ammo. Additionally, you must wait for both animations if you accidentally stop firing and try to fire again immediately. You are supposed to use this for crowd control or to take down a super heavy enemy, but it fires too slowly to start and uses too much ammo for effective crowd control and the super heavies won’t stagger until it reaches its maximum fire rate, so they can fire back for a decent period. In the hands of the Strogg, the chaingun is a hit scanning death machine that has no warm up or cool down. Thankfully, only boss enemies feature it. This weapon is much better suited for competitive multiplayer, which is what Quake 2 is remembered most fondly for.
Bouncing Betty (Call of Duty World at War) – These just don’t fit my preferred play style. I don’t much care for camping (in real life or video games) but I like running around like a madman, meaning I would run into these well-hidden bastards fairly often. Cue the Joe Swanson “My legs! Oh my legs!” (Blind Owl Editor’s Note: These were the only way I could get kills in this game. Brendan referred to me as a “camping whore” several times and frankly I find that offensive)
Fatman (Fallout Series) – I blow myself up with this thing almost as often as I actually hit my target. Even if I hit my target, I still usually explode. At least the self-death animations in Fallout are funny. (Blind Owl Editor’s Note: I saw this happen dozens of times. And yes, on almost every attempt, he did blow himself up)