Rifle (RE4)

The M1903 Springfield rifle was a service rifle of the U.S. Army from 1903-1936 until it was phased out in favor of the semi-automatic M1 Garand. The M1903A4 variant was specifically made to be a sniper rifle, which in the end was deemed inadequate due to numerous problems with the weapon itself.

In Resident Evil 4
The Bolt Action Rifle (actually a Springfield M1903A4) is the first of two sniper rifles in Resident Evil 4. It is purchased from the Merchant for 12,000 pesetas. It can be equipped with a custom scope for extremely long-range sniping for 7,000 pesetas. Additionally, a thermal imaging scope is found on the island base, and is especially useful against all varieties of Regenerador.

The Bolt Action Rifle takes up 9 spaces (9x1) of Leon's inventory. The custom and thermal scopes take up 3 spaces (3x1) each, you do not need to combine both scopes to get the thermal effect.

To start, it has a firepower of 4.0, can fire every 2.73 seconds, takes 4.00 seconds to reload, and has a capacity of 5 rounds. As a bolt-action rifle, the bolt must be manually operated after each shot, taking the player out of aiming mode.

Fully upgraded, it has a firepower of 12.0, can fire every 2.73 seconds, takes 2.33 seconds to reload, and has a capacity of 18 rounds. The Bolt Action Rifle costs 289,000 pesetas to fully upgrade (296,000 including the custom scope).

Its exclusive upgrade increases its firepower to 18.0 in the Japanese and US Gamecube versions, making the Semi-Auto rifle by far the better weapon, while in the PAL Gamecube, PS2, PC and Wii versions it increases to 30.0. This makes it more powerful than a Broken Butterfly with everything bought but the exclusive upgrade (and while using the vastly more common rifle ammo), and twice as powerful as the semi-auto rifle. Due to its very slow firing rate and reload time, it is not recommended for anything besides long-range attacks.

Resident Evil: The Deck Building Game
This rifle makes an appearance in the Resident Evil DBG under the name Single Shot Rifle w/ Scope. It is so far the fourth Rifle type weapon in the game so far. The weapon's effect has the player who plays it select another player and have them discard a card from their hand. It's ammo cost is 40, Damage is 30, and gold cost is 50. The weapon appears to have the enhancement scope from it's parent game attached to it.Since its a Rifle type weapon, it is particularly useful in the hands of Sheva Alomar.

Trivia

 * The M1903A4 originally fires the bigger, more powerful .30-06 round, but the game designers changed it to the smaller .223 Remington. This is possibly a generalization to keep coding down and not stress out the player with too much ammo, but still gave it the high power (In the PS2, PAL, PC and Wii versions.)


 * The 1903A4 had to be loaded one round at a time due to the placement of the scope mount, while the ingame rifle is loaded via a stripper clip similar to the previous M1903 variants.
 * The M1903A4 was primarily used as a sniper rifle by American Forces during World War II. Its purpose as a service rifle was replaced by the semi-automatic M1 Garand.
 * When the rifle is stored in Leon's case, it is depicted with the scope removed and placed near the barrel. In reality, storing the weapon in this manner would be unwise, as the scope would have to be re-sighted to the rifle every time it was removed and re-attached.
 * When Leon reloads an un-upgraded rifle, the stripper clip has much more than 5 rounds visible, even though the standard capacity is only 5.