The Top 5 PC Pistols
Monday, May 9th, 2011PC pistols don’t stand for Politically Correct whining weapons, assuring their targets that they would have projected fair-trade chunks of lead through them no matter what race they were (despite the fact they’re now all Russian.) While console games like Halo need aim-assisted assault rifles to even glance a moving enemy, the pistol has been the workhorse of the mouse-marksman since the first nazi was shot in the face.

The last Nazi was also shot in the face. Several hundred times!
We pay tribute to the best of those handguns which have saved our pretend lives thousands of times, by ending millions of others.
5. Glock 17 (Half Life, Half Life 2)
The Half-Life series has unusual casting for a first-person shooter. Its first person is a silent scientist instead of a linebacker who thinks he’s a stand-up comic, and its most famous weapons don’t actually shoot. The gravity gun can throw everything except bullets, while the original’s crowbar remains a symbol of PC gaming. And a reminder of the horror we felt in 1998 when an army of Doom players booted up Half Life and realized “My god, they’re really making me start this game without a gun!”
Which is why the Glock is such a relief.

Oh god yes, a weapon which doesn’t require me to be right next to them, WHICH WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT I WANTED TO BE
There’s a rush of genuinely psychotic pleasure when you pick up the gun, and the distinctive clickety-click-clack equipment sound is probably Gordon buckling it to his wrist with five separate straps so he’ll never be without a gun again. It’s ridiculously useful due to having far more range than the enemies (despite the alien’s entire deal being “Able to hit you from another dimension”) and because it uses the machine gun’s ammo it’ll never run it.
4. Dual Pistols (Strangehold)
The only cyborg item on this list, because twinned pistols are a more essential part of Chow Yun Fat than his hands (and he uses them more often.) The criminally underappreciated Strangehold wrote action-movie logic into the game engine and the pistols’ mechanics, because they don’t need to be reloaded unless it looks cool.

If he has a hundred bullets left, they’re fed down his arms and straight into the guns because reloading would mean not shooting. He only reloads when you trigger the “Barrage” special move which makes them even faster and more powerful. This is a game where the main character not shooting for a second means you’re really dead.

This game loves guns so much a one-on-one standoff becomes a pistol threesome
3. USP (Call of Duty 4)
The pistol mechanic in Modern Warfare was so vital (as in “to do with staying alive”) that they included it in the tutorial. The game’s realism extended to reload times, with some guns so slow it would be quicker to build a new weapon around a fresh ammo pack. Which, in the case of the RPD, seems to be what you’re doing.

Stop the war, I’ll be ready in a minute!
This is the first game where the weapon switch is more than reload. It needs to be right next to grenades under your thumb, and if it isn’t, buy a mouse with more buttons. Spinning the scroll-wheel on a CoD serverwhen your gun’s empty is like defending yourself from a tiger by knitting a distraction. It also gives that wonderfully psychopathic feel of emptying your gun at someone, then switching weapons, then emptying that one too.
The USP wins over the Desert Eagle because it’s still pointing at the same hemisphere after five shots.
2. Lugermorph (TF2)
Team Fortress 2’s pistol is one of the most satisfying weapons, despite technically being the only 3rd-rank firearm in the game (it’s the Engy’s secondary weapon, and his primary is other people’s secondary.) It isn’t fun because of its damage, or craziness, or murderous efficiency, but because whenever you’re using it you really, really want that guy dead. Either a Scout finishing off a scattergunned enemy, or picking of a sentry gun, or an Engy chasing down that expletive-hatefulword-ed Spy who’s trying to get away: no weapon has been so charged with psychic hatred outside of Dungeons and Dragons.
And the Lugermorph makes it even cooler.

A cute little thing held by an angry little thing
TF2 with Sam & Max is a more impossible combination of awesome than ice cream and napalm, and even more lethal. If you’d told someone you could win an electronic gun from a comic character twenty years ago, you’d have been locked up. And awesomely right!
1. Deagle (Counter-Strike)
The deagle is the most lethal thing up to and including old-age, which can only kill something once. The Desert Eagle is one of the most powerful guns even in the real world, and that fact is one of the few nasty realities about guns that makes it into videogames. While the Modern Warfare version recoils like an 18th century cannon which just saw goatse, the CS version could drop Superman.








































































