More Interesting Guns in Gaming

As I have written in my article Interesting Guns in Gaming there have been several guns in fiction that had unique, but destructive properties. Some of these guns had hilarious gimmicks, interesting aesthetics the suited the person holding the gun, or were famed for being one of the most destructive guns ever conceived in gaming history. But these were just three examples of interesting guns in gaming. In recent times there have been other games that have developed unique weapons for the player to use. In Saints Row: The Third, an action-adventure game developed by Volition and published by THQ, some of their downloadable content included some bizarre weaponry, such as the Shark-O-Matic. The sequel to Saints Row: The Third, Saints Row IV had its unique gun, the Dubstep Gun, a weapon that killed the player's enemies with energy blasts, supplied itself with its own ammo so the player did not have to spend too much money on it, and provided the player with awesome music to listen to while causing amazing amounts of carnage. Even family friendly gaming systems like the Nintendo 64 had their own interesting gun. In Turok 2: Seeds of Evil the player had access to the Cerebral Bore, a gun so brutal and visceral, various players of the game still consider this gun one of the most gruesome guns in gaming, and this was for a game that was released in 1998! Guns can be brutal, powerful, and awesome, but depending on how the game wants to be played, it can also be weird.

In the game Saints Row: The Third you play as a mob boss who was trying to get back at the people who double-crossed you. By killing them. Extravagantly. While some of the weapons provided by this game were both destructive, weird, and bizarre, downloadable content enabled the player to acquire even more destructive, weird, and bizarre weapons. One of those weapons was the Shark-O-Matic, a shotgun. With a description that read, "Avast! There be nothin' like shootin' lubbers with fish guts to lure the elusive Steelport Sewer Shark. Yarrr!" the player was clearly informed that this gun could summon a shark to eat whoever the player targeted. By shooting a target with fish guts, the target reacted rather incompetently in that the target either ran away or tried to wipe the guts off. Soon a random shark came up from the ground and proceeded to devour the target Or at least greatly damage. This weapon was destructive in that the shark that it summoned was a Great White Shark that was stereotypically portrayed as a savage man-eater who ate people. This was a weird weapon in that the weapon was basically an elongated meat grinder for fish and the only reason it could kill anyone was because it used its fish ammo as bait for the shark. And this weapon was bizarre because other than identifying the shark as a creature that lived in the area Saints Row: The Third took place in, there was no explanation offered about how a shark managed to survive in an urban environment.

Saints Row IV was one of the most surreal entries in the Saints Row series. The boss was the president of the United States, Keith David was the Vice President, having to deal with an alien invasion of Earth, deal with the entire Earth being destroyed, and get revenge on the aliens by fighting on a simulated Earth aboard an spaceship. For a strange setting Saints Row IV had to create strange weapons. One of these weapons was the Dubstep Gun. A special type of gun, the Dubstep Gun was modeled after the sound systems used by disc jockeys to make the beats typically heard in dubstep music. As described, "It's a party in a gun! Make the world dance to your beat and fear the power of your wubs!". It fired long-range pulses of energy to the beat of an electric song, it automatically recharged itself when it used-up its energy reserves, and when the weapon was active, pedestrians who were not getting shot at danced to the music that played. Ob top of that, the Dubstep Gun was customizable. The player had the choice to alter the coloration of the Dubstep Gun, with the result being different different song being played with their own individual properties. This gun was interesting in that the player could be entertained by the damage this weapon could do once it was upgraded, while enjoying some awesome music at the same time.

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil involved aliens, dinosaurs that had rocket launchers attached to their bodies, and science-fiction weaponry that should not have been used as well as they did when acquired by the main protagonist. See, Turok, the game's main protagonist and the character player controlled in this game, was a native American from the 1800's. He should not have had as much proficiency with much of the weapons in this game. Particularly the Cerebral Bore. Appearing as a circular gun, the Cerebral Bore fired bores, golden spheres with several, small hook-like protrusions, a drill on the front, and an explosive charge, from a rotating ammo chamber set in the front of the Cerebral Bore. When the bore reached an enemy, the drill allowed the bore to embed itself into an enemy through their brains, allowed the viewer to see a shower of blood and guts spray out of the other end of the bore, and finally decapitate whatever victim fell prey to this weapon by exploding. The enemy stumbled about for a few seconds before falling to the ground, dead. Like the game Conker's Bad Fur Day, which I covered in my other article Conker's Bad Fur Day: a Game of Vulgarity, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was a very violent game that did not try to censor its violence when it came to genuinely violent content. The Cerbral Bore was a weapon that did violent things to its enemies, the gore reflected the brutality that a weapon that shot bullets that buried itself into an enemy's brain before exploding, and its over-the-top violent helped it earn the title of one of the most gruesome weapons in gaming history by gamers.

Guns in gaming were meant to dispatch people over long distances. In gaming however, how a gun is made to kill people can be portrayed as unrealistically as possible. If a game wanted to be as over-the-top as possible or make the player adventure throughout an alien world, the weaponry had to match the outlandishness of the game as well. In Saints Row: The Third the player had access to a gun that could summon a shark when fish guts were shot at enemies. There was no explanation as to why a gun that could summon a shark existed in Saints Row: the Third, it was just accepted because the weapon was awesome and it matched the audacity that this game took with its stories. The Dubstep Gun was also well-suited for Saints Row IV because the game was mostly a science-fiction story, so surreal weapons were expected by the player. And in Turok 2: Seeds of Evil the Cerebral Bore was just a very violent gun that gamers enjoyed using because it introduced graphical violence that was revolutionary for its time.