Shovel Knight is remarkable in many regards, but let’s not let that get to the guy's head. He might have turned up on our consoles with a choice of weaponry that could be described as "unconventional", but it’s by no means the weirdest Xbox has to offer. The following list is but a snapshot of the sum total of imaginative, unsettling or plain stupid ways we’ve been given to hurt people in fantasy lands - some of which are among the .
Bayonetta’s hair is part-clothing, part-weapon and part-demon portal. The macabre forms of Hell’s most powerful denizens emerge from her scalp to dismember angels. There’s no easy way to explain how weird this is in practice, so let me put it this way – she also uses bazookas powered by the soul of a character from Apocalypse Now, and they didn’t make the list.
Tedious spiritual types will tell you that “true strength comes from within.” To be fair to them, that point is somewhat proven by this, the Sniper’s last unlock – a mason jar filled with his own urine. Not only does it weaken those doused, it’s also an efficent roleplaying tool for outraged music festival attendees.
In a series with both tens of playable characters and a wanton disregard for responsible history teaching, there was always going to be a point at which a character just carried around Sun Tzu’s famous tactics manual/’80s business bombshell and use it to summon ghosts. This is that point.
While an artefact that spontaneously gives Dante gloves, thruster boots and an enchanted SCUBA mask doesn’t stray too far outside of the series’ penchant for weirdness, the fact that practically all of its moves are drawn from Bruce Lee films or Capcom fighting games is a bit odd. He’s essentially wearing a website list feature – we’re going to sue.
On the surface, there are far stranger concoctions in the Dead Rising series, but this has an endearing simplicity. It’s a bomb, and it’s massive. So massive you can’t put it in your inventory – you cart it to its endpoint, lob it, and wipe out a city block. And blow all of lead character, Nick Ramos' clothes off in the process.
The majority of tower defence games are content to give you a castle that conveniently parps out siege weapons. This undersung XBLA offering swaps all that for a sentient rock plonked to earth by the hand of God, to roll down hills and try to destroy priceless works of art given Terry Gilliam-esque life.
Boganella is a pink shotgun that talks to you in an Australian accent. Well, swears at you. She swears at you for firing her, she swears at you extra-loudly for swapping her out for another gun, and she gets – er – excited when you reload her (which she indicates by swearing at you).
Bethesda RPGs are notable for their preponderance of junk. We’ll spend hours carting around candlesticks and forks until we realise they’re useless – but this weapon finally gives them meaning. Quickly unencumber yourself by firing the prized possessions of those you’ve robbed out the front of a vacuum-powered cannon.
Bows are ten-a-penny in video games these days, but the Stranger’s version comes with a twist. This wrist-mounted ballista fires a selection of chittering alien beasts, from body-less chipmunks to spiders that crap out immobilizing webs in (entirely reasonable) surprise at being used as ordnance. Lara Croft’s nothing until she’s twanging whole wolves at enemies.
This long-forgotten third-person shooter was probably the start and end of the action-comedy genre – a sad fact given how brilliant this weapon was. There’s little more satisfying than pointing at an enemy and having them bitten in half. It’s so good, in fact, that the Saint’s Row devs stole this idea wholesale. Bunch of chum-bags.
Inadvertently the creepiest addition to our list. One of the few redeeming features of this half-baked game was the ability to equip a cartoon unicorn who farts catastrophic rainbows when you lift his tail. But look at the pain on Toots’ face – this is clearly non-consensual misuse of a magical arse. Don’t they have laws on Mars?
You can make this one at home. Just get a standard “big foam hand” from any good sporting event, then point it at people and childishly mutter “bang bang bang” or “pew pew pew”. All you need to do then is work out some way of making your targets’ limbs fall off once you’ve done so.
Perhaps a spiritual predecessor to Shovel Knight, this XBLA action platformer also swaps out traditional weapons for something we keep in the shed and try to forget about. Brooms serve the double purpose of vanquishing enemies and, well, sweeping up dust (albeit in the kind of style you’d expect from a Hong Kong kung fu movie character)
Johnson is a weapon in more ways than one. He’s an irritating, levitating British skull who also serves as every one of lead character Garcia Hotspur’s guns, and becomes a game-long source of dick jokes. Oh, and just to quadruple down, some of those gun names are dick jokes too – just in case you didn’t get it.
Context is all. In most action titles, a crossbow would be a mid-game stealth option – at best a one-shot kill machine provided you get a headshot. But in an RPG where most weapons are either turds or twigs, the ability to fire high-velocity bolts into people’s abdomens suddenly becomes a very strange thing indeed.
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