The greatest gaming weapons ever created?

We’ve all got our favourite gaming weapons. Kill, kill, kill, die, die, die… and so on. But which are the ones that live long in the memory, which are the weapons that define your gaming? Here’s our list, see what you think.

The Lancer: so named because it saws Locust in two.

The Blades Of Chaos
God Of War
Kratos’s go-to weapon of choice combines destructive power over a wide area with a rather fetching graphical effect that can only be described as ‘magic laser lines of ultimate mythological destruction’. Physically attached to Kratos by Ares when he burns them into his arms, they represent both Kratos’ servitude to the God of War and his struggled against him.

The Master Sword
Zelda series
The Master Sword is so iconic it features in every Zelda game and every Zelda game features a quest in which Link has to attain it. From it, Link gets his power to defeat Ganon and the power to do the old charge-and-swoosh attack, which is good for taking down multiple attackers and rupee-bearing bushes alike.

Lancer
Gears Of War
Without the Lancer’s ‘optional extra’ it would be your bog-standard, instantly forgettable, sci-fi shooter weapon: a high-powered machine gun with a huge clip. Okay, that’s still pretty cool, but not as cool as being able to eviscerate your enemies with a built-in chainsaw. Would Gears have been as successful without this iconic gun? We don’t think so.

Doom's BFG 9000. What the hell can the BFG 10000 do?

BFG 9000
Doom
If you don’t know what BFG stands for then you’re probably too young to understand or you’re too young to understand – if you get our meaning. Hey, Google it. Anyway, the ultimate weapon in a game full of iconic weapons features a laser blast that puts almost every modern FPS weapon to shame, evaporating your enemies back – literally – to hell.

Nail Gun
Quake
Ow, point that thing somewhere else. If we had a penny for every time we died in a hail of nails while playing Quake online we’d have exactly 1,454,211 pennies. That’s a lot of pennies and a helluva lot more nails. Great when you’ve got one, awful when you don’t, the Nail Gun spewed a lethal stream tiny, sharp projectiles in the general direction of an enemy. It was also the perfect weapon for id’s brilliantly gruesome gothic shooter.

MA5B Assault Rifle
Halo
Weirdly one of the weakest weapons in Halo, it can take a thousand bullets from this pea-shooter to fell any foe. However, it is also the most iconic. It's the weapon that's most associated with Master Chief – the go-to weapon when you run out of ammo on weapon slot number one… The weapon you die holding the most.

Gunblade
Final Fantasy VIII
What’s better than a six-foot sword? A six-foot sword with a gun attached to it, of course. Squall’s gunblade is, in theory at least, one mean weapon. It’s stabs and it shoots and probably should inflict more damage that it actually does in the game. We can’t help but feel that Kratos – or Bayonetta – would make better use of it.

Ebony and Ivory
Devil May Cry
Is this first instance of a pair of guns being the star of a videogame? Maybe, but by the very act of naming Dante’s partners in crime made them as cool and as important as that game’s lead character, himself one of the most iconic characters of recent years.

… continued