Guns that don’t shoot bullets

We almost picked the healing beam, but decided it’s far too helpful and not nearly painful enough. Thus the syringe gun, which shoots syringes, is our favorite Team Fortress 2 gun that doesn’t shoot bullets. It’s like getting a lifetime of vaccines in just a few seconds, but only if those vaccines also kill you.




What exactly this weapon shoots, we don’t know. But it delivers what the name promises. Like putting a wet shirt in the dryer on high and cranking way past the “optimum dry” setting, things hit with a shrinker come out small. After that, it’s just a matter of scraping them off your boot.  

The expander became available with the Plutonium Pack expansion for Duke Nukem. As an alternate fire for the same piece of hardware, it also delivers what it promises: expanding enemies to nearly twice their normal size before they explode and both damage and gross out anyone standing nearby. It’s kinda how we all hope to die.

This gun fires a cow that lands ass-first on your opponent’s head. Cow butt partially obscures your enemy’s vision (and inflicts damage).

Never the most popular weapon, or even the most effective, of the Halo series, but it doesn’t shoot bullets and you know what it is, so we’re using it. The needler fires a volley of magenta needles that tepidly seek out their targets. If you stick something enough times with these pretty pink pricklies, the needles get excited and explode. We’d say that makes these oddly functioning needles some of the weirdest ammo on our list, though not the funniest.


Above: Nothing funny about this


The ripper is technically the circular saw of the future, which makes it a tool and not a gun, but its secondary fire shoots a sawblade in a straight line. So until someone proves it’s actually a helpful function for those hard to reach 2x4s you don’t have time to walk across the room to cut, we’re going to classify the ripper as both a saw and a gun whether the Dead Space writers like it or not.

The ripper’s primary fire shoots a saw blade that spins rapidly, disconnected from any other hardware, about six feet from the licensed engineer for several seconds. But don’t mistake this for an enchanted piece of building equipment. Dead Space is sci-fi, so it’s science (not magic) that allows someone using the ripper to manipulate the blade of the saw without being close enough to clearly see what he’s cutting. It also eliminates the need to wear safety goggles.




A weapon so advanced that even our own military didn’t know it exists, the ray gun was the best zombie liquefying technology available in WWII - or rather, not available. You can only get this gun by getting lucky in Nazi Zombie mode or through cheats in single-player mode.

Presumably, this advanced technology could only be an alien weapon sent down to earth to help the Allies defend the human race from the inevitable zombie outbreak (and the Nazis/Japanese). That is, if game lore is to be believed, which, as in any historically based shooter, it should be.