History VideoGame / HotDogsHorseshoesAndHandGrenades

* DramaticGunCock: A required step to chamber the majority of the weapons, all faithful to their real sounds like the Single-Action Army's four-click hammer or the chunky sound of the [=M107A1=] and [=XM500=]. Cocking the hammer on handguns and double-action revolvers isn't necessary but it does provide a much lighter trigger pull.

* EverythingFades: Spent casings and shells can be configured to despawn on a delay or simply remain their until you clean the scene manually while Sosigs, Junkbots, and the earlier Wienerbots will despawn by exploding into a pile of LudicrousGibs. Unspent rounds, magazines, clips, speed loaders, and dropped weapons will remain until the player manually cleans the scene via their wrist menu. Impact decals, when enabled, have an upper limit before old ones are removed.

* DeathIsCheap: At least for the Sosigs. Anton confirms that the remains of slain Sosigs are simply ground up to create new ones with the same memories, hence why their death quips are more annoyed sounding rather than dejected.

* OurZombiesAreDifferent: Rotwieners, at least in their Sosig iteration. [[spoiler:Aside from obviously being hot dogs, they're the result of a Sosig's cognitive ability degrading without stimulation and the addition of a Meat Core turns them into the different Rotwieners you see throughout ''Return of the Rotwieners''.]]

* DoNotRunWithAGun: The Armswinger locomotion option winds up bringing this into play in a realistic manner as you have to be moving your controllers, making accuracy suffer on the move.

* BoringButPractical: Intermediate cartridges and just about any semi or fully automatic rifle that chambers it. A burst is enough to down most Sosigs and standard FMJ can rip through kevlar.

** The Remote Missile Launcher, true to [[VideoGame/MetalGearSolid the game it's inspired by]] is incredibly slow until you pull the trigger on the control stick.

* EnemyChatter: The sosigs have all sorts of quirky lines when idle, fighting, taking damage and even when dismembered. The [[VideoGame/TeamFortress2 Meat Fortress]] sosigs even get their own lines that parody the iconic lines of their respective classes. All voiced by Anton (excluding the Rotwieners [=NPCs=] that are voiced by someone else).
-->"You ever feel like you're being watched by, like, [[TakeThatAudience greasy folk with weird machines on their face?]]"
-->"That texture repeat is really obvious. [[SelfDeprecation Lazy dev...]]
-->(Dismembered)"Haha! I outnumber you!"

** The reworked Take & Hold allows you to use limited ammo, only allowing you to reload magazines, clips and speed-loaders at a specific panel sometimes found in supply points. You can spend override tokens to duplicate them at a different type of panel.

* FreezeRay: One of the alternate ammo types for the Soldier's Rocket Launcher in "Meat Fortress" is the "Rocket Pop", which causes Sosigs in the blast radius to be chilled, even slowing down their AI reaction time and making them more resistance to cutting damage but more vulnerable to blunt damage.

* SetAMookToKillAMook: Myra's Salty Pie in "Return of the Rotwieners" causes Rotwieners to attack each other. This also works on the friendly NPCs so be careful.

** The suppression Turburget variant in Return of the Rotwieners that guard the Pacification squad strongholds shoot flash-bang rounds (presumably the same 23x75mmR shells mentioned above).

* BorderPatrol: Before it was completed, Return of the Rotwieners had a giant, red X saying "STOP" to prevent access to unfinished areas of the game. Going past this would kill you instantly and using an invincibility wiener would spam you with freedomfetti and vomiting noises until you left or the effect wore off and you died.

* DiscOneNuke: Return of the Rotwieners had this at first, it was easy to complete the quest to set the giant beartraps and be rewarded with bolt-action rifles for subsequent runs but the last of which could either be the SV-98 or the ''[[{{BFG}} Arctic Warfare Magnum]]''. A patch changed this by making the third reward box, typically a Kimber 8400 Advanced Tactical or its short-barrel variant, the fourth with the AWM and SV-98 as a quest reward in the gun store in Downtown Wienerton.

* HollywoodHacking: What the new Take & Hold is presented as where you acquire override tokens to spend on equipment and the hold points have "encryption" (read: targets) that must be neutralized to complete a hold.

* RunningGag: In "Return of the Rotwieners," Myra's meat pie recipes constantly have notes of her saying that they need more salt, among other revisions.

** The fictional Scalpel-LE introduced on Day 23 of Meatmas 2018 takes this further with additional rails and a butt-plate to create a tacticool piece of kit or an abomination of meatkind. For a fictional weapon, Patrick Sutton did a remarkable job on the details, such as the [=ArmaLite=] style dust cover, the ammo counter on the magazines and even a latch on the left side of the shotgun that prevents the ammo counter from rotating backwards.

** "Meat Grinder" and "Take & Hold: Containment" has laser tripwire mines in the hallways that pulsed on and off in a pattern but could also be shot at to detonate them.

** "Take & Hold: Containment" often had laser tripwire mines in the hallways that pulsed on and off in a pattern but could also be shot at to detonate them.

* MagneticWeapons: The [[Film/BladeRunner LAPD 2019]] can activate a "Railgun Assisted" mode once a battery is inserted, greatly increasing the velocity and force of rounds fired from it at the risk of {{Overheating}}. The [[Series/{{Firefly}} Moses Brothers Self-Defense Engine Frontier Model B]] is implied to be some sort of gauss gun or rail gun as the rounds it fires are no bigger than the .41 rocketball rounds fired by the Volcanic Repeater.

* RandomTransportation: The "Somewhere?", "Where'd I Go?", and "Here I Go" power up sausages in "Return of the Rotwieners" transports you to a random location in the scene.

* WarpWhistle: The "Hometown" power up sausage in "Return of the Rotwieners" instantly takes you back to the Honey Hamlet when eaten.

** Belt-fed machine guns also avert this compared to other games where you can see the last of the belt leave the box. You can even detach the empty box and replace it so you're ready to load the new belt in once you fire the rest of the current one.

** This iteration of Meatmas, much like 2017, also takes the chance to make fun of the RevenueEnhancingDevices that [[VideoGame/TeamFortress2 two]] [[VideoGame/CounterStrike specific]] games make heavy use of in that you can buy and sell "gun hats" on the "SMEME Marketplace", some of the rarer ones go for ludicrous prices. You only win crates every time you finish a game in the Cappocolosseum so how do you earn more G-Bucks for keys, hats and more crates? Why work less than minimum wage for the Gronch, of course!

''Hot Dogs, Horseshoes, and Hand Grenades'' (often abbreviated ''[=H3VR=]'') is a Virtual Reality gun range simulator developed for multiple VR headsets (Creator/{{Valve|Software}} Index, UsefulNotes/HTCVive, UsefulNotes/OculusRift and Windows Mixed Reality) by developer RUST LTD. It's currently in early access and can be purchased on Steam [[http://store.steampowered.com/app/450540/ here]].

* ApocalypticLog: Meatmas 2020 adds a new scene for the advent calendar in which you traverse a vast wasteland to find the vaults containing each day's new weapon and also find and listen to audio logs to know how it came to be.

* The gift drop of Meatmas 2021 brings in the [=Mk19=] belt-fed grenade launcher, in typical sosig-portable configuration like the M2 Tombstone.

** The only weapons that are almost completely silent are specialist weapons like the [=DeLisle=] (a conversion of a Lee Enfield that takes 1911 magazines with a large integral suppressor), the Welrod Mk. IIA (a handgun that uses a series of rubber wipes to seal gasses and is meant for point-blank assassination), and the [=OTs-33=] (a revolver whose cartridges contain a piston that propels the round and self-seals the casing).

** Near misses from enemy bullets have a Hollywood "zwoosh!" noise as he considers supersonic cracks to be too harsh on the ears.

** Another aversion is that these will not work on any revolver with the sole exception of the Nagant M1895 due to the unique gas seal mechanism. Suppressing it winds up making it quiet to the point you can hear the hammer striking the pin. The [[HandCannon BFR]] revolver introduced in Update 77 Alpha 1 can also be suppressed due to its tiny cylinder gap.
** Update 82 gives us the Mk 22 Mod 0 "Hushpuppy" and two goofy suppressors, a [[PillowSilencer duct taped bottle and an oil filter]], along with adding two inversions which are a loudener and a muzzle-attached bike horn that honks with each shot.

* RemovingTheHeadOrDestroyingTheBrain: In the completed version of Return of the Rotwieners, decapitating or destroying a Rotwiener's head will count as a kill. However their heads flop around as they run, making the torso a more reliable target. Alternatively, a Rotwiener can be killed by letting it bleed out, making .22LR rounds and especially hollow point rounds effective.
** Early versions {{averted}} this; zombie sosigs were more than capable of functioning without a head.

* SniperScopeSway: Present but, again, in a realistic manner. Even with three-point stabilization with the virtual stock, the crosshairs on optics will be noticeably shaky but there are ways to steady yourself both in game, such as bipods, and in real life, such as holding your breath, and crouching or going prone. In-fact, Anton even recommends getting a physical table to set your arms down on if you need additional stabilization. Update 100 added two toggle options for stabilization; general hand smoothing and "sniping assist" which can either be always on or activated by holding the trigger with your forward hand on a two-handed weapon.

* SniperScopeSway: Present but, again, in a realistic manner. Even with three-point stabilization with the virtual stock, the crosshairs on optics will be noticeably shaky but there are ways to steady yourself both in game, such as bipods, and in real life, such as holding your breath, and crouching or going prone. In-fact, Anton even recommends getting a physical table to set your arms down on if you need additional stabilization.

* HolidayMode: Every year around December has featured a form of "Meatmas" with every even year being an advent calendar with new weapons added every day and every odd year [[TakeThat being a jab]] at video game microtransactions along with a gift drop on Meatmas Day in both instances. The only aversion to the tradition was 2021 due to the stress Anton was under at the time but it still contained a gift drop on the 25th.

* MagnetHands: You can never lose grip of any object you're carrying unless it was either a [[GatlingGood minigun fired one-handed]] or a stunned Sosig that regains their senses as you're carrying them. This is especially true with the control scheme on Vive where you squeeze the trigger once to pick up most weapons and then squeeze the grip buttons to drop them which, compared to other VR controllers, are not the easiest to keep held down.