Angry Gaming 01.21.08: A Farewell to Arms

Posted by Damian Sarcuni on 01.21.2008

Modern weapons research sucks. Here are three game-inspired weapons we’d like to see.

Welcome to Angry Gaming, the New England Patriots that reign down fire and brimstone on the rest of the gaming industry's NFL. I am your hate master, Damian Sarcuni, and my pet chocobo is growing up to be quite a fine bird. WARK!


A Farewell to Arms

Counter-Terrorists win!

Ah bloody hell, it happened yet again. I've been playing Counter-Strike for years now and I still don't have the skills to handle an AWP rifle, even as a terrorist on the cs_italy map. The longest running first person shooter of all time, and little kids who just picked it up a month or two ago are beating me mercilessly. It's a disgrace!

Ok, I admit it, I'm not exactly the sharpest shot in the world. But is it really entirely my fault? In order to be more realistic, games like Counter-Strike and Call of Duty add heavy recoil to all of their weapons, making it harder to aim a spray of bullets in a concentrated area. In fact, this is one of the selling points of most first person shooters, as guns that don't kick back are considered "cheap" to use in this day and age.

It goes to show just how screwed up our global mentality is. We look down on gamers who aren't able to handle the rampant recoil of most weaponry, but we think nothing of where it all comes from in the first place. The real life guns of today do have that recoil after all, and while it may be greatly reduced from the barrel loaded pistols of the past, its not exactly up to date weaponry.

I mean come on; a kid today can get drafted into the US military, get put on the front lines of battle and never so much as have to dodge a single bullet. Today's wars are fought with radar guidance systems, lock on mechanisms, and missiles that can cross a continent in minutes. Private Johnny doesn't always have his head in the trenches anymore. Now he spends quite a bit of time booting up his windows PC, clicking the "LAUNCH ROCKETS" button the same as any of us do when playing Xbox. That's all well and good because there is nothing wrong with taking the sting out of war for the poor bastards stuck in it (even though most of the whiney, techno-savvy soldiers of today still have a penchant for whining about non-existent traumatic experiences). But if we're able to nuke a country using just our Cisco routers and White House emergency phone lines, can't we at least do something to make the grunt's pistols fire in a straight line, every time?



Apparently not, or we would have seen this technology developed by now. We've seen it in enough video games already; maybe not in Call of Duty but certainly in Unreal Tournament. If you can dream it, you can create it, given enough resources and time. Unfortunately, modern weapons research sucks and the really cool weapons in video games are nothing but figments of the imagination. Well, that's no fun. So here are three video game inspired weapons that we'd like to see created in real life.


Soul Calibur – Ivy Valentine Sword



So you're cornered in a dark alley by about three local gang bangers who have successfully chased you down in an attempt to remove you from your wallet and possibly your anal virginity. They smile and laugh, but they aren't even closing in on you. They don't have to, because they are armed to the teeth with unregistered guns of all shapes and sizes. They lift their silver pieces at you and suddenly you're staring down the barrel of not just one but three .45's. What to do?

Well you could always pull out the sword you've had strapped to your back the whole time, but that might just make your assailants laugh even harder. Unfortunately, Star Wars is fictional and so are light sabers. There's no way your mere metal is going to deflect the oncoming hail of bullets bound for your skull, and even if you had a laser sword, odds are you wouldn't be fast enough to parry them all.



So imagine their shock and surprise when, using a plain old steel blade with a mere flick of the wrist, you separate their heads and arms from their bodies all at the same time in a flash. Little did the poor fools realize you're sword wasn't just any old toy replica. You've got the Ivy Sword, made popular by everyone's favorite dominatrix Isabella Valentine in the Soul Calibur series. For those of you who haven't seen it, this is a simple sword that packs a simple ability…it extends to lengths that would floor even Ron Jeremy.

Ivy's sword comes can basically switch between three lengths. Sword mode, whip mode, and holy-Christ-its-the-apocalypse-of-thorns mode. That last one is the longest. Ivy fashioned her sword out of an Asian chain whip, which will run you about $35 on Amazon.com. She then glued razor blades to the edges, which for the sake of size argument we'll say should cost another $30. The problem comes in when Ivy infused her sword with black magic. Leave it to a feminazi bitch to take the easy way out. Ivy's magic allows her sword to expand and retract at will, and to replicate that we need to call on science for help. Your best bet is to jury-rig a bungee cord to the chain whip to give it that extra stretchy effect when you lunge forward. Getting it to twirl around in a flurry of pure death is another story altogether, but hopefully R&D teams will answer our prayers.


Marvel VS Capcom – Photon Cannon



Any good science fiction fan knows that true power comes not in the form of big muscles or ballistic weaponry, but rather from unstoppable, relentless beams of pure light that decimate everything in their path. It was the choice weapon of every alien from those in Independence Day to those in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists have speculated that you might see something similar if you were ever unfortunate enough to be at ground zero when a nuclear bomb hit. A bright white flash would envelope your being, and you would painlessly cease to exist along with everything else in a 500 mile radius.

Photon cannon's create this unrepentant light as well. We've seen it from the wannabe Iron Man cliché in Marvel VS Capcom known as War Machine. Basically, War Machine has the ability to summon the mother of all hulking machinery's onto his shoulder at any giving time during a fight (provided his super move meter is at level 1 or higher of course). He then pulls the trigger on the existence purification device that we call the photon cannon, and obliterates anything unfortunate enough to be in his way. Before anyone corrects me by the way, War Machine's weapon might actually be called the "PROTON cannon", but I couldn't find any information on a real life proton cannon. Besides, it's all the same brilliant white obliteration beam in the end.



How do you make it? I haven't the slightest clue. Some unnamed guy on wiki.answers.com posted this little summary of how the mother of all death beams should work in theory:

A photon can be considered as the vibrational energy with a certain frequency (the duality of light), and thus the photons with the same frequency can interact with each other by overlapping to achieve maximal magnitude of vibration. Assuming billions of the same-colored photons overlap the same way and form a single photo possessing gigantic amount of energy, once released to target, the photon could cause conceivable damage. In my opinion, a photon cannon should be different from laser gun where population inversion is required to achieve more excited state photon generating species. A photon cannon theoretically can be powered by electricity or light (laser).

I'm not sure whether or not any of that is a legitimate description, but it certainly sounds good enough for me. I will actually argue against his theory of photons causing "conceivable" damage though. Conceivable?! We don't have time for conceivable damage! The whole point of building this damn thing is so that it will cause INconceivable damage, preferably to anyone foolhardy enough to get close in an attempt to reverse engineer it for themselves. Sorry Kim Jong il, this baby belongs to America!


Mario Kart – Red Homing Shells



On my way to a party this weekend, I found myself staring far too closely through my windshield at one of those huge ass Infiniti QX series SUV's that guido's parents buy for their birthdays. The driver was clearly high, and paranoid. Well, either that or his hair gel had seeped through the pores of his scalp and fried his brain. The point being, he was going slowly. VERY slowly. And of course we were on a highway ramp so I had no way of getting around him. When we managed to get into a normal street, he repeatedly blocked me as I attempted to get around him, then started to speed away.

I was able to stay with him pretty easily, but found myself caught between his sorry stare down (he had nothing better to do than ride alongside me and stare) and some other guy's blue semi-pickup. I easily remedied the situation Initial D style, slamming on my brakes and fading around him into his blind spot and speeding past before he had a chance to realize where I was. Considering I drive a Dodge Neon, the shame I cast down upon his brand new luxury vehicle should probably last a few generations.



Still, I wouldn't have HAD to pull off that little race maneuver if I had the weapons cache of someone like Mario in my car. In Mario Kart's various incarnations, Mario and his boys have always had the convenient ability to remove unwanted traffic through the power of dreaded shells and banana peel. By shell, I don't mean that of a shotgun but that of a turtle. Yes, Mario throws shells at people and knocks them off the road. This is pure genius, and one shell stands out above the rest: the mighty red homing shell.

Traffic jam? No sweat, just fire up three of Mario's patented reds and you've got options. You can either fire off these babies one by one at the poor souls in front of you, oblivious to the doom about to befall them, or you can simply ram into them and watch as they squeal in agony while you drive away unharmed, your shell having taken all of the damage. We NEED bigger versions of these things! Mario drives go karts, not cars, so modern weapons makers would have to size up the shells and make them compatible with today's automobiles. Oh, and just FYI, red homing shells don't seek out their targets by magic at all. While digging around online I chanced upon US Patent 4397430, a simplified homing system for a missile of the SHELL or rocket type. All we have to do is craft a large red shell big and strong enough to cave in a slow moving Geo Prism, and stick the patented homing device into it. The road will be ours from that day on, my friends.


The Anger

Alright alright, so maybe it isn't cool to sit around dreaming up new devices to bring about pain, destruction and death to anyone who even annoys you slightly. Hell, if there is a link between video games and violence then it's probably that games increase our warmongering creativity ten fold. But what the hell, we didn't come up with these weapons, we just want to see them in our lifetime. They are awfully convenient after all, and like any volatile substance can do a great amount of good in the right hands…namely mine. Until next time, embrace the hatred.