Awesome Arsenals – Perfect Dark
How this classic Nintendo game stretched the limits of weapon design
The 90’s era of video gaming brought us a plethora of incredible and unique weapons. Arguably, these games were the biggest sources of my creativity. When I first started drawing, my favorite thing to draw was firearms and other various, unique weaponry.
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There are plenty of games I’d love to cover that deserve praise in how they created their arsenal of weapons. Turok, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, Amid Evil, and countless more. Today, I wish to explore with you a few incredibly designed weapons from one of my favorite Nintendo 64 Games: Perfect Dark!
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Rocket Launcher: With a Camera Guided Option
Rocket launchers are a staple of any action shooter game. In most games, you can just fire rockets straight one at a time, and they explode, they destroy everything within its blast radius. What makes this one unique is the secondary feature. This rocket launcher has the option of guiding a missile through a camera where you can steer it around corners in a first-person camera. Most games now scrapped this camera rocket in favor of laser guided rockets or lock-on missiles. The main disadvantage of the camera guided rockets leaves your character standing still, making you an easy target to be picked off. While this may not have always been practical in its use, it was still extremely fun to use, and incredibly unique for its time. There was little more satisfying than seeing that final frame of your view catching up on your friend in a versus match right before blowing him to smithereens.
Laptop Gun – A Spy Weapon and an Automated Turret all in One!
Perfectly capturing the essence of action spy thrillers is the laptop gun, a gun that takes on the disguise of a personalized computer. It’s lightweight, has a high firing rate, and has a unique feature. The laptop gun can be configured as a turret that you can throw on any surface. This allows it to shoot at any threat autonomously. This was one of the earliest implementations of player-controlled turrets in video games, and it was extremely effective, especially in multiplayer. With your laptop gun raining fire upon a populated hallway, you can use another weapon to help rack up kills. Not only does it provide for more killing potential, but it forces enemy players to divert their attention towards it as a powerful means of distraction. Use of this weapon can also make players paranoid of where the next laptop gun would be mounted, compelled to check every corner.
Cyclone: A Unique Magazine Feeding Mechanism
The cyclone is a futuristic sub machine gun with a feature I’ve never seen replicated in any game to this day. While its firing abilities are mostly standard, the creative choice of reloading is what I’d like to highlight about it. Instead of having a magazine attached to the firearm, you instead feed it through a slot and ammo is delivered straight into its body, discarding the empty mag.
For safety and practical reasons, I can’t imagine how this weapon could be created in real life. However, this design is certainly one of a kind.
The secondary fire on this weapon unleashes the entire magazine in a prolonged burst at over double its normal firing rate. This was a highly risky option for suppressive fire and blitzing, giving you an “all or nothing” choice to put down your threat. Again, impractical and incredibly not safe, but fun!
K7 Avenger: The Crisp Firing Sound is the Cherry on Top!
The K7 Avenger, functionally, serves as a standard bull-pup assault rifle. What I find impressive about this lies in both the visual aesthetic, as well as the sound design. With its shiny, chrome skin and its many ridges, the futuristic vibe of this rifle makes it difficult to take your eyes off of.
Not only is it pleasing to the eyes, but the crisp punch of each round fired, and that snappy reload noise still echoes in my memory. The K7 Avenger may not be a unique firearm, but the artistic design has been perfected to a point to be memorable in its own right, which what makes this one so special.
Mauler: Alien Design Done Right!
The skedar arensal perfectly highlights their brutality. Their mauler is a pistol that captures their alien aesthetic wondrously, with a brutalist cold steel melding with its green colors, and a sharp magazine at the front. It can expend five round to fire a single powerful blast, depending how long you charge it. Visually, I feel this is one of the most impressive designs of the guns we’re covering here. It can be difficult to create an alien aesthetic when it comes to any form of technology. If done right, it should feel both foreign, yet strangely familiar. Here I feel it was done masterfully, along with the other alien weaponry in all of Perfect Dark.
Farsight XR-20: Aka, the X-Ray Gun
If you played this game, I’m sure you’ve seen this one coming. From a different series of alien weaponry, the maian Farsight is one of the most powerful weapons to wield, and one of the most frustrating guns to fight against. There are several maian weapons to list here too when it comes to design – their Neptunian style, aquamarine guns have this “living weapon feel” when you feed orbs into the guns through a strange membrane to reload them.
The Farsight is a railgun with the wholly special feature of being able to shoot through walls. With your x-ray scope, you can pick targets off while being several rooms apart. It made the player feel like he was cheating using this gun, and if playing against your peers, they’d agree. This was from an era before hackers ruining multiplayer games with external cheats, shooting players without even needing to see them. In Perfect Dark, this was the only gun that was capable of this feature, and what makes it the most iconic weapon in the series.
Thank you for reading! Let us know how classics like Perfect Dark shaped your tastes in the comments below!
The laptop turrets were incredible when we first played the game. That seemingly straightforward option unlocked so many strategies and expanded the thrill of the game. Split screen Perfect Dark soon surpassed Goldeneye for my group growing up.