Fire and remember: 23 great unorthodox weapons in video games

Mario’s first Game Boy-based adventure saw the plucky plumber bust out a whole host of new hardware, taking to the seas and skies with a plane and submarine to battle the forces of oddball alien Tatanga. But it was the humble Superball, which, once fired, bounced all over the screen in the ways a boring old fireball never could, that was the real game changer in 1989's Super Mario Land. Adding elements of aiming, and even some snazzy trick shots, to Mario’s repertoire, the Superball was apparently so good that it got itself shelved for 30 years—making its triumphant reappearance as one of the most enjoyable tools in Super Mario Maker 2's arsenal in 2019. [William Hughes]

The power pellet in Namco’s 1980 arcade game Pac-Man and the 1982 sequel Ms. Pac-Man isn’t so much a weapon as something that turns your hungry protagonist into a weapon, a fierce predator capable of devouring the colorful ghosts chasing them around the map. They need to be used strategically to clear a level, with the ideal maneuver being to reach one right as Blinky and Pinky are about to box you in so you can turn around and eat them, ideally while screaming “the hunter becomes the hunted.” The euphoria is short lived, so try to gobble up the ghosts and their points as quickly as possible and any other pellets you can while you have the breathing room and then get yourself to the next power pellet to start the process again. [Samantha Nelson]

Having his two reptilian heroes spit bubbles instead of fire was Fukio Mitsuji’s stroke of genius, a design decision that permeates every aspect of Taito’s 1986 action classic. Level architecture tests your ability to bounce on them, turning traversal into challenge, adding an almost puzzle-like element to proceedings. Tactical dilemmas arise: pounce immediately on captured enemies so you don’t risk them escaping, or trap everyone before going for the kill, aiming for the jackpot-like rush of 64,000 points for bursting seven encased critters all at once? And even aesthetically, the sparkly, transparent globes perfectly complement the cutesy sprites and candy-wrapper palette. One of the greatest platformers ever made, Bubble Bobble unsurprisingly precipitated a wave of unorthodox weapons in similarly genre-bending spiritual successors like Rainbow Islands and Snow Bros. [Alexander Chatziioannou]

One of two grappling-hook-style weapons on this list, The Bionic Arm, wielded by the titular Bionic Commando, is more than just a great way to get around: It’s also a weapon, a tool, and, uh, a lover. (At least, if the bizarre plot revelations that come near the end of the franchise’s 2009 reboot game are meant to be taken seriously.) Mostly, though, it’s a joy: One of those great “when all you have is a bionic arm, everything looks like a giant gap to be swung across” kind of tools that helps remind us that even a game with guns in it can be about way more than just being a game with guns. [William Hughes]

Most other power-ups in Mario transform him. They recolor his colors or give him new supernatural powers. Kuribo’s Shoe, found in just a single level of Super Mario Bros. 3, is just a big shoe. Mario wears it up to his neck, cowering over the edge of it like a little gremlin. It’s a power that is not his, that he can’t own and has to steal. So it transforms the game briefly. Spikes are no obstacles, enemies offer more limited harm, and you can jump forever with this large, green shoe. Best and worst of all, it disappears when you finish a level. The kind of magic you can only hold on to for a moment. [Grace Benfell]

Konami’s quarter-devouring arcade beat-’em-up let up to four players lead the Simpsons on a violent quest to rescue Maggie from the clutches of Mr. Burns. Homer is a straightforward brawler, but the rest of the family members in the 1991 arcade game use unconventional weapons to dispatch Burns’ seemingly endless army of hired goons. Bart’s skateboard doubles as a club, and Lisa lashes out with a jump rope, but none of them is as silly as the ever diligent housewife Marge, who cleans clocks with her vacuum cleaner. You have to admire the upper body strength that must be required to swing the bulky appliance around so effectively across eight increasingly brutal stages. [Samantha Nelson]

While getting the Master Sword or the Boomerang is nice in a Legend Of Zelda game, few items warrant a “yes, finally” like seeing Link pull the Hookshot out of a treasure chest. The item essentially functions just like Batman’s Grapple Gun, but since there are very few gargoyle-covered skyscrapers in Hyrule, Link mostly uses it to traverse small gaps or bring items and enemies closer to him and his sword. Like the best Zelda items, it feels kind of unfairly sci-fi for the otherwise fantasy-style setting, which makes it seems a little like cheating. Ganon thinks he can take over the world? Wait until a little elf boy in a green hat shows up with a thing that pulls things closer! [Sam Barsanti]

Scorpion’s spear is the most iconic weapon in the Mortal Kombat series, but it’s hardly the best. You throw it at a guy’s chest, you say “get over here,” and that’s it. For a truly great and unorthodox Mortal Kombat weapon, there’s no better pick than the razor-rimmed hat of Shaolin warrior Kung Lao. You can use it as a buzzsaw, you can use it as a knife, it slices, it dices, and it’s a stylish fashion statement. It even ricochets like Captain America’s shield and—if that doesn’t cut it—the hat can teleport back to Kung Lao’s head (he can even teleport to the hat, which is helpful for controlling a fight or… getting out of a party early). [Sam Barsanti]

If anyone ever questions you on the versatility of the English language, just point them toward “telefrag,” a term that got its start in the world of first-person shooters, and which reached an apotheosis with the Translocator from the long-running Unreal Tournament series of multiplayer shooters. A wrist-mounted weapon/tool that fires, and then teleports the player to, little disc-shaped beacons, the Translocator is a fine way to move quickly around a map—but it’s a great way to murder an enemy, via teleporting your body messily inside theirs. (Hence “telefrag,” one of the bloodiest and chunkiest portmanteaus in all of gaming.) [William Hughes]

There’s one sound that Super Smash Bros. players have been taught to fear, and it goes a little something like this: Doo d-d-doo doo doo doo doo doo. That’s more or less the jingle associated with the Hammer from Smash Bros., with the item and the song both coming from the original Donkey Kong game. Like in its first appearance, the Hammer makes the user extremely powerful and effectively invincible (though Hammers sometimes break in Smash Bros., leaving you very vulnerable), but perhaps its more important utility is as a weapon of psychological warfare: A player with a non-broken Hammer can control the entire battlefield, if only for seven or eight seconds. [Sam Barsanti]

From a visual point of view, the weapon your digital avatar wields while fighting its way through the computerized worlds of 2001's Rez is hardly anything: a targeting reticle, a climbing hit counter, a few somewhat snazzy beams of light. But sonically, it’s sublime: the little -tsk- as it locks on to enemies, the rising tones as the counter goes up, and then the musical sting as you unleash a store of homing musical energy. Each sound, designed to work with the pulsing background track of whatever level you’re floating through. Almost subconsciously, you find yourself tuning into the rhythm, timing your shots, not to the patterns of your foes, but to the groove—the perfect achievement of the game’s synesthetic goals. [William Hughes]

Let’s be honest, if you press Start on a game titled The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you’re not getting shocked by a bit of overkill. Granted, for a gamma-irradiated behemoth that can casually grab a military tank by the muzzle and send it hurtling toward a flying chopper, ripping a sedan in half and wearing the resultant bisected lumps of metal, wiring, and imitation leather as gauntlets might seem a bit redundant—is Bruce worried about sore knuckles, or what? But at the same time it’s precisely that needless extravagance that fits perfectly with the feeling of unbridled strength so persuasively conveyed by the PS2 classic and justifies its existence in that power-trip of a game. After all, if Hulk wants to wear your Ford Focus in lieu of boxing gloves, are you about to object? [Alexander Chatziioannou]

It’s easy to laugh, or marvel, at the Portal Gun’s various absurd uses, but the ways it reflects is what has stuck with me. The second thing you do in Portal, after entering the titular doorway, is look at yourself through it. It’s like a mirror, but yet so unlike one, as you can watch “yourself” look away. It’s a perspective we will never have on our real bodies, photographs notwithstanding. We’re hardly the first critics to notice this, but it’s still the game’s most profound and subtle observation. After all the noise of mechanics and motion, we can’t get away from our bodies. [Grace Benfell]

Most of the weapons in Dead Space are ostensibly futuristic mining tools that just happen to be perfectly suited to severing the limbs of rampaging Necromorph monsters. And if severing limbs is your goal, few things are better suited than the Ripper—a weapon that launches spinning saw blades that hover a short distance from the user, or which can be propelled lethally across the room. Imagine the chainsaw from Doom (or any chainsaw, really) but the dangerous part extends out far enough that you can stop yourself from getting swarmed by bad guys. Or, you know, rocks and stuff. Because it’s supposed to be mining equipment and not a thing designed just to separate monsters from their limbs. It’s just very, very good at that. [Sam Barsanti]

Batman has a lot of wonderful toys in the Arkham series, like exploding gel (that he always applies in a bat shape) and the two-way Line Launcher that is something only Batman would find useful. But none of them are as fun as the Remote Control Batarang—a physics-flouting weapon that can be thrown and controlled in mid-air. Unlike the plain Batarang, which locks onto an enemy and just goes in the one direction, the Remote Control version can be manually targeted right at a bad guy’s butt, or piloted through air vent mazes to solve puzzles. You can even speed it up and slow it down as it spins through the air, which—again—doesn’t make a lick of sense. It doesn’t need to; he’s Batman. [Sam Barsanti]

There are a massive number of daggers, swords, axes, and other weapons you can find, craft, and upgrade in Bethesda’s 2011 open-world RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but one weapon you’ll always carry with you is the power of your voice. As the prophesied Last Dragonborn, your character is capable of using Dragon Shouts—unleashing magical effects by uttering words of power. The first you’ll unlock by following the main quest, and the game’s most iconic by far, is Fus Ro Dah, or Unrelenting Force, which allows you to knock foes back, ideally flinging them off cliffs to their deaths. The goofy power has been relentlessly parodied, but never better than in the 2014 RPG South Park: The Stick of Truth, where the player’s Dragonborn stand-in must learn to harness the devastating power of their farts instead. [Samantha Nelson]

Of the many improbable combatants in the Marvel Vs. Capcom franchise, few are more improbable-er than put-upon attorney, and all-around normie, Phoenix Wright—who spends his own (mostly text-based) games getting regularly smacked around both inside and outside the courtroom. The brilliance of Phoenix’s appearance in Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, though, is in how his fighting game moveset mirrors his arc in every case of the base series: Ineffectual at first, but then, as more Evidence is scooped up, growing increasingly powerful—until it’s time to spend all of said Evidence to unleash the series’ signature “Turnabout,” allowing a lost cause to rise from the ashes (and opening up the single most devastating Hyper Combo in the game, “Ace Attorney,” in the process). [William Hughes]

Perhaps we should re-classify gardening as an extreme sport. Pitchforks have been used as video game weapons at least since the 1985 version of Friday The 13th; shears have given us, in Clock Tower’s Scissorman, one of the most iconic antagonists in the medium; and, as everyone that’s played an adventure where you snoop in other people’s barns can attest to, rakes can be dangerous of their own volition. Perhaps Shovel Knight was a way of shining the spotlight on an unfairly overlooked farm implement? Whatever the impetus, Yacht Club Games has redressed the imbalance, equipping our hero with a multi-purpose bludgeon in the process, one he can also use for traversal (in the manner of a pogo stick, a la Scrooge McDuck’s cane from Capcom’s Ducktales, which would have fit right in on this list), defense (deflecting enemy missiles), and, more traditionally, digging for precious gems and nourishing carrots. [Alexander Chatziioannou]

The titular weapons of developer Sorath’s tightly crafted homage to Quake-style shooters is not an unusual video game weapon so much as it is all of them distilled. The entire cacophony of rocket-propelled grenades and shotgun blasts and machine gun patter sharpened into one knife’s edge. Every session of Devil Daggers is sharpening yourself against that knife, blasting against the ground to jump or steadily firing daggers into the black abyss. Besides the demon things you kill, the dagger, and what it makes of you, are all you see. Your body, with its raised fingers, is merely an extension of this new horror, this alluring curse that drags you back through hell. [Grace Benfell]

The best assassinations in the Hitman series aren’t the ones that Agent 47 executes himself—the garroting, the drowning in a toilet, whatever. They’re the ones that seem like bizarre twists of fate, where you’d never know that 47 had been there at all if not for the goons stripped down and stuffed into dumpsters. To that end, the Explosive Golf Ball is one of the greatest tools of the hitman trade. You can throw it like a grenade (if you’re not a true artist of murder), but the real joy is casually putting it in place of a real golf ball belonging to your 1 percenter asshole target as they prepare to shag a few balls and then just… leaving. Pack up your stuff, head for the door, and wait for the boom. [Sam Barsanti]

Dropmix, the enormously fun card game created by the Rock Band developers at Harmonix, is simply too cool for this world. Using an expensive cyberpunk-ass board that connects to your phone, you play cards that trigger different audio tracks that are then combined into a new song. So you can play a card with, for example, the drumbeat from “The Mother We Share,” the strings from “Call Me Maybe,” the guitar from “Take Me Out,” and the horn part from “Fireball,” and Dropmix’s tech is so good that it’ll sound pretty awesome. But then there are special cards, the ones that will remix everything else around themselves to dominate the track—the greatest and most powerful of which is “Down With The Sickness” by Disturbed. Imagine having the power to instantly ruin any song with an “OOH AH AH AH AH,” and you’ll know what a real video game destructive power is. [Sam Barsanti]

Many of the “weapons” in Tom Francis’ deeply expressive spaceship-heist sim Heat Signature can double as tools—from exotic teleporters and hacking devices down to the humble wrench. But none are more deadly, or more fun to exploit, than a single pane of glass that probably shouldn’t have been installed on a ship traveling through deep space in the first place. There are few moments in gaming more satisfying than seeing that some over-powered, armored Heat Sig guard has gotten the drop on your plucky astro-rogue—only to realize they’re standing a few inches too close to a window, allowing you to hurl the both of you out into the void with a well-aimed shot. You’ve got a spacesuit and a remote controlled ship to come pick you up; they don’t. Have a nice death in vacuum, dumb-dumb. [William Hughes]

ZA/UM’s stunningly beautiful Disco Elysium is not, on the whole, a violent game. But it does contain some moments of shocking violence, and when they happen, it always helps to have fashion on your side. Given that the bumbling, drunken, amnesiac detective you play as in DE has managed to lose his gun by the time the game starts, it’s completely possible that you’ll come to the game’s most deadly encounter ostensibly unarmed. But no man is truly defenseless when he has a garish necktie—one that whispers to you as you walk through the war-torn streets of Revachol, encouraging you to (among other things), buy a bottle of almost pure alcohol to dunk the tie into to make a makeshift Molotov cocktail. Deployed at the right moment, in the right way, this surreal, goofy, absurd object can save a number of lives—not unlike its unconventional, but potentially heroic, owner. [William Hughes]