WINNER - The Therminator
By Joel Grafton

We’ll admit - and apologies to Joel - it doesn’t look like much. In fact, compared to some of the classy sketches, detailed illustrations and - in one case - actual, 3D, it’ll appear even stranger that we’ve selected this as the winner. But Joel’s entry got a whoooooole lot more interesting once we s⛄et aside his illustration and moved to his super-detailed description of The Therminator. From here, he simply dazzled us with three pages of absolutely fantastic ideas. Combining startling originality with horrible violence and a side order of the just plain bizarre, his ramped-up, weirded-out, temperature-controlled Shotgun was the standout entry among the pile of great ideas. T🎃ake a lookbelowfor the whole, gory-ous breakdown…

Silenced muzzle
A throwaway comment in his document is actually one of the most interesting elements: “For Gears 2 there will be female soldiers, pushing the game into new stealth territory.” He’s even saved Epic the trouble of dreaming up൲ their names - they’re Quinn and Weatherman.

Grenade launcher
Grenades that contain flesh-eating viruses? Yes. Grenades that contain flesh-eating viruses you can mix? Even better. We lo🌱ve the idea of being able to take a doctor along too, to mix the viru෴ses and having to protect him, meaning there’s additional tactics to match.

Release button
A new way to approach Gears’ gun-jamming - press it once and it unjams the gun. But we also liked t🌃he way Joel gave serious thought to the tactics behind it. Using the release button at will would make it pointless - only being able to use it twice during any one level, makes it a vital part of the deci𒈔sion-making.

Trigger
Now this is plain weird; an organic life-form as your trigger. Wouldn’t that feel plain wrong? Basically, it wraps around your finger, like a worm, to prev꧙ent your finger ever slipping away. How would the life-form feel about having its head stuffed inside a shotgun for the entirety of its life? The fact that it “adjusts” to your finger is just brilliant. We want one.

Temperature control grip
With Joel’s vision for Gears 2 involving more diverse locations - the cold of Lost Planet’s ice world, say, and the heat of Far Cry’s jungle - the temperature of the grip is suddenly🃏 inspired. How good is the idea of having a cold grip to prevent𝔍 sweat slippage? Awesome, we tell you.

Casing
We’re not sure we fully understand how this black magic works, but basically The Therminator has the T-1000 as a barrel, mean♏ing it can absorb fire if necessary without the internal barrel, i.e. the bit where the bဣullets travel, being harmed. Completely bizarre, but cool.