There are lots of great things you can say in games but not real life: “Jump onto that dinosaur!” “Invading Russia is a good idea” and “I think this gun is really fun but I’m not insane!” That last is what we’re looking at today, with five of the funnest guns in modern gaming. This doesn’t mean the most effective - if you just want to destroy every enemy in the game you can turn off the computer. Aimbot using cheats stalk around Counter-Strike servers with lethal AWPs but have as much real fun as pubic lice - they’re just annoying out of instinct and ruining other people’s real fun. Fun they can never understand.

We’re looking at the funnest guns. The fact they kill things is just a welcome side-effect.

Screamer - Bulletstorm

Choosing a single weapon from Bulletstorm is like choosing your a single breast/pectoral from a harem (of whichever gender your orientation enjoys). It’s the sheer selection (and adrenalized hopping between them) which makes it such a ridiculous urge fantasy. The pistol seems like the sanest - and thus least-Bulletstormy - of the arsenal, but it truly represents everything the game is about. It rewards accuracy while encouraging you to aim for asses and crotches, it’s a pistol which can turn enemies into screaming fireworks with a charge shot, and it has you challenging an entire planet to a fight with a handgun.

And you’ll be laughing the whole time

Your Gun - Brink

Brink’s grittiness turns the character customization into blue and brown ghillie suits - there are hundreds of options, but instead of adding individuality they make the characters so indistinguishable they need floating yellow icons to remind you what class they are. But all is forgiven becaues of the weapon customization, and the best gun in the game: Your Gun.

Oh baby

Whichever weapon you use, it’s not just a killing tool, it’s a passion. It brings the car-owners obsession to the world of firearms, letting you customize different wepons for each class and playstyle. Drum magazines for suppressive fire, quick draw straps for the backup pistol, choosing between power and rapid-fire for the rifle, and a game has never been a better motivation to go through the training levels. You can have fun with your gun, simply adoring the work of art you’ve earned and assembled, even before you ever join a Brink server. And even more after you do!

Compound Crossbow - Killing Floor

Killing Floor servers are where you go to kill zombies and speak cockney, guv’nor, and the compound crossbow doesn’t just respect the golden rule of headshots. It turns them into an art and a performance piece.

I call this piece “Ode to accuracy”

The M14 has faster spray and higher DPS, but if you’re all about filling a hall and hoping you hit things you shouldn’t be a sharpshooter int he first place. It’s often called the crossbow (especially when you’re begging someone for money as the trader’s time ticks down), but give it the full name. The compound crossbow earns those extra syllabes in sheer pleasure. It brings Quake’s quad damage to a gritty world of mutants and you don’t even need to pick up a glowing Q first. Headshots cause 400% damage. Regular guns only add 10%, making “proper aim” a worse time investment than smashing expensive clocks.

It has the second most expensive ammunition because it’s worth it, it can be recovered, nad nothing else in the game can pin multiple enemies to the wall. This is a professional weapon. True, it’s more professional than the game mechanics in some cases with minor hitbox problems, but a solid Fleshpound headshot gives greater job satisfaction than being Superman.

Grenade Launcher - Left 4 Dead 2

Taking the grenade launcher on an L4D2 server is like taking a bottle of tequila instead of a parachute - you’re probably going to die but have an awesome amount of time doing it. The launcher sacrifices any real ranged defense for the ability to make huge crowds of zombies just go away.

You’re really depending on your teammates, because if an enemy gets close your own gun turns into a suicide trigger. For you and your team. Which is why they won’t help you. You can upgrade the “awesome until it’s not” vibe by taking a chainsaw as your secondary weapon, turning your self into an explosive avatar of corpse-destruction (and accidental teammate murder), unless an enemy suddenly gets clos, you run out of gas, or you’re in an enclosed space. And when has that ever happened in a zombie situation?

Truly, taking weaknesses has never been so much fun.

Devastator - Duke Nukem

The Devastator’s design says more about the joy of explosion than even its rockets can, and its rockets are twin-linked triple-shot explosion-maker which don’t stop until they’re empty. It’s better at explosions than the Human Torch on an oil rig, but above all it’s a fashion statement:

I don’t need a button to admire that.

Behold that design as an admission of function: you don’t just hold the weapon, it consumes your entire arms for the sake of detonating anything making the mistake of being in front of you. It converts its owner into an avatar of helpless destruction, a mobile gun platform utterly unable to even tie his shoelaces because his hands are busy being part of a murderbox. Finally, a gun which gives the main character an excuse for not being able to open doors, and Duke can open doors anyway because screw you Homefront!

America’s last best hope needs grown ups to open doors for him

This is the ultimate gun. And if you just said BFG9000, you’re not being honest with yourself. The BFG wasn’t a gun, it was a handheld smart bomb - you fired it and everything died. The Devastator shreds its targets but you still need to look at them with your finger on the trigger and hate in your heart until they explode in bits of ex-enemy. The slow-moving projectiles means you have to aim ahead of the target, and it’s still possible to lose to a pistol at any range above point blank.

And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Valve are the established masters of sequel. Half Life 2 introduced the greatest gun of all time, Team Fortress 2 was less a sequel than a perfection of a rough concept, and Counter-Strike Source made Counterstrike’s graphics better. (Which doesn’t sound so impressive, but only because there’s no actual way to improve Counter-Strike.) But the best example of how to sequel is Left 4 Dead 2, and f you don’t think “sequel” is a verb, you haven’t been paying attention to the videogame industry. Most modern videogames come with more numbers after their names than Terminators, and are even more designed to awesomely blow things up. Which is why we’re presenting the best lessons from L4D2.

Make a Sequel Because You Need To, Not Want To

The original couldn’t do this. Case closed.

When Valve announced they were making a sequel to Left 4 Dead whiners descended on them like a horde of their own zombies, because in opposite-land sequels to great games are a bad thing. Despite 10% of all online gamer posts being “I wish they’d make a sequel to GAME NAME.” Dozens of frothing forum posters pounded spittle into their keyboards as they complained that Valve was making another game within a year. EA doesn’t get that much hate despite that plan being their entire business model, charging $60 for a game which could be updated with a text file of new player names. Their annual sports games are now so desperate that “animated hand towels” is an advertised advantage in Madden 10, instead of something a software designer is too ashamed to admit he ever worked on.

Left 4 Dead 2 was created because they had more and better ideas they couldn’t do in the first game. You know, the reason you’re meant to make sequels. You need only play the Hard Rain campaign to
a) become even more terrified of Witches
b) know that this could never have been built in the Left 4 Dead engine.
The upgraded engine’s weather systems are even more oppressive than the zombie hordes. Oh, and the game can also handle even bigger zombie hordes, and both horde and lightning storm will hit you at the same time. And if they’d really wanted to churn out sequels, they’ve given out enough free content and mutation modes to be on L4D4 by now. Compare that to Modern Warfare 7 has been moving backwards, now charging $5/new map and banning private servers.

Respect The (Real) Fans

Despite all this, internet haters still whined because that’s all they do. Valve handled it better than James Bond playing with his mobile phone after being captured. They shipped in the spokespeople for the haters to show off the new game, knowing that they would absolutely love it and that all the other haters would absolutely hate them. The group devolved into a cannibalistic feeding frenzy, focusing their entire hatred on their own spokespeople the instant they exhibited independent thought. Because publicly pillorying things they used to love was this groups entire deal.

Whiner Rule #3: Anyone who gets anything you want is a sellout

Include The Original

The latest addition to L4D2 servers, and the most glorious. The original survivors* (falling to *75% of original survivors in one level) have been imported into the upgraded engine, levels and all, and it is amazing. This is no simple search and replace for files - entire levels have to be recompiled and rebalanced for the new abilities, but for fans it’s so much fun.

We can only hope for a day when every game lets you import the old levels. Imagine Mario Galaxying around Tick Tock Clock, or Retro Lancing someone on the steps of Clocktower. The only game which wouldn’t benefit from this is Crackdown, which is actually much better if you don’t bring it anywhere near Crackdown 2.

Chainsawing Zombies!

This in everything please

Weather, masses more zombies, beloved characters and the ability for the latter to chainsaw the former them during the climactic crashing of a a lightning storm. That’s not just a game, that’s the best zombie game ever in an art-house movie. (Hell, it even turns black and white if you play poorly enough!)

In this case the movie is both black and white AND extremely short

Besides, all the best sequels let you chainsaw zombies.

All of them

Games need sequels. Complaining about the exploitation of a franchise is like complaining about the eating of cake. Whiners imagine a utopian world where developers aren’t concerned with money, but in a world where you don’t have to pay for things we’d be too busy jetpack-trampolining (followed by extreme fire-extinguishing of the burning trampolines) to sit with a controller.

When designers and marketers work together properly they can make a lot of money: the designers make a bog-standard polygon platformer, the marketers make sure some of those polygons are huge on the characters chest; the designers add a few items to a repetitive shooter, the marketers make sure the box still says HALO in big easy-to-read letters. As you can see, problems start when the marketers entirely the designers’ ideas with “We don’t care if you’ve thought of anything new, we have a shareholder meeting in June.”

That’s why we’re setting up the Sequel Seal Of Quality.

We think we’ve captured the motivation for making sequels rather well

Like Nintendo’s original, it’s not a review of whether the game’s any good, just if the sequel had another reason to exist beyond “More Easy Money.” Obviously that too, but did anyone expend the least effort beyond building an extension to their money pool? Or did they just ctrl-v the code and hire a few extra strippers to throw dollar bills in the air? To explain the system we’ll look at some examples.

Team Fortress 2

Such an obvious choice that most players think of the 2 as part of the title, like Left 4 Dead, instead of a sequel. TF2 is everything sequels should be - hell, it’s everything evolution should be, improving so massively on the original that if there’s ever a Team Fortress 3 it’ll have cure cancer not just while but by causing world peace to be worthy.

The funnest food chain in gaming

Team Fortress was a truly inspired Quake modification, upgraded by Valve into Team Fortress Classic, but both were like watching drunken Sumo wrestlers: great fun but massively unbalanced.

Back in my day we charged over the 2Fort bridge to our deaths without a roof over our heads!

TF2 took everything that was good about the original and utterly rebuilt it. The Six Million Dollar man wasn’t as thoroughly improved as this game, and didn’t have as many fans. It also mocks the sequel strategies of every other shooter, as free updates add more maps and equipment than most other franchises do in entire sequels. The Scout alone has received more new items than Master Chief did in three games.

Bioshock 2

Bioshock is the ultimate example of why the marketers have to be kept out of the game design process, or any other place where you need creativity beyond imagining building forts out of gold bricks. The first game revealed that you were the scripted plaything of your designers, a masterful parallel of the gaming experience, while the second revealed you the plaything of the marketers, which feels more like being mugged.

This image really does sum up the effort put into the sequel

The sequel played like the accountants had broken into the computer room one night and thrown something together before the real dev team arrived in the morning. Bioshock 2 re-used more art than Andy Warhol but without the same level interactivity, and Warhol made non-interactive things, and is dead. Returning to the same city to fight the same monsters was bad, but repeating the exact same delaying missions like finding a fire plasmid to melt your way through a frozen door feels like being mugged. The only difference between that and a stranger in a dark alley is that the latter uses a blunt object to damage your memories and doesn’t act like he’s doing you a favor.

“Would you kindly give us more money for nothing?”

Dragon Age II

We hate to admit it but this had a very clear sequel motivation. It’s just unfortunate that motivation was “Hack off every single part of the great original that doesn’t fit the mainstream console market, and hope people still buy what’s left.” As with the Nintendo original, our Seal doesn’t say it’s a good thing. The only thing in this world that get stronger when you remove chunks of them is Ashley J Williams. And he’s not in it (though he has turned up in a medieval setting in the third part of a trilogy once before, and it was awesome. Just sayin’.)

Crackdown 2

It’s clear that the Crackdown weren’t expecting a sequel, what with the small team, having to include a Halo 3 beta key to get people to buy it, and the twist ending. What was clearer was that they still weren’t ready to make a sequel even when they did it. Crackdown 2 wasn’t just a bad sequel: if it had been sent back in time four years and shown off as a demo of the original it would have been the videogame equivalent of shooting its own grandfather.

This not being fun isn’t just disappointing, it’s downright blasphemous

The game took three years to make but felt like it was written in negative six months, a broken beta with every single good thing about the game stripped out. The shining Pacific City was literally ruined and re-rendered in grey and brown. “Gritty, detailed grey and brown like every other boringly-realistic game?” the designers must have asked, surprised at themselves for saying something that stupid hopefully. “Nope. Boring grey and shit-brown in the cartoon engine.” And including an unskippable tutorial in a game whose whole point is “Sequel to something everybody played” was a really nice touch, Satan. When your motivation is “make it different from that thing that worked really well” don’t be surprise when the result is terrible.

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.

When you’re surrounded by angry undead at that terrifying - and previously impossible - midpoint between “mindless hunger” and “controlled by an evil AI reading your every move”, you know two things:

a) You’re playing Left 4 Dead
b) You want more weapons

In the old days you might have wanted more teammates too, but after playing L4D2 servers for a while you realise that finding just three other people who aren’t idiots is wishing for plenty already. So we’re looking through the incredible user-generated armory of FPSBanana, to find slick skins which make crushing corpses even cooler.

1. The Glorious Golden Deagle

There are two types of pistol players: those who know that the deagle is king, and those who shouldn’t call themselves pistol players. (Those in the latter category should report to a counter-strike server for free and repeatedly fatal education.)

You know a neighbourhood’s in trouble when a gun adds a touch of class

Piggy’s perfect upgrade turns the handgun into a thing of beauty, and just in time - the poor pistol has fallen into disfavor since melee weapons became available. Making Left 4 Dead 2 servers the only reality in which single-shot firearms are a step backwards compared to “waving things at them.”

2. CROWBAR!

But if you’re going to wave things, wave the best ones! Half-Life’s incomparable crowbar has been brought across to a world which truly needs its incomparable embodiment of “hitting things until they stop bothering you.” No wooden barricades, no crates to crush, just an endless army of undead zombies (Proven to horde five million times harder than their idiotic headcrab-zombie cousins).

If you’re not hearing choirs of melee-weapon-wielding angels right now, GO PLAY HALF LIFE 2

3. The Anger-Roo

When shoving a fireaxe through their face just DOESN’T COMMUNICATE ENOUGH HATRED, it’s time for the Anger-roo!

They’re both pissed off and, like Voltron, much more dangerous together

We’re not going to lie to you: that’s probably the best skin you’ll ever see. We only hid it in the middle of the article so you wouldn’t get distracted too soon.

4. Badass Ale

What do people most regret messing with? If you answered “Molotov Cocktails” or “Samuel L Jackson” then you’re right. If you answered BOTH, you’re awesome and also “ddd” from FPSBanana. And we love you.

You may be able to decode the pixelated text. Hint: upon what manner of individual would you deploy a Molotov Jackson?

Still less painful than messing with the real Samuel L.

5. Aliens M41A Pulse Rifle

Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about the original Left 4 Dead. In fact, we’ve found the absolute ultimate in anti-horrible-horde weaponry: The Aliens M41A Pulse Rifle, and yes, the movie IS part of the name.  THAT’S HOW COOL AT SHOOTING THINGS IT IS.

You now either feel warm inside or don’t know what a “gun” is

On the downside it doesn’t actually equip you with futuristic pulse ammunition, but on the upside it doesn’t turn you into a screaming wimp-marine provably less manly than a nine year old girl.

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.

Sniper rifles start a lot of arguments online (the exact opposite of their real world function).  The ultimate expression of what guns are meant to do - kill someone else from so far away that the word “fair” would need a satellite to see it - they’re a worse balance problem than a one-legged camel.  If they’re realistic everyone hides in corners screeching at each other to stop camping, if they’re weak there’s no problem.  Or point.

Ah’ll nevah rule the universe with you, ya overpowahed wankah!

We’re rating five sniper rifles on Effectiveness and Fun, just one more of the millions of things that are okay in videogames but would be terrifying in real life.

5.  Unreal Tournament

Sniper rifles on UT3 servers are fun, but the problem is obvious:

Three engine blocks and a drinking straw.

They fit about as well as a square peg in a duck’s hole.  UT3 player models look like American footballers wrapped in sacks of sausage meat (Epic Games went on to make the beef-tanks of Gears of War) and in the massive meaty paws of these Hulk-a-likes, the sniper rifle looks like the world’s most lethal toothpick.  And if anyone gets close it’s about as effective.  Even when you’re successfully sniping, you feel that the game’s calling you a pussy.

This guy’s using the transmission from a Dodge Viper as a weapon.  He thinks a sniper rifle is a tool for gynaecologists.

Effectiveness: It’s like bringing a javelin to a touch football match - it’ll definitely murder people but it’s not really playing the game properly (and when the others get close they are going to kill you.)

Fun: As much fun as playing Double Dragon in a Harem - great game, but you’re not exactly in the spirit of things.

4.  Left 4 Dead

The closest thing to sports sniping on the list, with hordes of milling undead offering excellent headshotting opportunities at all times.  It’s just a pity that you’ll be simultaneously boom-smoker-hunt-charge-jockeyed if you take more than two, with your so-called “team-mates” half a level away complaining about the idiot actually standing still on a Left 4 Dead server.

Left 4 Dead 2 upped the anti with a rapid firing military model, but it still can’t cut the mustard when the horde descends.

Effectiveness: Is it a shotgun?  Can it beep or set things on fire?  If you answered “no” to both of these, don’t bother picking it up in Left 4 Dead.

Fun: We did just mention the shotgun.  If you find a weapon more fun than the shotgun, well done on using the guitar during the Midnight Riders finale.  If you find a weapon more fun than that, well done on having such an excellent dream.

One of the best multiplayer shooters ever made (including its own terminally hacked sequel), CoD4 servers couldn’t do a better job of sniping without killing JFK.  They’re only one option among many, you can customize perks to enhance your “death from afar” vibe (though this does often mean choosing Claymores, the Dark Side of online explosives), and you’ve even got a shot if they get close.  Up to seven if you’re quick with the pistol. And, the mark of a truly good sniper game, if you forget to check your back you’ll find fourteen knives in it.

It even gives you a Ghillie suit.  PS That mound by the car can kill people.

Effectiveness: Perfect.  The Special Forces call doorways “coffins” and if you can find a safe spot to snipe one you’ll enjoy why.  The natural breathing shake and limited hold-breath window balance the lethality with skill.

Fun: Full “it would really worry anyone who overheard you talking about how much fun it was to drop people with the twitch of a trigger” joy.  You really do have to search for targets in the detailed environments, and you only have a split-second to snipe them, and you will enjoy every single one with psychologist-terrifying intensity.

2.  Team Fortress 2

It’s challenging work.

It’s hard to stress the sniping aspect of your game more than creating a guy called “Sniper,” handing him a sniper rifle, then telling him to snipe things for a snipe snipe.  It helps that TF2 servers are better balanced than twin Zen masters floating over either end of a seesaw - facestab-whiners aside, Valve is a team of amazingly award-winning professionals and they’ve spent the last three years working on Team Fortress.  The result is that it’s better tuned than the London Philharmonic.

Effectiveness: Exponentially decaying.  A single sharp sniper is essential for a team of eight or more, dropping Heavies and forcing Medics to deploy their übercharges early.  Unfortunately you’ll have a minimum of three and at least two will suck harder than a gay black hole.  Your team will have all the offensive weight of a half-full pillow, and enemy Spies will stroll across to enjoy a backstabbing party.

Fun: Maximum.  The Ozzie Assassin is excellently balanced, with cunning coding preventing rapid fire or noscope shots - you need to scope to charge up your hit, so you can kill anything at a distance (just like a sniper should), but  all the while your back is a big “Stabby-knife-goes-HERE” sign.

1.  Counter-Strike

Of course it’s the AWP.  Doctor Doom could fire a scoped superstring projector which detonates eleven Earths in parallel dimensions, and the Arctic Warfare Police rifle will still have killed more people. With less chance of them seeing it coming.  Unfortunately, the best weapon in the world won’t work with an idiot user, leading to a few CS server problems.

Effectiveness: The AWP is more effective than actually shooting people through the head, because you can do it more than once, you can enjoy their reaction, you don’t have to bother with wind, drop, or - for experts - actually bothering to aim through the scope.

Fun: The AWP is an absolutely effective sniper rifle in a multiplayer game, making it about as much fun as doing dental work on an unanaesthetised elephant.  In Counter-Strike an AWP noscoper is able to kill everyone instantly, and the only counter is to be him or better than him.  Which is no fun at all.

Achievements are gaming squared: they’ve been mocked as wastes of time (by people who apparently think destroying the Covenant armada was a real matter of national security), but they take you into an incredible fictional world to do even more incredible and funner things.  It’s true that some are stupid, but the challenge involved in the more abstract examples couples to a incredible sense of insane satisfaction you simply don’t get when detonating Evil Overlord Number 3,223 (6,446 if you count ‘twist’ he-wasn’t-quite-dead returns).

The best example is Little Rocket Man from Half-Life 2 Episode Two - you have to carry an ornamental gnome all the way through the game.  A game that’s challenging enough when you’re using your hands for incredible weaponry, never mind when they’re full of porcelain garden figure.

Pictured:  Garden gnome.  Not pictured: Effective weaponry for combating Combine ground and air forces.

It’s one of the most painful experiences outside of stapling your head into a Virtual Boy, but James of PCGamer turned it into incredible fun (and produced the above image).  And one in twenty Episode 2 players have actually done it.

It’s all well and good when it’s your own time you’re double-wasting but L4D2 servers are an entirely different situation.  You’re hooked up with three other players and while a team taking on the challenges is fantastic meta-fun, wasting the time of a trio of strangers is a gaming crime up there with “Stealing healthpacks” and “Choosing Gon in Tekken 3” (the fighting game equivalent of blowing your nose on your opponent’s controller.)  Annoying others instead of playing the game properly is a simultaneous proof of

1. the fact you don’t have any friends to play with
2. the reason for that.

Here are the most awful antichievements to inflict on others:

He’s back and he’s bad!  How bad?

Bashing in undead-skulls bad, which is orders of magnitude more badditude than achieved by any other lawn decoration in all of history.  A terrific adventure for a willing team (and another one tackled by James, from whom the above image originates), but in any other situation you’re telling a desperate team of survivors “Good luck with the undead hordes guys, I’m going to cuddle a triple-fake virtual-statue-mythical figure instead of my gun.”

Melee weapons are for when things get too desperate for firearms, and these melee-only challenges make sure that’s happening all the time.  You might think unknowing strangers are a great way to get this - after all, they’re using their guns to keep most of the enemies away - but there’s a reason over 95% of all Left4Dead games have friendly-fire incidents.  And kick options.  At least the original Left4Dead offers Akimbo Assassin, where the spirit of Chow Yun Fat can help you.

John Woo + Gun + Gun = Invincibility

ANYTHING telling you not to shoot in this situation is not your friend.  It is trying to kill you, and at this moment you have 1000% enough things trying to do that.

Only available at the end of the Passing.  Also available at the end of the Passing: the chance to ask Louis “What the hell do you mean you’re doing okay on your own, Captain crippled-legs, you just lost 37.5% of your team on the same bridge we just cleared!”

Here’s where you earn Stache Whacker:

And here’s your complimentary Stache Whacker checklist:

1. Hold still in a game where holding still means more Special Infected and special Horde deliveries straight from the evil Director.
2. Do so while shooting at carnival game instead of said Special Infected and Hordes.
3. Your reward for doing so is a loud noise which trigger another horde.

You couldn’t hurt your team harder if you hacked the server and set it to ignore their fire buttons.

Einstein’s famous for having a several sets of the same suit to save him the bother of choosing what to wear (even though it’s not true).  So just this once gamers, make the master of spacetime look stupid: T-shirts are even easier and go with everything.  Because once you’re wearing a videogame T-shirt you’re telling the concept of clothes “going together” to go together over a cliff.  Here are some of the best and worst things to wear while sniping Dustbowl, and the unpleasantly brightly-lit breaks in between.

BFG Shirt

Only two things come from Deimos, boy, and you don’t look like a demon to me!

One for the Doom fans which, because this is an FPS gaming site, should be every single one of you.  If you don’t like Doom please report to the Phobos UAC base for mandatory re-education.  And demon-murder.  The BFG was simply the most famous gun in all of game history (before the Gravity Gun picked it up and blasted it over the horizo) and most players still have a soft spot for it.  Even demon-infested titanium fleshtanks have a soft spot for it, because that’s kind of its function.

This T-shirt’s a nice, inoffensive rendition of this classic - painlessly inexplicable to anyone who doesn’t get it, and any security staff stupid enough to censor you for wearing a picture of a fictional weapon wouldn’t recognise the vertically-aligned futuremachine as a gun to begin with - but loses points for unimaginatively ripping off Full Metal Jacket instead of coming up with its own text.

Server Down

Just look at that.  You want to look like that?

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the “Server Down” tee.  We’re no stranger to the importance of gaming servers - that’s our entire deal - but step one of finally being forced out of games and into the real world is “Not complaining about the fact.”  Even as a joke, this top is the meeting-new-people equivalent of a foghorn tuned to sound like a screaming baby.  Avoid.

Razer’s Ridiculousness

Get the terrible T-shirt!

Calvin Klein can convince people to wear their logo because, well, they’re Calvin Klein and apparently once you’re featured in Esquire enough times things don’t have to make sense.  You don’t get to pull the same stunt when you make things like the Razer Battlelight, and Razer are charging $20 for customers to advertise them with a cryptic statement, in small green text, on a black T-shirt.

You might recognise that as approximately twenty times what such a shirt usually costs, and that anyone who understands what the hell “Get the unfair advantage” even means is already as obsessively into Razer products as you are.  Which means you’ll have a great time discussing spending money on overpriced objects (you can play PS3 games together!), but the odds of you meeting are on par with being run over by two unicorns coming from opposite directions.

The CEDA Shirt

Hey, that guy looks employable and not crazy!

It’s a basic rule in gaming server content: if you want it to be awesome, check what Valve are doing.  They don’t disappoint with this stylish secret-agent style gaming garment, because you can wear it anywhere and no-one’s any the wiser.  Fellow Left4Dead fans will recognise the CEDA signage while everyone else will think it’s inoffensive, formal, and lots of other words not normally related to shooting zombies in the heads with shotguns for hours at a time.

It’s the only gaming shirt you could wear to an interview (and that’s “real interview,” not “register-monkey protection racket shilling GameStop slave”) as it’s semi-formal and CEDA can stand for whatever you want.  Community Education and Development Authority?  Computer and Electronics Development Association?  Cheerleading Exotic Dancer Agent?  Whatever they (or you) would want it to be.

The Worst T-Shirt Ever

Balancing the above brilliance we present the worst T-shirt ever, the only thing on this list actively worse than charging into rooms naked.

This image posted without comment, but with disgust.  Hey, there was a comment!

It’s a powerful Counter-Strike server sentiment, but if we have to explain why running around with “WHORE” on your chest is bad we probably couldn’t.  Because we use computers, which is utterly incompatible with your “FIRE HOT!” level of understanding.  You’d actually be better off carving the word on your chest -  at least then people would think you were a dangerous asshole and stop short of actively beating you.