Nine crazy weapons we want in Modern Warfare and Battlefield

Before you read on, we'd just like to clarify that we are not, despite appearances, screaming mental gun nuts. Honest. I am not currently staring at the back of your head through a rifle scope, whistling to myself and stroking a stuffed Alsatian. Nor am I inside your bedroom wardrobe, holding a gun made of taped-together Charlton Hestons. Somebody could be though. Yeah, you dwell on that.

But we will admit to thinking about weapons rather a lot. We don't have much choice in the matter, what with writing so much about Call of Duty and Battlefield. Both games claim to offer the world (shortly before blowing it up) in terms of projectile and blade-based death, but we've had a look round the better-armed corners of the internet, and there are definitely a few weapons they're missing.

If there's one thing Modern Warfare's multiplayer teaches you, it's always bring a knife to a gunfight. In one of the series' many departures from reality, blade kills are generally faster than bullets. You'll need to take your time with the Warrior Knife, though. See the serrated edge? It's designed to remove heads. Blimey. Slightly more spectacular than sticking the pointy end in somebody's round bit. You could always use the head as a thrown weapon afterwards, or mount it on an RC car for that ghoulish finishing touch.

No, this isn't some precept we cribbed from an assertiveness coaching session - it's a vehicle-mounted pacification weapon that fires a millimetre-thin beam of microwaves. According to the blurb, targets will feel like they're on fire without (allegedly) being on fire. No harm done, then, unless you count psychological trauma. Softies.

The terror of shadowy doorways and stairwells returns with a difference: rather than frags, it radiates dozens of electrified darts. Given some realistic conducting water, you could take out an entire team on a smaller, swampier FPS map.

The Nazis dreamt this up as a portable tank-stopper. It was rubbish so they dropped it quickly, but let's not let a little thing like reality spoil our fun. Essentially a modified flare gun, the Sturmpistole could fire several different kinds of grenade (our imaginations have already coughed up goo, lava and cake-filled specimens - see if yours can do better). Not dissimilar to the Magnum pistol thingy in Bulletstorm, perhaps. Helicopters beware.

Lost an arm? Haven't lost an arm, but rubbish at punching people? You need an Apache. Wear the thing one way and you'll hit harder than a modest-sized charging swan! Wear it the other and you'll be able to seriously aggravate and distress un-armoured targets at distances of upwards of twenty feet! There's also a pop-out knife for stabbing blocks of tofu and opening important correspondence with.

This one looks like a boring old assault rifle till you realise you can tear out and replace the barrel as easily as a laptop battery. Besides contributing essential satisfying clicky noises (see Ghost Recon's Gunsmith mode for more where they came from), this would allow the alert and dynamic Battlefielder to alter the range and power of his shooty-death stick at a moment's notice. Delicious.