PC pistols don’t stand for Politically Correct whining weapons, assuring their targets that they would have projected fair-trade chunks of lead through them no matter what race they were (despite the fact they’re now all Russian.) While console games like Halo need aim-assisted assault rifles to even glance a moving enemy, the pistol has been the workhorse of the mouse-marksman since the first nazi was shot in the face.

The last Nazi was also shot in the face. Several hundred times!

We pay tribute to the best of those handguns which have saved our pretend lives thousands of times, by ending millions of others.

5. Glock 17 (Half Life, Half Life 2)

The Half-Life series has unusual casting for a first-person shooter. Its first person is a silent scientist instead of a linebacker who thinks he’s a stand-up comic, and its most famous weapons don’t actually shoot. The gravity gun can throw everything except bullets, while the original’s crowbar remains a symbol of PC gaming. And a reminder of the horror we felt in 1998 when an army of Doom players booted up Half Life and realized “My god, they’re really making me start this game without a gun!”

Which is why the Glock is such a relief.

Oh god yes, a weapon which doesn’t require me to be right next to them, WHICH WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED TO BE

There’s a rush of genuinely psychotic pleasure when you pick up the gun, and the distinctive clickety-click-clack equipment sound is probably Gordon buckling it to his wrist with five separate straps so he’ll never be without a gun again. It’s ridiculously useful due to having far more range than the enemies (despite the alien’s entire deal being “Able to hit you from another dimension”) and because it uses the machine gun’s ammo it’ll never run it.

4. Dual Pistols (Strangehold)

The only cyborg item on this list, because twinned pistols are a more essential part of Chow Yun Fat than his hands (and he uses them more often.) The criminally underappreciated Strangehold wrote action-movie logic into the game engine and the pistols’ mechanics, because they don’t need to be reloaded unless it looks cool.

If he has a hundred bullets left, they’re fed down his arms and straight into the guns because reloading would mean not shooting. He only reloads when you trigger the “Barrage” special move which makes them even faster and more powerful. This is a game where the main character not shooting for a second means you’re really dead.

This game loves guns so much a one-on-one standoff becomes a pistol threesome

3. USP (Call of Duty 4)

The pistol mechanic in Modern Warfare was so vital (as in “to do with staying alive”) that they included it in the tutorial. The game’s realism extended to reload times, with some guns so slow it would be quicker to build a new weapon around a fresh ammo pack. Which, in the case of the RPD, seems to be what you’re doing.

Stop the war, I’ll be ready in a minute!

This is the first game where the weapon switch is more than reload. It needs to be right next to grenades under your thumb, and if it isn’t, buy a mouse with more buttons. Spinning the scroll-wheel on a CoD serverwhen your gun’s empty is like defending yourself from a tiger by knitting a distraction. It also gives that wonderfully psychopathic feel of emptying your gun at someone, then switching weapons, then emptying that one too.

The USP wins over the Desert Eagle because it’s still pointing at the same hemisphere after five shots.

2. Lugermorph (TF2)

Team Fortress 2’s pistol is one of the most satisfying weapons, despite technically being the only 3rd-rank firearm in the game (it’s the Engy’s secondary weapon, and his primary is other people’s secondary.) It isn’t fun because of its damage, or craziness, or murderous efficiency, but because whenever you’re using it you really, really want that guy dead. Either a Scout finishing off a scattergunned enemy, or picking of a sentry gun, or an Engy chasing down that expletive-hatefulword-ed Spy who’s trying to get away: no weapon has been so charged with psychic hatred outside of Dungeons and Dragons.

And the Lugermorph makes it even cooler.

A cute little thing held by an angry little thing

TF2 with Sam & Max is a more impossible combination of awesome than ice cream and napalm, and even more lethal. If you’d told someone you could win an electronic gun from a comic character twenty years ago, you’d have been locked up. And awesomely right!

1. Deagle (Counter-Strike)

A fan-made buffet of death

The deagle is the most lethal thing up to and including old-age, which can only kill something once. The Desert Eagle is one of the most powerful guns even in the real world, and that fact is one of the few nasty realities about guns that makes it into videogames. While the Modern Warfare version recoils like an 18th century cannon which just saw goatse, the CS version could drop Superman.

April Fools’ Day might make most of the internet more horribly useless than a bikini for Darth Vader, but it’s an excuse for game developers to cut loose. As fellow gamers they know what you love and hate, and they’re professionally employed to make fun things for you. Every April 1st they unleash things they fear, hate, or just take more piss out of themselves than people after a Budweiser drinking competition. We’ve found six imaginary products which should be implemented as quickly as possible.

1. World of Warcraft’s Crabby

Blizzard’s gags are the stuff of comedy legends, probably because exploiting their own customer base isn’t just fun but their actual business model. This year’s joke is the best yet, with the reincarnation of the most hated character ever to appear on a PC.

Clippy 2: The Revenge

Demanding Clippy in a MMORPG might sound like wishing plutonium was a pizza topping, but he could be reprogrammed for good. Think about it: expert users always turned Clippy off anyway, usually while testing if humans could psychically murder Microsoft programmers long-distance. Only the beginners and idiots were stuck with the little sycophant. That’s perfect for Azeroth! Just think of the messages he could deliver!

“Hi, it appears you’re a rogue replying to a group that specifically requested healers! Are you an idiot?”
“Your class doesn’t even sound like one that can use that item, would you like me stop you from rolling for items you’ll just sell to get a mount? Would you like me to calculate how many years it’ll take to get a mount that way, and how many people will hate you by then? ALL OF THEM”
“It looks like you’re not healing people even though you’re a healer and they’re all on fire, what is wrong with you?”

2. TF2’s Cow Melee

This one is brilliant and embarrassing, because in all our sessions of “What would make a good weapon?” (a mental game enjoyed by anybody who plays TF2) it never occurred. The 2D bovine prop was sitting in plain sight behind 2Fort’s fences all this time, and the TeamFortress Wiki’s idea of smashing it over people’s heads is glorious.

It’s also guaranteed. Not just despite how but because it’s a joke: it’s exactly the sort of thing Valve would include. Though the superpowered description of “inflicts bleed and Milk for 12 seconds” reveals it’s a fake more obviously than the date of posting, and it’ll have to be scale down to a Calf prop to fit the game. The “Buffalo Steak + Mad Milk” crafting recipe is pure perfection, though.

We look forward to cowing our opponents in a future update.

3. StarCraft Motion Overdrive

Starcraft’s Kinect-controlled Motion Overdrive is a ridiculous dream, in the same way imagining men could fly was once a ridiculous dream. The video might be a hilarious parade of gaming from idiotically-waved motion controls to frankly cyborg Korean players (though that’s more fact than joke), but the real dream in this video is the ultra-precise motion controls.

Right now every motion controller includes indicators on the screen to help you try to do what you’re trying to do, and if you notice how that was an awkward and repetitive sentence then you understand how perfectly it represents motion controls. Good Kinect games only ask you to perform very clear, basic actions like “Jump” or “Try to attract the attention of a passing helicopter.” Controls as sophisticated as Starcraft are something that will eventually happen, but for now we can only dream of. Which this trailer does for us.

4. Minecraft Store

Notch delivers, again, making him a gaming Santa but with a much faster schedule.

The Minecraft Store might have been a vicious parody of certain other Manntastic in-game purchases, with ridiculous prices attached to game-breaking upgrades like “griefer identity”, but thinking about it suggests a glorious future. If you combined TF2’s store and trading systems with how Valve welcome weapon designs from modellers, and you could have the ultimate game.

Imagine Minecraft Plus, with players submitting designs for new material types and crafting recipes, filtered and polished by Notch for inclusion in a vast online world. Connecting the huge output of dedicated Minecraft players would take the game from pre-industrial to post space age, with factories and skyscrapers and rare blocks like uranium powering vast sci-fi complexes in a shared world. With thousands of objects trading them would make as much sense as crafting them yourself, before finding fun ways to play with them. Obviously the actual “money” bit would have to be disconnected to prevent vicious ruination of the system by cheats and scammers. Leaving us to enjoy a self-built world with more things in it than the real one.

5. Knights Of The Old Republic (in Wookie)

This isn’t one we specifically want, but LucasArts should be careful about making promises they can’t deliver. The Star Wars gag promised localization of the entire game in Shyriiwook, a word you are now irrevocably nerdier for knowing, with cut scenes revoiced with the sounds of tortured furry carpets. The only problem with this great gag is that people will want it. We have to remind LucasArts that this is something that exists:

Though they should feel safe that their “Hairy HUD” is unlikely to be demanded.

In fact, we’ll be happier if we never hear the creepy phrase ever again.

6. Razer Talon

A better case of experts taking the piss out themselves with expensive gadgets than a doctor with a dialysis machine.

Razer are equally known for fantastic input upgrades and ridiculously expensive rubbish, and the Razer Talon combines both of those with THE FUTURE! All with more trademark overblown advertising than the Goodyear blimp.

The Talon promises up to 5000 actions per minute, which violates not just the anatomy of the human hand but lightspeed. This ultimate upgrade includes Bane-style Venom injectors, NASA components for better finger control, neural linkage for maximum Vespene gas extraction, mind-reading wiring for improved enemy destruction even finally makes it lupus (though that’s in the health-warning section.) It would be even better than a holodeck, because those will only make us worse at videogames. (Would you be good at Counter-Strike with your real body’s running speed? )

Of course, even if you got one, that Korean kid would still beat you with the motion controls.

Valve are kings of the crossover, arming their characters with a crazier range of weapons than the Joker and Batman combined. TF2 gamers play with more fictional items than Harry Potter, and while other companies like Activision don’t just sue other companies far making similar games, but sue their own (ex)employees for making similar games, Valve promoted Monday Night Combat like it was their own work.

More murderous cyclopses than Greek mythology

What other games would we like to see on Steam events?

1. Serious Sam And Counter-Strike

Duke Nukem’s reclaimed the spotlight but Serious Sam is the thinking man’s not-thinking man. Mainly because he actually writes his own lines instead of stealing Evil Dead (one line is a reference, an entire script is copyright infringement.) If you ever want to terrify a Sam-player, just run at them screaming LOLOLOLOLOLOLLOLOOO! In fact, try doing that anyway. It’s a lot of fun.

No head and bombs for hands. Finally, an enemy who really would still attack after you’ve killed ten million of his mates!

The skull-free suicide-bombers are the perfect antidote to the professional CS server, where you’ll be informed that gaming is serious business and whatever you’re doing is noobier and gayer than a sonogrammed fetus looking disgusted to be inside a woman. They’ll also survive a lot longer than the average player – they’re the only thing in the first person world immune to AWP headshots, and the sheer frantic dashing of a horde of these things will shatter even the most professional team the first time it happens.

It’d be a hilarious custom mod, and even better as an admin tool. Someone’s screwing around but you don’t just want to kick him? LOLOLOLOLOLOL!

2. Doom with TF2

TF2 characters now employ more custom-created tools than MacGuyver, and unless you work in a sex shop they’re more fun to use on people as well. But the game is still missing the ultimate examplar of melee weaponry – something which would reclassify every TF2 server as a museum of modern mauling history.

The exact moment players first realised FPSes could trigger orgasm

As employed by Professor Williams, Head (Remover) of the Department of Chainsawlogy

Left 4 Dead 2 already understands this, but that’s because it is by definition “One of the best games ever, with improvements.”

3. Dead Rising 2 and Half Life 2

Dead Rising 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, and that’s with the flaws. Without them it would be the next stage of human evolution.

I have never seen anyone better prepared for anything.

Half-Life’s Gravity Gun is pretty much the only cool weapon not already in that game, and while it had a crowbar it was criminally, catastrophically un-combo-able. You also don’t even have to worry about game balance. While a gravity gun would break most shooter worlds harder than an armistice, Dead Rising has always been more fun and ludicrously unbalanced than a unicycling Sumo wrestler. This was a game which trusted you enough to give you a choice between a handbag or a spiked baseball bat, and fun enough that you’d try both.

Now imagine strapping a chainsaw to a crowbar and spinning the whole thing with a Gravity Gun. Just writing that has improved the health of everyone around me, because it repels the dead so hard we just became more alive.

4. Portal And Lemmings

We would have saved a full year of our childhoods.

In fact, put a portal gun in every title. If the players use it to skip parts, then those parts shouldn’t have been in your game!

Grenades! The exclamation mark is part of the proper spelling, because no noun has ever deserved one as much. This single usually-shouted word contains more warnings about the fragility of life, the urgent need for immediate action, pure excitement and sheer explosive force than ten self-help books and a thousand philosophy courses. It’s also much more useful, whether you’re faced with zombies or just trying not to waste your damn time in general. They’ve been essential part of blowing things up for centuries. Ever since man first thought “I really want to kill all those guys but they know that and won’t let me come over.”

They lead to far more arguments online than in the real world, because a real grenade’s entire function is to render the target incapable of discussion. We’ve looked over some of the most popular first person shooters to see how they deal with this most urgent of action-items.

Halo

Halo revolutionized first person shooting with three things. The first was the beautiful Warthog.

The first time suspension was sexier than suspenders.

The second was making grenades effective, which sounds like making steak delicious but had been screwed up by every other game in history. Even the incredible GoldenEye (which you can now replay on Half–Life servers!) included grenades as one of the regular weapons. Which was the problem. It meant you had to cycle through the weapons to get them and a situation where you have time to idly flick through your armory is the exact opposite of the time you need a grenade. Halo servers attached grenades two an always–on button, and – along with the regenerative shield – revolutionized console shooting combat forever.

Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 embraced grenades like a noble soldier in a crowded trench, and did far better out of the deal. It certainly lasted longer. Modern Warfare’s emphasis on realism unfortunately includes how grenades are utterly, utterly lethal. Every CoD expert has inbuilt reactions because of them – if you want to kill a Modern Warfare player, just sneak up behind them on the sidewalk and make that “tinkling” noise. They’ll automatically sprint into traffic.

Counter–Strike

The most contentious because Counter–Strike servers are the most popular, the most competitive, and more unlikely to change than Commandments carved in solid diamond and frozen in Carbonite.

Camper

The problem is that CS uses status–changing grenades, the annoying smoke and the appallingly annoying flashbang. It may be a real tool used against terrorists but that’s because we hate terrorists and don’t want them to have fun. Blindness breaks one of the fundamental rules of fun game design: removing control from the player and/or scrambling their input so their ability makes no difference.

Not fun, especially when you know there’s someone trying to shoot you in the head.

Team Fortress Classic

The genesis of truly classic class–based combat. The makers of Team Fortress Classic knew that variety was the spice of life. Unfortunately they didn’t know that “making up a bunch of different things” is to “game design” as “blowing up a quarry” is to “constructing a building.” Team Fortress Classic servers are fun, but about as balanced as Muhammad Ali versus Tom Thumb on a seesaw.

Worse interpersonal relationships than a Tila Tequila show

The grenades are a greater collection of flaws and cliches than American Idol auditions. The concussion and plague grenades annoy the target more than outright death, which at least doesn’t scramble their controls, while the worst offender is the Engineer’s EMP grenade. The damage done is proportional to the metal carried by the target, which sounds cool and involved the very first time you see it. The second time you realise “Doesn’t that mean Engies could one–hit kill Heavies at long range from any direction? And isn’t that more broken than Atlantis’s levees?”

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is the greatest upgrade in history. They took all the potential of TFC and made it actually happen, and the most important part was taking out all the unbalanced grenades…

… and turning them into part of the Dustbowl ecosystem.

A psychocycloptic part

The Demoman means all the great grenade tactics still work – indirect fire, anticipating enemy paths, targeting groups – without breaking the balance because the Demoman has a longer reload time and less close–range combat skill than a pregnant woman. Which doesn’t stop idiots who think “Charge forward screaming” is an acceptable tactic from complaining that he’s too powerful.

Left 4 Dead

You could discover a call–center full of Neo Nazis and it still wouldn’t be a more perfect place for grenades than a Left 4 Dead server. Most of the thrown weapons on L4D servers aren’t regular grenades, with the bile jar and the brilliantly Tankicidal molotov, but sometimes nothing but a beeping cylinder of explosive pipe–bomb death will do.

Explosive ex-zombie excellence

It’s also the most perfect world for these grenade-a-likes: huge hordes of enemies swarming without tactics, you need to blow a hole and advance instead of killing everything, and in a reversal of the real world your enemies are attracted to the noise explosives make.

Sniping is the core of PC shooting even if you call them all camping cowards who should be shot (at close range). The mouse means we can aim precisely or spray the street with equal ease, making it a major challenge for developers who have to reward skilled play without breaking the balance. Make “Murder from miles away” too easy and everyone’s head keeps exploding, which is counterintiutively boring, but make it too hard and you’ve got a load of idiotically invincible linebackers running around waving huge guns like crotch-substitutes at an orgy.

That’s their subconscious function anyway

Sniping is a vital element in shooter design (despite being the opposite of the word “vital” as in “to do with living”), and the recent fascination with realism makes even more important. Even if that’s a very special definition of “realism” which involves carrying ten tons of ammo and resurrecting from the dead, as long as you have lots of detailed shading on boringly repetitive guns when you do it. We’re looking at how some of the best multiplayer games deal with the Sniping Problem. Surprisingly few of them chose “run away” or “wear a helmet.”

NOTE: These aren’t the best sniping games (though some of them are).  They’re games that represent very different attitudes to shooting people from a mile away.

1. TF2

TF2 servers are better balanced than a Zen monk holding a Ming vase on a tight rope. Some cunning design decisions make the Sniper part of the most aggressive ecosystem outside of Mur-dorr, the Violence Planet, in a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors-But-They’re-All-Guns. The usual problem with gaming snipers is that by definition they must carry a gun capable of instant kills. In real life this forces them to hole up somewhere for half of forever in the hope of their target passing by, but on a server there’s nothing to stop the sniping idiot running around shooting it like a ludicrously large six-shooter with bigger bullets.

Ideally a pistol shouldn’t be as long as the person holding it

But in TF2 our Australian friend can’t noscope. He needs to charge up a headshot for an instant kill, and the scope sticks him with tunnel vision more restrictive than right-wing earthworm. He can cripple an enemy advance by dropping the Heavy, or even better, blue-balling the Medic, but his back is wide open to anyone who can kill at closer range. Which is everyone else in the game. Spies are the natural predator but there’s nothing more fun than Scout-bashing a Sniper’s spine in.

Grevious Bodily Fun!

2. Counter-Strike

TF2 reduced the Sniper’s awesome kill power to balance the game.  Counter-strike servers take the exact opposite approach. They “balance” sniping in the same way capitalism “balances” being extremely rich. The AWP is the most lethal weapon in the history of gaming and has killed more players than Bowser’s spiked-flooring contractor. When asked “Doesn’t that mean that someone good with an AWP could kill everyone?”, CS answers “Yes. So get good with it!”

The cause of more electronic deaths than the MCP and Skynet combined.

But even the most awesome force in gaming history has an equal and opposite reaction. The AWP is an incredibly powerful and effective weapon, and the opposite is weak and ineffective whining. A full decade after the first headshot, players still complain that defending an objective by using a sniper rifle to pick off targets at long range - that is to say, using a sniper rifle to snipe - is in some way “cheap” or “camping.” If you want to run around all across the map go play a CP map. In the meantime, being shot through the head sucks. Buy a helmet.

3. Crysis

Crysis servers technically have a sniper attachment, in the same way “Meat is murder” PETA campaigners can technically be listened to - it’s far more effective (and fun!) to just run over and punch them.

Or punch other things at them!

Shooting people from four miles away is fine for frail fleshbags, but when you’re wearing a nanotech tank it’s not just hiding your light under a bushel, but sealing that bushel in concrete and dumping it in the North Sea. The single player campaign might manufacture a few artificially heavily-emplaced locations to force a headshot or two, but it’s usually faster - and always more fun - to sprint at them like a pissed off Flash who’s allowed to kill people.

4. Day of Defeat

Day of Defeat servers embrace the idea of fields of fire, making the sniper even more effective despite his being more of a furrow. Heavy machine gunners can suppress entire teams by blazing across an open street, which is what makes one man who can take him down a team player. The exact opposite of the sniper’s normal role.

I hereby rename this street Death Street!

Capture point maps make excellent use of this rock-paper-everything-else battle: the sniper can kill the gunner, but the gunner can kill everything, and the sniper has to watch out for an entire enemy team moving up under the suppressive fire. The central square battle on Donner is the first time you truly understand the phrase “Cover me!” In most games randomly spraying your machine gun is about as damaging as a camera flash, and less likely to even worry the enemy, but DODs heavy machine guns really can kill dozens of people in seconds. Like real machine guns.

Which is why taking them out is so important it’s even in the achievements.

5. Halo

Halo revolutionized console shooters (although the PC Halo servers are pretty fun as well), but that revolution was all about ending the importance of accuracy. After Master chief first marched through an enemy army and restored himself to full shields a few seconds later, health bars have been more endangered than bald polar bears.

You had to use things to heal? We were living like cavemen!

Console combat compensates for the inaccuracy of thumbsticks by turning into a grinding battle - every assault rifle is effectively a Pyro: hold the enemy in your sights for long enough and you’ll win, if he gets away he’s fine. While there are sniper rifles they’re included like the AOL homepage is included online - grudging relics of an older time and simply not very good.

He didn’t even notice that.

Parting Shot

What does all this tell us? We’ve only covered a fraction of the sniping games, barely mentioning the graphical joy of the ghillie suits in Modern Warfare or the ludicrous image of an Unreal Tournament player trying to hide, but the conclusion is clear: sniping is a PC player’s privilege, and it’s all kinds of fun.

The Steam store’s been chasing after Xbox Live, which is like the Mona Lisa getting made up like Lindsay Lohan. They’ve added in-game text chat, shift+tab out to the community screen, even a Steam score for those who need a fictional numerical reason to play games. As opposed to the very real numerical reason of Steam sales, as in “all the financial numbers are way lower and often missing altogether.” An accomplishment Xbox Live strangely seems to miss out on. Even for the packs which are free on the PC!

The upside is achievements, that most beautiful beep when you do something particularly cool and the computer agrees with you that yes, that was totally sweet. (And on TF2 servers it can even earn you new guns, which are even sweeter.) That’s why we’ve looked over our game catalog to find the best achievements.

Killing Floor

An achievement which creates better players is a rare and precious thing, like someone turning their baseball cap backwards that they might read classic literature more easily. Many achievements are exercises in game-ruining, where one team is effectively outnumbered because their most expert player is standing in a corner jumping up and down (we’re looking at you, Batter Up). Protip: make sure your server has a kickvote function.

Philanthropist, however, encourages team-building behavior to create a well-armed squad. And the more well-armed squadmates you have between yourself and this…

AAGH NO PATRIARCH TOO CLOSE GUN TOO SMALL ME TOO DEAD!

..the better everyone will like it. Well, except for the squadmates between you and that, but their opinion will stop mattering in about three seconds anyway.

At the other end of the expert-play spectrum, Merry Men walks right up to a squad of pro players and says “You think you’re so tough? Then why not come and fight death incarnate with nothing but pointed sticks?” Then it insults them a lot because they’ll be dead in a minute anyway.

The Ball

Our fine (and extraordinarily improbably appelled) friend Harchier Spebbington demonstrates the standard “Do what the game is all about” achievement. Which makes it onto this list despite its unoriginality because it’s just so much fun. The Ball is a sweet Source combination of Half-Life physics with a Portal-style single weapon, and while “huge boulder” is significantly lower-tech than Aperture Science’s handheld Portal Device, that’s only because you can’t flatten foes into smears of ex-eneemy with a tear in spacetime.

How do you even get a name like Spebbington? Did his ancestors piss off the first census worker?

And since Harchier can appear on Killing Floor servers thanks to a cool crossover, you can achieve the world’s first officially Merry Archaeologist!

Poker Night At The Inventory

Possibly the most unimaginative achievement name in history, but it could be called “You’ve just been diagnosed with horribly pustulent things” because it gives you this:

Unfortunately the Iron Curtain it doesn’t do anything beyond “Look Awesome.” Fortunately it looks SO awesome it doesn’t have to. And be honest: any Heavy Weapons player should be stylishly rewarded for resisting Natascha’s siren, slowing, enemy-annoying song.

Counter-Strike: Source

Counter-Strike servers running on the Half-Life engine – this couldn’t be a more perfect combination of videogaming beauty if it were presented by Joanna Dark. Normally these “you used a weapon to kill enemies” achievements are more superfluous than a third appendix, but on a CS:S server it isn’t just a message. It’s proof that you’re playing the game properly.

Though it’s odd that the makers, while talking about the most important weapon in the game, should be typing this “Magnum Sniper” nonsense instead of AWP. The most lethal acronym in existence outside of OMGIAATAB (Oh My God I Accidentally Armed The Atom Bomb.)

Achievements are both fun and terrible, not least because they’ve given puns a whole new lease of life. A life more more painful than being on the wrong end of a shrapnel grenade, and by wrong end here we mean “while you’re on the toilet you spend your last second discovering one in the bowl. ” But this one is simply so enjoyable - both to read and to achieve - we included it anyway.

Day of Defeat: Source

Taking out the emplaced guy because he’s distracted killing the idiots charging him. Such sweet joy, here the achievement isn’t a goal or even a reward, merely an electronic high-five for doing something cool.

You can view this as heroically saving the day, or mercenarily using your own teammates to detect emplaced enemies, or simple annoyance at being stuck on a team with so many idiots. “Don’t charge the heavy machine gun” shouldn’t have to be explained. Though for anyone who does need that demonstrated, multiple high-velocity ballistic death is probably the least powerful tool their cro-magnon skull will notice. Whatever the reason, a sweet snipe into someone distracted by thinking of how brilliantly they’re doing is incredibly enjoyable and the key to capturing the next point on any Day of Defeat server.

Team Fortress 2

With 368 achievements and counting, players used to be obsessed with achievements to get the new weapons. The Mann Co. store has released this pressure valve for those who simply have to have the latest items immediately, and allow the rest of us to enjoy the sheer joy of achievements like Search Engine. The Engineer’s was the last update, the delay building up so much spy hate in every mechanically minded player, and finally we can pay it back the way an Engineer should. With hundreds upon hundreds of rounds of sentry gun ammunition.

Revenge is a dish best served repeatedly at high velocity by robotic death machines

D.I.P.R.I.P. Warm Up

D.I.P.R.I.P., the incredibly fast fun and free Mad-Max-madness game you can install from Steam right now, closes out our list with the achievement version of screaming “YEEAAAAAH!” Ramming enemy cars might seem obvious, but DIPRIP servers aren’t a game of bumper cars. You have four weapons ranging from machine guns to mortars, emphasizing various non-zero distances of combat, and you’re far more likely to use your turbo to rush for a repair crate than ramming an enemy.

Which just makes those times you dare their fire to hit you and detonate a damaged enemy with a faceful of engine block that much more glorious.

KICKASSSSS!

User-created content is a complicated subject, with all manner of issues like profitability, piracy, distribution rights, liability, and various other words which are the exact opposite of fun.

Which is why we’ve broken it all down into one simple question:

It’s purely a question of corporate attitude, and any “issues” raised by that company are excuses because their corporate attitude is one that says “suckers” instead of “players”. Modifications are indisputably a good thing for gaming. The question of whether mods actually add anything to the player experience hasn’t just been answered, it’s been so answered it now reveals anyone who even asks it as either a non-gamer or a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. And at least the latter has an excuse for not knowing what they’re talking about.

Team Fortress and Counter-Strike both started off as modifications (for Quake and Half-Life respectively). Sorry, typo, I meant to say the two greatest FPS games in existence started as user-modifications. You could no more argue that mods are a “maybe” than you could claim the Sun is optional for life on Earth.

Smart companies take things like those and extend them into incredible new products. Team Fortress 2 and CS: Source servers are the most popular shooters online, and Valve regularly embarrasses every other company in the business with their sheer levels of sales and support based entirely on “providing great content for users, and letting them do that too.” It’s enough to make other developers ask themselves “Why the hell are we doing it our way?”

Like Modern Warfare. The first was an excellent online shooter with integrated Mod support. Modern Warfare 2 treated the user like a special needs student. They removed so many options you counted yourself lucky they still let you control the character. Tying to set up a server in ModWar2 gave you the strong impression the developers thought you were wearing a helmet.

The idea that modifications damage profits is ludicrous. Civ V took approximately infinity man-hours to make, and they’ve installed mod-support right from the first menu. No unpacking, no hacking your way through file trees, just telling the game “Hello lovely game that I bought, I would like to use you for fun things!” And the game goes “Great idea!”

You can tell somebody’s lying when people hide behind issues of “stability” and “customer satisfaction.” No company has ever failed to work out technical problems when there’s real money to be made, and unfortunately the opposite is also true: if they can make more by refusing to do something simple, that’s exactly what’ll happen. Player-made mods for popular games aren’t an abstract option, or some weird internet extra: they’re a simple binary indication of whether the company really cares about players or not.

Now we’ll look at which games don’t allow server mods. Or to put it another way: which Halo are you playing? It’s certainly not the original (unless you have a PC Halo server) despite how it that introduced the revolutionary - in fact now mandatory - shield mechanics for console shooters, or the grenade button (not so much an incredible innovation in that title but an incredible oversight in every game before that) Because the original Halo servers have been shut down (though you can still play on PC!) So has the Halo 2 support. So you’d better have bought 3. No, ODST. Sorry, Reach. Whichever they told you to buy most recently.

And people accept that! A strategically-mandated announcement “You don’t get to play anymore. It’s no longer worth OUR while to support this, so YOU don’t get to play this game you paid for - and clearly love because you’re still playing - anymore. Why not buy our sequel RIGHT NOW?”

Meanwhile, six years after release Half-Life 2 players can now now enjoy the cyberpunk class-combat of NeoTokyo, or the horror-movie hunting of The Hidden, the teamwork of Synergy and Follow Freeman, the insane Mad Max mayhem of D.I.P.R.I.P. and many more all from the same game.

Making a gun game sequel should be simplicity itself: if shooting something works, shooting it twice should be even better - double-tapping is something you actually do with real guns, after all.  But just like lots of (in fact, almost ALL) other things you do with guns, they’re a lot less fun in real life.   While they should be the best thing ever - instead of aching in the uncertainty of an experimental project, the development team know people love their game - the problem is that franchises attract marketing like fruit attracts flies.

Bioshock wasn’t just brilliant: any game which allows you to read Atlas Shrugged by shooting killer genetic bees at people could revolutionize the educational system.  But while the first was a nightmarish journey through a sinking Art Deco dream, the second felt like you’d forgotten your keys: an annoying return which should never have happened.

Modern Warfare 2 was the worst kind of sequel, retreading the same ground only to extract extra money and abuse the popularity of the previous game, not as a basis for improvement, but as bait to ram through horrifically bad features.  The loss of dedicated servers crippled the gaming experience, while the focus on Xboxers instead of proper PC controls damaged even regular gameplay.

How To Do It

Gaming cosplay articles are where substandard gaming bloggers show how much they wish they worked on Maxim (For Men), or Poorly Constructed Sexual Metaphors By People Who’ve Never Been Involved In The Process (For Virgins). For every awesomely engineered Big Daddy there are ten thousand shots of Cammy’s ass described in terms which would make a horny chef blush, and every single one seems to think they’re the first to think of saying how they’d like to “Cannon Drill” it.

That’s why we’re looking at five fan-made efforts with nary a sex organ in sight. Which means we’re not only alone among cosplay collections, but may be unique among websites.

1. Amazing TF2

Ryan Crasmussen and Grep Peltz utterly utterly destroy Hollywood in a single shot, and despite holding a rocket launcher that refers to a camera. Movies can’t make game characters look good despite access to millions of dollars and Milla Jovovich (who can make orange plastic dungarees look amazing). Ryan and Grep managed it in their spare time.

You didn’t/won’t look this good on your wedding day.

The most important is the incredible photography work of Alex Tkatcheva: unlike everyone else on the internet, it’s nice to see some people understand there’s a reason professionals don’t use blurmatic cameraphones to share sights with the world..

This may be the first time in history anyone has happily exclaimed “Look at those grenades!”

2. Really Left 4 Dead

If these guys looked any realer I’d start headshotting hoodies on sight

Seattelite cinephiles, as well as sounding like they watch movies in space, are part of the mix making zombie production Night Zero. It’s as photorealistic as a comic can be because it’s actually real photos, shot on location (and more professionally than you’ve ever done anything) before being touched up for final release. The sign of a real creators, however, is how they don’t hide from other incredible products in the same field - they engage with them.

She’s now the obsessive fantasy of at least one person. Welcome to the internet.

They turned their talents to Left 4 Dead, recreating the ultimate zombie killing game in gritty detail and releasing the shots just to prove how good they are. That’s how you make it online, and now far more people know about Night Zero - and think it’s cooler - than if they’d whined about doing it first or “better”.

I’ve never put this much effort into Left 4 Dead and killing zombies is my job.

3. Counter-Strike

This may be the greatest cosplay of all time.

Sure, anyone can collect the necessary clothes, spend ninety-nine cents on the fakest gun since you drew one on Etch-a-Sketch*, and hunch around a convention like “Keyboard-based Spine Deformation” and “Dodging bullets” were the same thing, but this man has the true spirit. He genuinely looks like he wants to kill you. That’s a simmering cauldron of repression, rage, and hastily assembled equipment intended for just one function. He couldn’t me more of a Counter-Strike terrorist if his elbows were pointed.

You must suppress every junior high urge to not give him back his orange-tagged backpack.

*Escher-style angled clip projecting out to one side extra!

4. The Heavy

At conventions TF2 cosplay isn’t just popular, it’s practically a nationality (just count the number of scouts vs the number of Ghanans at any event). Something about the slick cartoon style just lends itself to awesome group shots, but none have ever beaten this:

And just this once, we’ll admit to staring open mouthed at that beautiful girl: Sascha. If you were looking at anything but the minigun, there’s something wrong with you. Props are where most TF2 attempts fall flat (RED or BLU clothes aren’t that hard to find), but one is so un-flat it’s a fizzy Mt Everest. The reast of the Heavy costume is also excellent, is appallingly good, but if she’d turned up in a business suit and a judge’s wig Natascha alone would still have made it work.

BONUS: From the same photoset by frzdragon, more backstabbing than Judas Iscariot in a Tom Clancy novel.

5. GoldenEye

Transcending mere costumes is College Humor, who truly capture the spirit of GoldenEye - one of the most important games in FPS history. The N64’s incredible Bond game kicked the entire concept of shooting people in the ass (the manliest sentence you’ll read today) and showed that controllers could be tolerated in a good enough game long before Halo. They don’t just dress the part, they don’t just play the characters, they truly capture everything about the game in two minutes.

There are two types of gamers in the world: those who know Valve are the best, and those who haven’t played Portal (also known as “fools”). Obviously we’re enjoying Team Fortress 2, excited about the upgraded Counter-Strike, and looking forward to Episode 3 (and its inevitable inclusion of a Portal gun), but which other games should be given to Valve?

5. Final Fantasy

Square Enix have defined what it means to be a JRPG, selling almost a hundred million units, but that definition is seriously skewed. They’ve perfected the apparently important fields of androgyny, pointless minigames, and playing dress-up with electronic Barbies, but they’re worse writers than Stephanie Meyer after headbutting Dan Brown. Which is odd, because:

- If you want us to Play a Role in a Game, ideally you would make the characters engaging/not retarded

- Every Final Fantasy game contains more text than a special edition of War and Peace with an insurance warranty.

The only place a row of dots have in videogaming is Pac-Man’s maze.

Just imagine: a Final Fantasy game where the text was entertaining and relevant, where the cut-scenes were as good as “Meet The Spy“, and where equipping a hat could actually made your character better at things!

+2 to resist fire, -1 to mmhhmm-hmm

4. Starcraft: Ghost

If you haven’t heard of Ghost, you aren’t Korean or someone who really cares about FPSes.

Claiming to like cool games but not knowing about this armor is a blatant contradiction.

It was to be a third-person shooter set in the StarCraft universe, which has absorbed more man-hours and energy than most of the real actual universe. It’s also more delayed than “Christ 2: The Return.” First announced in 2002, it’s been through around more development companies and release dates than most videogame journalists, and is currently listed as “cancelled” by anyone even pretending to pay attention to reality.

So give it to Valve! They’re rather good at this whole shooter thing, they’re great at giving female characters actual character instead of skintight lycra, and with them the eight-year delay will look normal!

Ghost is currently suffering a fate worse than death: a book-of-the-not-even-game

3. Kid Icarus

We don’t care who makes it now as long as somebody does.  And since Nintendo seem to be really really busy with, er, both of the other massively popular franchises they still actually develop, why not let Valve have a crack?

Give him a double-jump, tell him to kill vegetables and we’re golden.

2. Modern Warfare

Did you know that Valve release multi-million selling award-winning games, and then

- People can actually play those games online, and it works?

- Valve don’t publicly cheat and fire people responsible for making the games?

- The rest of their staff don’t then jump ship like freed slaves?

- Valve’s games only feature the standard number of online cheating scumbags, not a scumbag wrath as unto Moses unleashing an electronic plague of hackers on some kind of online gaming Pharaoh?

- They release new levels for free, instead of charging $15 for levels (including levels you already paid for in previous games)?

Because Activision don’t! And they (used to employ the people who) make amazing games like Modern Warfare!

1. Every EA Sports Game