The 5 Most Fun Things You Can Do With Bad Video Game Weapons

So in order to keep you entertained though the 20-hour slog of story endurance, you get increasingly awesome ways to teach Todd to watch where the hell he's standing: battle hammers, axes, maces, halberds, and uh ... brooms?

You thwacked that guy with a broom so hard blood flew out. Remember that force equals mass times acceleration, so that straw has to be travelling at relativistic speeds. Here's that same broom, bludgeoning the Catholic out of a guy wearing full plate mail:

You probably never bothered with it, but the broom in Assassin's Creed II is a magic death machine that can be found everywhere, never breaks, and can even slit a guy's throat:

How the hell are you supposed to take out an enormous elder god who opens portals to Hell at will? The answer is, you aren't. He gets defeated in a cutscene, where Sean Bean morphs into a dragon and rips his throat out, heroically sacrificing himself. Wait, we already said it was Sean Bean; the sacrifice is implied.

Your only less-than-heroic interaction with Dagon is to run between his legs, resisting the urge to glance up and catch an upskirt of the devil, in order to get the cutscene to start. You're welcome to try to fight him, but attacking an immortal 300-foot god when you're just a level-12 cat-person is about as effective as attacking a functional social life when you're a level-12 cat-person. No matter how long you wail on him with your Longsword Of Misspent Time, it won't make a difference. The creators of the game made him as indestructible as a fratboy's self-confidence.

Unless you kept one seemingly trivial item from a random side-quest. While Dagon is the main god stirring up shit in Oblivion, he's by no means the only one. Sheogorath, the God Of Madness, gives you whimsical and nonsensical quests, like the one where you make it literally rain cats and dogs. The reward for that one is a mage's staff called Wabbajack. It's just a fun novelty item: Swinging it randomly turns any enemy into a different enemy. Fighting a bandit? Hit him with Wabbajack! Might turn him into a sheep ... or it might turn him into hideous spiked-tentacle beast from beyond who's got a big-boy crush on your orifices. Either way, the enemy returns to full health after being transformed -- so it isn't terribly useful in the actual game.

Most adventurers screw around with the Wabbajack for a while, and then ditch it in their junk drawer when it's time to get down to business. But what if, against all reason, you kept it with you, and decided to use this glorified party trick against King Fuck Of The Hell Dimension?

Yes, the invincible god of fire and stomping just up and melts. Mehrunes can deal with any amount of damage, but the Wabbajack doesn't deal damage, it rewrites its target's stats. He doesn't know how to deal with this, so he just opts out of existence. Bethesda probably didn't plan for this -- you don't get a special ending thanking you for being a jackass; the game doesn't know what to do after this. But still, it feels poetic that the Achilles' heel of the super-serious Prince Of Destruction himself is "tomfoolery."

That water gun fight is controllable, by the way: you can use the gun, and stealth mechanics, to soak your friend. It's a fun little diversion before zombies come and ruin it all. Caught off guard, Ellie and company are largely helpless. If only they had a shotgun, a flamethrower, a baseball bat -- something!

Oh right, the water gun! No seriously, one player hacked the game and discovered that the zombies shared a secret weakness with the aliens from Signs: poor scripting.

If that splash of weirdly rendered water hits any enemy, they fall over dead almost instantly. Add to that the fact that the water pistol has an area of effect, like a shotgun, plus infinite ammo -- and the best weapon in The Last Of Us is a goddamn brightly colored plastic squirt gun.

Now, maybe the shopkeeper assumes that where there's a ball there's a bat, or maybe your character can throw super hard -- but more likely, the game just wasn't programmed to differentiate between "harmless ball" and "lethal hand grenade" when an item is equipped to the throw slot. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same: you walk around town with an elbow cocked and the entire city is fucking terrified of your devastating fastball.

Ed would like to thank his sister for her help with The Last Of Us, and for her patience whilst he prattled on about game plots.

For ways the developers are messing with us, read 5 Video Game Easter Eggs That Were Absurdly Hard To Find and 6 Video Game Easter Eggs Developers Didn't Want You To Find.

And be sure to check out 9 Types Of Coworkers To Make You Want Your Head To Explode, and let us know about other headsplosion-worthy employees we may have missed.

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