Gaming’s Greatest Guns

I’ve got to agree with most of the choices in this article, “Gaming’s Greatest Guns”. I’ve played most of those games and the choices are dead-on, especially DOOM II‘s double-barreled shotgun, Duke Nukem 3D‘s shrink-ray, Halo‘s pistol and Perfect Dark‘s laptop gun. (Though, from what I understand, the omission of Half-Life 2‘s Gravity Gun is fairly egregious.)

Some of the commenters on the article suggest the Lancer from Gears of Wars should be included as well. Personally I disagree—there’s nothing particularly innovative or interesting about the weapon, except that it’s a machine gun with a chainsaw on it. We’ve had chainsaws and we’ve had machine guns in FPS games before. The Torque Bow is a bit more interesting, but I don’t really see how it’s significantly different from a missile launcher (except that it takes longer to fire, can’t heat-seek, and has a delay before it explodes).

Ultimately, I don’t think any of Gears of Wars‘s weapons were particularly ground-breaking in any way (or even overpowered), so I wouldn’t have included them on the list.

On a related note, it looks like the much-loved original Halo pistol is back for Halo 3—in looks, at least (the video is a leak and will probably be taken down by the time you click).

—02/13/07