5. The Arsenal of Halo Kid
They call this boy The Halo Kid which, if lacking context, would make kind of a badass Old West cowboy name. In context, however, the moniker refers to a pre-teen with a near-religious level of devotion to a game about shooting the palette-swapped space marine avatars of first-year college dropouts who get drunk at ten in the morning and yell homophobic slurs at twelve year-olds. Still, while some obsessed fans might drop a couple of hundred dollars on a replica helmet or collector's edition box set, this kid decided to use that largely untapped psychological force that metaphysical theorists are calling "imagination." Apparently, it's this weird thing some kids can do where they're actually able to pretend like some things are really other things. Doctors think it might be an offshoot of some kind of autism.
Regardless, this mysterious force has caused him to build exact replicas of every single weapon in the game out of duct tape, which he then records himself using extensively, even going so far as to precisely pantomime every single character animation in the game. Now, I'm not going to make fun of this kid, because he's like 14 here and at least he's doing something, but you can laugh at this video all you want.
Laugh it up.
Laugh at the dreams of a child. I hear that's how you power your car in hell.
4. Team Fortress Classic Replica Weapons
Now, this is what happens if you take that Halo kid and exclusively focus on his Nerd Devotion Skills until you reach the level cap: This 40-year old steel mill worker has built exact stainless steel replicas of every weapon from Team Fortress Classic. And look at that damn minigun! I know that doesn't look anything like a real one. It's a cartoon that exaggerates the core structures of just a few features of the real thing. But somehow that makes it even more intimidating than the original. And that's saying something, considering that the "original" in question is a tube that fires angry swarms of metal which render everything in the general vicinity of "in front of you" into something akin to pre-chewed meat.
These replicas don't function or anything -- they're just elaborate props -- but try taking one out on the street and explaining that to the waves of bullets that the police will introduce to you. At least one of them will probably be named Gary; you should try to greet him properly before he lodges himself inside your organs. Death is no excuse for a lack of manners.
3. Cloud's Buster Sword (Final Fantasy VII)
And here's where we start to step out of the harmless and into Crazy Town. The following video is of a man who built himself a real-life version of Cloud's Buster Sword from Final Fantasy VII. You know, the sword that became kind of a running joke about the implausibility of videogames, because it was so ridiculously oversized that it just came across as some kind of phallic overcompensation? This sword, being the weapon equivalent of a forty-five year old balding man driving a solid gold Hummer, could not exist in real life, because it would be essentially useless in the hands of anybody smaller than Andre the Giant. And yet, some crazy son of a bitch knew all of this, and he was not deterred. Some mad, bearded, potbellied, blacksmith-of-yore-looking-bastard forged a to-scale replica of that sword, and then filmed himself trying to use it.
Now, admittedly, when he first starts running up to that palette screaming, you kind of believe he can pull it off. The guy just displays such savage fury that it seems for a moment as though he might bend the laws of physics through sheer force of will. But then we get to the whole "swinging it" part. You know, the entire point of a sword? That part doesn't go so well. There's a brief, awkward moment at the height of his swing where it doesn't even look like it will quite make it over his head -- leaving him tottering uncertainly on the ground, looking like somebody spinning plates on Star Search -- and then the sword just kind of flops over and impotently lays down on the palette. So, not only does the weapon itself scream overcompensation, but it also basically suffers from premature sword ejaculation.
The video cuts off before we see the man apologizing to the palette and attempting to explain that, honestly, this has never happened to him before.