The Best Video Game Handguns. If you’ve played video games, you’ve encountered a handgun. In the right game, a handgun can be an object of menace or empowerment. But video games often treat them as a starter weapon to be replaced as soon as possible. What makes for a great video game handgun? A Brief History Lesson. Handguns are among the oldest type of firearms. Originating in ancient China as small hand cannons, guns eventually evolved into muzzle loaders, like those seen in Assassin’s Creed. IV: Black Flag, then revolvers, like most of the handguns in Red Dead Redemption, and eventually semi- automatic pistols, like the M1. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. Police forces started equipping guns in the 1. When World War I came to a close, weapons manufacturers turned to the police to maintain their sales. Firearms and police forces have been closely connected ever since. Handguns are almost as old as video games themselves. What may have been the first video game handgun appeared in Taito’s 1. Western Gun, a Wild West- themed game where players shot at each other with revolvers. Other early examples of handguns include Nintendo’s 1. Western game Sheriff, Capcom’s 1. Gun. Smoke, and Konami’s 1. Sunset Riders. 1. Castle Wolfenstein, most notable for being the earliest stealth game, begins with a dying prisoner handing the player a gun they stole from the guards. In gameplay, the gun appears to be a handgun of some kind, most likely a Luger pistol. Check the Fitbit Buzz page for the latest reviews and press, awards, celebrity endorsements, media mentions and more. A variety of lesions in different cerebral regions may affect the human ability to orient in the environment, resulting in ‘topographical disorientation’. In a. You just bought a new Nintendo Switch. First of all, good job! They’re still kind of hard to find. Now it’s time to figure out what games you want to play. We. As games grew in sophistication and platforms grew in power, handguns became firmly entrenched in video game design. How Handguns Work. Whether it’s Doom’s classic pistol or Bloody Mary’s Smith & Wesson Model 2. The Wolf Among Us, handguns are ubiquitous video games. The appeal is obvious: handguns are small, portable, and easily concealed. When a villain reveals the gun hidden in his coat, it’s a moment of surprise. When a gunslinger draws on his opponent and wins the duel, it’s thrilling. It’s a lot harder to hide a rifle or draw a shotgun quickly. While there have been a staggering variety of handguns throughout the centuries, the most common types in games are revolvers and pistols, though the term “pistol” is often used synonymously with all handguns. ![]() ![]() Handguns start with a round, or cartridge, which consists of a case, the bullet, a primer, and the propellant. The cartridge is inserted into the chamber. Pulling the trigger causes the firing pin to strike the cartridge, which causes the primer to ignite the propellant. The expanding gases from the propellant push the bullet through the barrel of the gun, sending the bullet towards its target. The difference between a revolver and a pistol is in the way they chamber bullets. A revolver features a cylinder, which is usually loaded with six rounds, though there have been rare, unsuccessful variants over the years with as many as 3. When you pull the trigger, the cylinder rotates and the hammer pulls back. When you let go, the hammer strikes, firing the round. When you pull again, the cylinder rotates, and so on. Here’s a detailed video demonstrating the entire process. Pistols work differently. Rather than a cylinder, the pistol’s rounds are loaded into a magazine, which is usually inserted into the pistol’s grip. A round can’t be fired until it’s chambered, or transferred from the magazine to the chamber. Pull the trigger, fire a round, chamber a new round, pull the trigger again. If you’ve played a lot of games, especially shooters, you’re probably familiar with the basic pistol archetypes. From Half- Life to Gears of War to Destiny, revolvers are portrayed as slow- firing, powerful weapons, while pistols are portrayed as weaker but faster- firing. This is a myth, because plenty of things can hamper a revolver’s power, and in some cases revolvers can fire just as fast as pistols. Power has nothing to do with the way the round is chambered. A round’s power is determined largely by its kinetic force, and that force is determined by the round itself, based on the mass of the bullet and the power of the propellant. So why do shooters perpetuate these myths about how handguns work? How Handguns Work In Shooters. Most shooter design can be traced, in some way, back to Doom, id’s seminal 1. Doom cemented basic shooter weapon archetypes in video games: the pistol, the shotgun, the automatic rifle, and the rocket launcher. In Doom, the pistol fired a single shot, the shotgun fired multiple pellets at once, the plasma rifle and chaingun fired multiple shots in quick succession, and the rocket launcher fired a single shot that did explosive splash damage. Developers have been fond of progression systems, and Doom’s weapon- based progression was near perfect: start with the pistol, end up with the incredible plasma- firing BFG. In the 2. 4 years since Doom’s release, few developers have messed with the formula. Halo tried churn,where players had to constantly scavenge for weapons on the battlefield, and Borderlands went for a Diablo- style stat system. But most shooters all begin the same way: like Doom, they start with a handgun. As a result, handguns tend to be portrayed as weak starter weapons that you replace with more powerful shotguns or more accurate rifles. Some shooters, like Destiny or Borderlands, are based around stats; as you grow in power, you find guns with better stats, doing, say, 1. Others, like Hitman, give pistols the advantage of being concealable or quiet, making them preferable over more aggressive weaponry. But by and large handguns are starter weapons, meant to be suffered through until something better comes along. Video game weapons rarely match their real- world counterparts. In video games, shotguns tend to shoot confetti beyond three meters, and flamethrowers seem to be propane- based movie flamethrowers, which are designed to keep actors safe rather than behaving like their proper napalm- based counterparts. Handguns are no different: as the starting weapons, they tend to be weak, because they exist as gateway weapons that carry you along until you get to better weapons. But it doesn’t have to be this way. How Breaking The Rules Leads To Better Handguns. Handguns don’t need to be weak. Plenty of games contain unique takes on handguns that elevate them from starter weapons into some of the best weapons in shooter history. Titanfall 2 contains a level where you lose all your weapons, but you gain the smart pistol for the first time shortly after. What follows is a level that’s all about empowerment. Every other weapon in the game needs aiming, but the smart pistol locks on and one- shots enemies. This lets you wallrun without sacrificing your accuracy, making for an awesome escape sequence where you never stop running. Getting that pistol, in some ways, feels like the pinnacle of Titanfall 2’s campaign. Wolfenstein: The New Order’s pistol is no slouch, but it’s the only weapon in the game that can be silenced. This makes it a great choice if you’re trying to play stealthily. You can also dual- wield and auto- fire, adding to its versatility, but it shines in its unique role as a stealth tool. Since The New Order has plenty of stealth segments, the pistol holds its own. The Boltok, from the Gears of War series, is a legendary revolver. One of the Gears series best features is its gib system. Most enemies die as you would expect when they’re killed, but when the you headshot an enemy with the Boltok, his head practically explodes in a fountain of blood and viscera, accompanied by a satisfying splorch noise. The big secret to Gears special sauce is the way enemies react to its guns, and the Boltok creates some of the best reactions in the series. Halo: Combat Evolved’s M6. D seems like a regular pistol, but it’s got a nice 2. X scope on it, which isn’t a common feature on video game pistols. Later Halo games treat pistols more like the traditional weak starter weapon, even when you don’t actually start with a pistol, but the M6. D has high damage and can hold its own in a firefight. Heck, if you’re in the right position, the M6. D can take out Halo’s toughest enemies, hunters, with a single shot to their weak point. The M6. D feels amazing in part because it isn’t a hitscan weapon; there’s this split second of lag between firing and hitting that gives it a satisfying crunch that hitscan weapons in other games can’t replicate. Bungie didn’t stop there. Atypical Categorization in Children with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have enhanced perceptual discrimination, but deficits in processing configural information. They show accelerated learning on some tasks (e. O'Riordan & Plaisted, 2. Klinger & Dawson, 2. Plaisted, O'Riordan, & Baron- Cohen, 1. Many competing theories have been developed to explain these findings (e. Iarocci & Mc. Donald, 2. 00. 6; Just, Cherkassky, Keller, & Minshew, 2. Mc. Clelland, 2. 00. Three of the most influential, Weak Central Coherence (Happe & Frith, 2. Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (Mottron, Dawson, Soulieres, Hubert, & Burack, 2. Reduced Perceptual Similarity (Plaisted, 2. ASD form hyper- specific representations that affect their perceptual abilities. Hyper- specific representation means that information is represented in an extremely detailed and event specific fashion that minimizes the points of similarity between objects or events. This type of representation reduces the ability to learn perceptual categories requiring complex generalization, generalize perceptual learning, and transfer learning to novel contexts. Effective perceptual categorization is an important precursor to many of the social skills that individuals with ASD have difficulty learning. For instance, part of being able to correctly understand the social cues that guide interactions with others involves learning to correctly categorize facial, vocal, and body language expressions. This requires recognizing similarity between complex perceptual inputs that vary on a number of dimensions (Mc. Cann & Peppe, 2. Sasson, 2. 00. 6; Schwarzer, 2. Consistent with theories assuming hyper- specific representation, there is substantial evidence that individuals with ASD have difficulty transferring learning to novel contexts (Mottron & Burack, 2. Plaisted et al, 1. However, research examining family resemblance comparison in individuals with ASD has produced mixed findings. Family resemblance comparison is the ability to treat objects as part of the same category based on their overall similarity to other members without any defining features or simple rules to indicate membership. Family resemblance comparison may occur because people create an average representation (or prototype) for the category and compare new examples to that average (e. Rosch & Mervis, 1. Nosofsky, 1. 98. 4). All categorizing processes involving family resemblance comparison require the ability to assess similarity across multiple representations and thus will be negatively impacted by hyper- specific representation. Some researchers have found abnormalities in the use of family resemblance comparison in children with low functioning ASD when classifying animal- like stimuli (Klinger & Dawson, 2. ASD (HFASD) when classifying faces (Gastgeb, Rump, Best, Minshew, & Strauss, 2. Other researchers, however, have found that children with HFASD show normal tendencies to use average information about the category when trying to remember or categorize simple line drawings (Molesworth, Bowler, & Hampton, 2. Also, simulations of adults with HFASD's performance using the general context model (GCM) have been interpreted as evidence against hyper- specific representation, because the individuals with HFASD did not show higher sensitivity scores when final performance was modeled (Bott, Brock, Brockdorff, Boucher, & Lamberts, 2. Sensitivity scores are thought to reflect the ability to recognize similarity to learning exemplars, and Bott et al (2. Therefore, similar sensitivity scores to controls were interpreted as disconfirmation of hyper- specific representation in ASD. However, hyper- specificity should most strongly affect the ability to recognize similarity between items and to average across them. Consequently, it may not be reflected in this overall sensitivity score. The reasons for these differences across studies are debated. Some suggest that the “difficulties” with family resemblance comparison associated with ASD may actually reflect misunderstandings of the instructions (Molesworth et al., 2. Others have argued that the binary feature stimuli used in studies showing “normal” family resemblance comparisons can’t easily differentiate between rule- based and family resemblance strategies (Gastgeb et al., 2. Further in Bott et al. HFASD had serious difficulties initially learning categories, suggesting that they learned differently, and null results are always difficult to interpret. Overall, past studies have not produced a clear picture of whether individuals with ASD have difficulty generalizing on the basis of perceptual similarity, as predicted by theories assuming hyper- specific representation. It is clear, however, that further research is needed. The current study attempted to disambiguate the situation by clearly examining whether children with HFASD have difficulties making family resemblance comparisons. School- age children were used because of the availability of clearly diagnosed and described HFASD populations within this cohort, and because of the possibility of extensions of this work being used to inform treatment programs designed for this population. An influential family- resemblance category learning task—the dot pattern classification task (e. Homa, Cross, Cornell, Goldman, & Shwartz, 1. Knowlton & Squire, 1. Posner & Keele, 1. Smith, 2. 00. 2) was used to determine whether children with HFASD are less likely to use family resemblance than matched typically developing (TD) children. We chose this particular task because performance is optimized by making decisions based on overall visual similarity across members, and it is difficult to perform well using rules. This task also has the added advantage of using abstract stimuli with no social relevance. To directly examine whether the participants seemed to be averaging across their experiences, we used prototype- based formal models of categorization that are standard within the literature (e. Smith, Redford, & Haas, 2. Smith, 2. 00. 2). Because prototype models assume a comparison to the average of the category, a break down in the prototype model's ability to describe the data suggests a break down in use of information about the average of the category (i. Prototype models assume people are comparing items to average information about the category; so if individuals with HFASD have hyper- specific representations, these models should fail. The GCM also averages information across the category members, but the richer base of representations for comparison and the greater number of free parameters make it more likely to be able to describe performance even if averaging across members is abnormal. Also, similarity averaging is not a parameter in the GCM; so it is less useful for looking at averaging processes. For these reasons, the prototype model was the better suited for addressing our question about family resemblance comparison. We are not making any assumptions about whether averages are captured within the stored representations themselves in the form of a stored prototype (e. Homa et al, 1. 97. Rosch, & Mervis, 1. Smith, 2. 00. 2) or calculated during the decision process (e. Hintzman, 1. 98. 6; Nosofsy, 1. There is ample evidence that performance on many tasks is better described by the use of other strategies (e. Ashby & Maddox 2. Johansen & Palmeri, 2. Minda, Desroches, & Church, 2. Our goal is to determine whether children with HFASD use family resemblance comparisons to the same degree as TD children in a task where the stimuli make these types of comparison maximally helpful. Method. Participants. Twenty children with HFASD and 2. TD children, ages 7- 1. Table 1). The HFASD and TD groups were matched on age, gender, and IQ. Statistical analyses showed that there were no significant differences between the groups for age, t(3. IQ, t(3. 8) = - 1. Fisher's Exact Test p = 1. Pearson Chi- Square p = . Fisher's Exact Test p = 1. Pearson Chi- Square p = 1. Children in the HFASD group were recruited from a summer social treatment study involving children with HFASD, and all had met specific inclusion criteria including WISC- IV (Wechsler, 2. IQ composite > 7. VCI or PRI) ≥ 8. 0; receptive or expressive language score ≥ 8. CASL short form, Carrow- Woolfolk, 1. ASD criteria on the Autism Diagnostic Interview Revised (Rutter, Le. Couteur, & Lord, 2.
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