Handguns: why is gaming’s most common weapon so ambiguous?

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...ns-610x343.jpgA handgun and shotgun lie before you, dropped by the two guards you killed with your assault rifle’s last bullets. Which will you pick up? The shotgun’s attractions are obvious. You haven’t played this game much yet, but you can be pretty sure it will deliver powerful and wide short-range blasts at a low rate of fire. It’s perfect for crowd control and one-shot close kills, if that’s what you’re into. The handgun, though? Its abilities are pretty much impossible to gauge at first sight.The handgun occupies a strange place in the videogame armoury. Other trusty regulars brandish their intents and roles clearly. The assault rifle? It’s a stalwart, unwieldy at close range, but accurate at medium range, delivering a rapid flurry of bullets. The sniper rifle? It offers hugely damaging and highly accurate single shots. The shotgun, the rocket launcher – game after game has reinforced the roles of a set of weapons into a near-universal grammar of conflict, their identity unchanging across accurate military simulations and breezy shoot ’em ups, in thirdperson and first-, in Vietnam’s jungles or on the surface of Phobos.That handgun lying at your feet, though, what will it be good for? It might be a pop gun, a standby supported by plentiful dropped ammunition, but oh so weak, firing frustratingly slowly, with little impact and barely on-target. Doom’s pistol, in other words: the weapon you only use when you’ve run out of shotgun shells. But it could equally be a punchy headshot monster, terrifyingly accurate with a zoom, capable of firing over three times in a second. That would place it in a class with Halo: Combat Evolved’s notorious but much-loved Magnum, or the slower-firing .357 Magnum of Half-Life, which can drop most enemies in a single shot.The pop gun and the puncher: two completely different concepts for game guns in the same compact package. But neither really lives up to what a handgun is in reality. In our world, handguns readily cause horrific injuries to their targets. Their rounds generally penetrate at least as deeply as most internal organs, and one of the commonest ammunition types is jacketed hollow point, which expands on impact, increasing the chances of hitting something vital. So they’re not exactly the weak standby you find in Doom, but they also hardly deliver the deadly precision of Halo’s Magnum. The standard handgun’s lack of a stock makes it hard to aim and susceptible to recoil, and its short barrel makes it inaccurate at medium range and beyond.

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