Currently, my favorite gun in Borderlands: The Spy

Isn’t it pretty?

Given as a quest reward for putting King Wee Wee in Tetanus Warren six feet under, The Spy is a crazy good gun. Cah-razy good. It’s a Hyperion SMG (or maybe it’s considered an assault rifle?) with a highly effective scope, making it almost pass for a multi-clip, fast-damaging sniper rifle. Almost. There’s definitely perks to using a sniper rifle to snipe from a distance, but The Spy can hold its own, too. It also takes out shields relatively fast.

Now, I’ve written before about my distaste for big guns, so I sell every rocket launcher I pick up. Otherwise, I do try to swap a lot of my guns in and out of my hand to try them all. Borderlands claims it has a godzillian amount of weapons, and though a lot will look the same, most will perform completely different. It’s good to give each one a test run, even the silly repeaters. But The Spy has not been swapped out since I got it. It’s too good, especially for the character I’ve built; my soldier has a high capacity shield that also regenerates health over time, as well as a class mod that regenerates ammo at a good clip (pun intended). That means I can basically sit back and fire at a decent distance thanks to The Spy, and throw down my corrosive-laced turret for extra support.

There’s a couple other guns that I like to use, like Krom’s Sidearm and an assault rifle that likes to make things explode, and they all have a time and a place. By chance, The Spy seems right for each of these except when I’m getting mobbed by three crazy suicide pyscho bandits. Then I have to rely on grenades and hiding and mixing it up.

I guess if there’s one good thing to playing this game all alone is I don’t have to fight over awesome loot like the above. It’s just mine, now and forever.

Size matters, but not to me

For Fallout 3, there’s a varied choice of weaponry: you can go unarmed, you can wield melee weapons like the über awesome Deathclaw Glove, you can toss and set explosives, you can use an array of small guns,you can zap enemies into piles of ash and green goo thanks to energy weapons like the Plasma Rifle, and you can totally demolish just about anything with big guns. Seriously, a Raider is not going to get up after you set a mini nuke off on his/her head.

But get ready for a humdinger.

Of those weapon types just listed and after a collective total of 120 hours spent scouring the Wasteland, I’ve never used a big gun. Not even once. Both my good karma and evil karma characters have instantly attached themselves to smaller weaponry, Chinese Assault Rifle and energy weapons, respectively, and any time I come across a big gun in the wild or off a bullet-infested Super Mutant, I either leave it where it is or sell it as soon as possible. Even missiles, which do not take up inventory space, get sold because I know that, no matter the what and when of the situation, I will never launch them.

I wonder what Sigmund Freud would have to say about this pic.

For one to roleplay Fallout 3 using only big guns…well, that’s a bit challenge at the start. They are hard to come by, weigh a lot, and are often usually in bad condition upon first looting. There’s only a couple of perks to help you on your way to mastering them as well. When you leave Vault 101, you will most likely have a pistol, a police baton, and your jumpsuit. From there, finding or purchasing a good one will take time and a lot of effort. But ammo is scarce, they are not the best weapons in close quarters or when being sneaky is vital, and they even have a greater chance of injuring the Lone Wanderer.

One might assume that some of the tougher enemies like Deathclaws and Super Mutant Behemoths can only be killed via big guns. Those folks are wrong. I’ve dropped a ‘Claw or two thanks to a well-placed bottlecap mine and some undetected shots to the head with Lincoln’s Repeater.

I appreciate that big guns are there in the world and love taking down those that wield gatling guns and such, but I don’t ever really expect to use them. They don’t fit my playing style, now or ever really. After all, Paul means small. And yes, I know I just set myself up there. Go on, try me.