Punch-Packing Pistol

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This gun is everything. Cleanly polished, bright silver. It never jams, it has a large magazine so it barely ever needs to be reloaded. It has the stopping power of a shotgun, the fire rate of an SMG, and it can do headshots for instant kills from a mile away, and it has a scope and a laser sight to boot.

It is . . . a 9mm/.45 caliber pistol?

There is a strange tendency in video games to make the starting pistol so ultimately powerful that you may never have to use anything else, since ammo is so plentiful and the gun is so practical. These are those guns.

In Video Games, Sniper Pistol is a subtrope, in Real Life, a scope can be a worthwhile addition, but that doesn't make the gun overpowered.

See also: Standard FPS Guns, Hand Cannon

Examples of Punch-Packing Pistol include:

Video Games

• Dead Space has the pistol-equivalent, the Plasma Cutter, and many people genuinely believe it to be the most efficient weapon in the entire series, especially once fully upgraded. There's an achievement for going through the first game using nothing but the Plasma Cutter and it's actually not all that hard.
• Deus Ex
  • The first game is infamous for its pistol which almost perfectly fits the trope description.
  • Deus Ex Human Revolution continues the tradition by making a silenced pistol with a laser scope and armor-piercing mod one of the best weapons in the game.
• Half Life:
  • For some reason, the same 9mm cartridges do more damage when fired from the Glock than when fired from the MP5. Also the Glock is given the miraculous ability to be fired underwater.
  • The Python does far more damage than the .357 it's supposed to be; They should have said it was a .44 Magnum or even something bigger like the .454 Casull.
• Halo
  • Halo: Combat Evolved is infamous for it's Magnum handgun, which did have a sort of scope, and ridiculous power.
  • Halo2 originally had a handgun just as powerful that you could Dual Wield. This was later patched.
• Left 4 Dead: The pistol is quite an effective weapon, particularly when it's upgraded to Guns Akimbo (while the weapon's technically being upgraded, it remains the Emergency Weapon). The original even has an achievement for completing an entire campaign with one.
• Metal Gear
  • For every game in the series, as soon as you can find a silencer for the pistol, it instantaneously becomes your best weapon. This is especially true when the series introduces first-person view, because you can line up headshots so easilly. Combine this with the fact that every gun is wildly accurate, and you can easilly have situations where you line up a headshot from across the loaded map to where you can barely see the enemy textures, and it will work.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater not only skips the step of making you find the Silencers which make the pistol so effective (though you can run out and need to restock them), but when you get it, Naked Snake goes on an extended monologue about how awesome the pistol is, and if you call Sigint later, he'll go even more in depth.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots almost seems to lampshade this when they give you the Operator at the beggining of the game, which is already a good gun, (according to the in-game stats) but then you can acquire the similar except better Mk.45 (the SOCOM from the original) and the M1911A1 that Naked Snake used in the third game, each gun being better than the last.
• Resident Evil 4 gives you a 9mm handgun at the start that you can make very powerful through upgrades. Then, a second gun comes around with better starting stats that can be made even better. Infuriating, right? Nah, the upgrades on your old handgun make it astoundingly valuable, so you can buy the new gun and get started on upgrades. That's an overpowered pistol that breaks two parts of the gameplay system.
• Resonance of Fate: Breaking your pistols is actually one of the main game mechanics. It doesn't show on the models, but in the inventory screen you can see your pistol decked out with ridiculous stuff like a drum magazine for absurd amounts of ammo before having to reload (really good, since you unload one cartridge with every attack), scopes stacked on top of each other, and multiple handles for decreased recoil.
• Splinter Cell also features one of these. Even better, it's silenced from the start and never stops being that way.
• For Vampire Bloodlines characters who don't specialize in combat, the late-game Colt Anaconda offers the best combo of accuracy and firepower. Even combat-based characters may find themselves using it primarily, despite the availability of automatic rifles and shotguns.