IGN posted a Top Ten of the best videogame weapons of all time, and I couldn’t believe they got things so wrong. (thanks, Josh, for input)

The Real Top Ten Videogame Weapons of All Time

Honorable Mention: Zerglings – The easiest, cheapest, most n00berific “weapon” in Starcraft is so popular it has spawned a whole new verb. Anytime you’re rushed by large numbers of small annoyances, whether in WoW or RoN, you’ve been zerged.

10. Buster Sword – Silly looking, but powerful, and perfect for the future setting of what many argue is the best Final Fantasy ever. Me, I like Final Fantasy VI (or 3, if you’re not as cool as I am), but I did love playing the classic story of Cloud and his rebels. You need a big sword to take down Sephiroth, and Cloud had it.

9. Fireballs – Mario’s hands and feet were powerful weapons in themselves, but you were never so powerful as when you had eaten the flashing flower. The best was when you brought fire into the water levels, and were able to grill you up some fish. Until you touched one, that is. That shrinking sound still gives me nightmares.

8. Red Shell – There is almost no greater joy in the universe than using a red shell in Mario Kart to take out an opponent right before you sneak ahead of them and cross the finish line.

7. RCP-90, The Klobb – Everyone loved the RCP-90 in Goldeneye, but I was a big fan of the Klobb. Not because it was a good weapon or anything (the aiming was terrible, and it was weaksauce), but because whenever I killed someone with it, I could yell “It’s Klobberin’ time!”

6. MP5, AWP – The MP5, most have learned, is the cheapest, most reliable weapon you can pick up in CounterStrike. No matter how much your team sucks, you can still afford to do some damage with it. But no weapon is more cursed (and loved by AWPing bastards) than the most expensive and powerful sniper rifle in the game.

5. Snarks – Even disregarding CS, Half-Life was home to some terrific weapons. The Crowbar could very well have made an appearance on this list, as could have the RPG or the laser mines (which could have appeared here for Goldeneye, come to think of it). But no weapon was as charming or as hilarious in HL as the Snark. It had the best animation, too– it tried to bite you even as you held it. And it gave rise to one of the most fun mods ever, Snark Wars.

4. Gravity Gun – Sure, the Havoc physics engine in HL2 was cool, but you hadn’t seen nothing until you picked up the gun (a.k.a. the “Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator”) and played catch with Dog. And after that, the game wasn’t so much a war against the Combine as a set of objects you could pick up and throw around. After the gun gets infused with Dark Energy, it’s all over but the tossing.

3. The Redeemer – Whenever I played an Unreal Tournament level with the Redeemer in it, I usually spent a good deal of time just trying to get this thing, and fly it remotely into the enemy’s faces. And as fun as the gun itself was, I had even more fun playing with the Dr. Strangelove mod– a mod that lets you ride that rocket directly into the supernova sized explosion that comes with it.

2. The Chainsaw – Flashback to around 1986. I’m just a kid, and I’m over at my friend’s house on his computer. “It’s a computer game called Doom,” he tells me. “And you can hit these guys with a chainsaw!” I didn’t believe it until I saw it.

1. The BFG9000 – But no weapon in videogames has been as popular or caused as much amazement as the ol’ BFG. Why is it so popular? Could it be the weird and wonderful model for it? Or maybe the crazy green plasma it decimates a room with? Here’s the description from Wikipedia for what a BFG actually does:

When firing the BFG9000, there is a pause of exactly 6/7 of a second (about 857 milliseconds) before a green plasma ball is ejected. If the plasma ball hits a solid object, it explodes and causes between 100 and 800 points of damage on that object. After a further pause of exactly 16/35 of a second (about 457 milliseconds), blast damage is calculated: 40 invisible rays are emitted by the player in a cone-shaped area (about 45° half-angle) in the direction the plasma ball was fired (if the player has turned around, the direction of the blast damage rays don’t change – they are still traced in the direction of firing of the original plasma ball; if he has moved around, their origin changes). Each ray causes 49 to 87 damage points if it hits a solid object. Therefore the minimal damage of the weapon is 49 points of damage (if an object is hit by one ray and not the plasma ball) and hypothetical maximal damage of the weapon is 800 + (40 × 87) = 4280 points of damage (if the plasma ball hits an object for full damage and all 40 rays also hit the object for full damage). Although that much damage can never actually be inflicted due to the periodicity of the simplistic pseudorandom number generator used by the Doom engine, damage in the 3000+ hit points range is common enough for the weapon to be used to kill a Spider Mastermind in one shot during assorted speedruns.

Just in case that doesn’t make any sense to you at all, here’s the real appeal of the BFG, the reason why, after however many years, any gamer will tell you it’s the best weapon in gaming:

It’s just a really Big F***in’ Gun.