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Author: OHakubi

Jan 7th 2010 at 12:20:07 PM

I'm not sure if most conventional melee weapons (i.e. stuff that *really* pales in comparison to the rest of your arsenal) would be part of this simply because they're meant to be a last resort, which is to say, ideally never used.  There's a difference between running yourself out of ammo and having to club dudes to death because you're a horrible shot and/or don't know to conserve ammo and having the game give you a bad weapon and look at you expectantly like it just did you a favor.  Although that bad weapon could be the default melee weapon depending on how much emphasis the game places on using it, so.

Anyway.

* The upgraded Lava Gun from Ratchet And Clank: Going Commando.  The basic weapon fired a steady stream of molten rock, was one of the best guns to use when you were surrounded (hold down button, spin, watch things burn) and was generally very powerful overall.  The upgrade turned it into a burning rock machine gun, which basically did the same thing as another one of your weapons (the Lancer), except it fired more slowly, had less range and shot in a low parabolic arc.  Fortunately Insomniac realized what they did and changed the final upgrade to the Liquid Nitrogen Gun in Up Your Arsenal, having it keep its elemental bukkake properties from beginning to end.

* Mines usually fall into this category in single-player games, such as the trip mines from Duke Nukem 3D and the first Half-Life, due to their being defensive weapons in games where you're usually on the offensive.  If you plan on using them your options are either setting up a trap and luring enemies into it (at which point it's usually just easier to shoot them) or putting them in select points to stop ambushes (but you'd only know that the ambushes were coming if you had prior knowledge of the game, making the "ambush" a moot point).

* The grenade launcher from Kingpin: Life of Crime.  Most grenade launchers either fire grenades that explode on contact with enemies, hold more than three rounds in a magazine, let you carry more than 18 rounds total (especially if the game's bazooka has a clip of five shots and an ammo cap of *one hundred rockets*), take less than four seconds to explode, exist in games where enemies aren't smart enough to run like hell before the 'nade goes off or some combination of the above.  Kingpin's grenade launcher is not any of these things.  It's so bad that not even the AI can figure out how to kill you with it.