Colt Python 357 Magnum

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The Colt Python 357 Magnum was made by Bigben for the Sony PlayStation 1 & 2. It supports Guncon 1 & 2 and normal gun mode. The product was officially licensed from Colt and the holder of the exclusivity license Cyber Gun. Curiously the gun totally lacks the Colt branding and instead sports a Pachmayr logo, which is sort of hilarious. Pachmayr is a manufacturer of high quality gun grips for real firearms. The rubber on this light gun though is made of a thermodynamically instable polymer which since has turned to goo. There is no way Pachmayer was producing this grip. I would imagine the designer was just handed a real fire arm with the order to "just copy it". I assume the protected trade mark accidentally slipped onto the gun that way.

Other than the dreadful grip the gun is of a very high built quality. The shell is sturdy and shows some nice details. The buttons fuse well into the design and don't distract the eyes much. The A and B buttons are distributed among the two sides and are located behind the cylinder. Sadly the cylinder obstructs the access to this buttons which decreases the ergonomics a lot. On the left hand side just below the cylinder are the Start button and the fire mode selector. Normal and auto fire plus auto reload are the available choices. The auto reload capacity is five shots. Often the gun reloads twice upon reloading using this mode. Personally I wish the A and B buttons would be on the same height as the Start button as this would make them more usable. Another button is located on the handle. It is mapped to A which is very convenient for reloading. The hammer is movable and acts as C button. Reloading using it is fun, but doing so obstructs the sight picture a lot. Below the hammer is a micro joystick which acts as D-pad. At the heel of the grip is a switch which enables or disables force feedback. This feedback is quite fast, but sadly it is very weak. It might be the least strong force feedback I have ever felt on a controller. Also on the heel is the gun mode selector switch.

The trigger is tactile, clicky and feels very nice. The sight picture is very clear and usable. Sadly the light sensor is quite weak and thus demands a lot of screen brightness in order to work properly.

In GunCon mode the accuracy and precision are decent. Sadly there are narrow dead zones at the left and right hand side of the screen and even worse a huge one at the bottom. In this mode just the A and B buttons are operational. In normal gun mode accuracy and precision stay about the same. Luckily here the dead zone at the bottom of the screen isn't as big anymore. In this mode the B button acts as Start and A acts as special shot. In GunCon 2 mode the accuracy is bad, but the precision is still decent. Dead zones are present in a similar fashion as they were in normal gun mode.

Personally I don't like this gun much as for the dead zone issue in GunCon 1 mode. It is very pretty, but ultimately it fails as a controller. It's a pity that there aren't more nice revolver light guns for the PlayStation. For games using the normal gun mode the Colt Python 357 Magnum doesn't perform better than the end of the line Konami Justifier like controllers sold by Naki and Innovation or the Pursuer. In episode 137 I already showed some other PlayStation revolvers but sadly none of these were great.

The box looks very appealing. It folds open to show the real controller behind plastic and lists some additional information. Similar as with Bigben's P99 gun the false claim is made that this gun will work on every system, generously ignoring 100 Hz CRT's which were certainly a thing at the date of release.