[Xantar]

You bought the Punisher? That's a gun you get for free if you shoot 10 blue medallions. Or was that little mini-quest only in the GameCube version?

Anyway, the Punisher is not a terrible gun compared to the original handgun, but it's also not much better at all. The only real advantage it has is the ability to shoot two people who are lined up, but in practice that's not worth much at all because enemies very rarely line up like that (and when they do, there's usually five of them in which case you should be using something other than a handgun anyway). Besides that, by this point your original handgun is probably upgraded enough to be quite deadly on its own.

By the way, did you notice those boulders hanging pointlessly up on the edge of the canyon in the second El Gigante fight?