Duck Hunt

 

Despite Nintendo's refusal to acknowledge the Duck Hunt character in Super Smash Bros. until long after the 3DS version was released, we all knew that the duo – or trio – were in the game. What we didn't know at that time was that Duck Hunt was due to release on the Wii U's Virtual Console, and now it has. The question is whether it has aged well.

For those who don't know how Duck Hunt works, you have to point at the screen and shoot ducks down from the sky in three shots or less so that your trusted hound can pick them up and display them to you. Once you've shot or missed ten birds you'll progress onto the next round, which increases the speed that the ducks move and periodically brings in other colours that move in different patterns. If you fail to meet the minimum number of successful hits – displayed by a blue bar underneath the row of duck icons – it's game over and you'll have to start all over again.

In Duck Hunt, you and your pooch are out on the hunt for wild game. In each round, you must shoot down ducks as they fly across the screen, but aim carefully and conserve your ammo if you don't want to be laughed at for your poor shooting skills.

It’s pretty crazy when you really stop and think about it. The U.S. videogame industry was on the verge of total collapse, about to be buried in the New Mexico desert with hundred of thousands of Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges, only to be miraculously resurrected by an unassuming, gray, brick-like system and a certain, now legendary dual-title pack-in game. What pack-in game could have done this? What pack-in game was so mind-searingly amazing as to breathe life into a dead industry and nestle comfortably into the hearts of millions of gamers worldwide? Why … Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt of course. This pack-in title allowed gamers to control a portly, mustachioed man on a mission to get juiced up on mushrooms and dethrone a fire-breathing, bipedal turtle. If that wasn’t enough, gamers also had the option to point an actual, physical gun at their TVs and pick off innocent, wide-eyed ducks as they tried to flee.

Silly premises aside, nearly everyone can agree that this pack-in cartridge was monumentally influential – mainly due to Super Mario Bros. and its revolutionary use of hardware scrolling, colorful visuals and acclaimed level design. But, where does that leave Duck Hunt, the other half of that legendary dual-game bundle package? Was it worthy standing side-by-side with Miyamoto’s side scrolling classic and should it be considered an epic title in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s much revered library of games? To be blunt – no and no. But really, what games during that early point in the NES’s lifespan could have matched up with the brilliance of Super Mario Bros.? Duck Hunt is hardly a bad game, and certainly shouldn’t be dismissed or left to slowly fade from the annals of videogame history.

When I first got this game though, I was just a little tyke, and being the immature lad I was, I didn’t think in such a politically correct way. I just saw the game as a fun way to use a toy gun to shoot crap. The real reason I bought the game is that it was included along with Super Mario Bros. in the same cart. Perhaps that contributed to the relative popularity of this game; I can’t envision that many people lining up at the stores just to get this game. In any case, while Mario was, in all earnestness, ‘the game that started it all’, Duck Hunt is basically just a little gimmick. Mind you, it’s somewhat fun since in today’s society we’re all infatuated with guns, but Duck Hunt is destined to be remembered as only a fun diversion (and a chance to try out the light gun) to play after you’ve gotten tired of Super Mario Brothers.

The premise: for some reason, you’re out in a field. You’ve got a loaded rifle and your hound with you. Now, you can choose to practice on clay targets, but that’s just…not right, is it? After all, this game is about hunting ducks. So, you wait for one or two ducks to fly up in the air, and that’s when your gun comes in handy. The control is simple; you’ve just got the trigger button, so if you can’t figure how to work this game you have problems. You’re supposed to sit from something like 20 feet away from the screen, but that’s a pretty tough deal. The light gun seems pretty accurate, but it’s still surprisingly easy to miss those small, moving ducks. If you do miss, and you will, your dog will come bounding over and laugh at you. Unfortunately your dog’s fur is bulletproof or something, ‘cause none of your shots can hurt the it.

Back when the Wii was announced ten years ago (yes, really) one game that jumped off the lips of the long-term Nintendo fans (i.e. those old enough) when they saw the unique controller was that of ‘Duck Hunt’, the game that appeared early on the life of the NES featuring ducks that you had to shoot at, clay pigeons you had to shoot at, and a snickering dog that was second only to Muttley in laughing canines you detested as a child, which you really wanted to shoot at.

It seems weird then that it’s taken almost a decade and a new console for the light-gun classic to finally get a Virtual Console release, but here we are fresh into 2015 now with the ability to play the 1987 game on the WiiU. Nintendo have ported over the game mostly unchanged to the modern console albeit replacing the light-gun control with that of the Wiimote, the underside B button being the gun’s trigger (making it ideal to play if you have, like me, the piece of plastic from Link’s Crossbow Training to turn the remote into a gun) and the + button selecting a game. The difficulty is lowered by the crosshair now appearing on screen, but you can go back to how the game used to be and remove this for the majority of the time playing – it only appears when shooting – by pressing one of the buttons on the D-pad, which adds more challenge.

Other than the dog and the ducks, there are no “moving parts”. You’re camped in a wheat-field of sorts, with the expanse of sky clear in front of you. Your hound looks okay, with a few sparse frames of animations (the laugh looks fairly good, though), and the ducks vaguely resemble avian creatures. That’s about it though. The game isn’t particularly heavy in the audio department either; you shoot your gun, you miss, the dog laughs at you, you shoot your gun again, the dog keeps laughing, and so on. Apart from the gun, ducks and dog, and a few tunes whenever you hit a duck or pass or fail a level, there’s really no sound. The game seems (and is) sparse in the audio/visual category, but that’s ok. What’s there works fine, and apart from a few effects that can get irritating (the dog’s laugh) the graphics and sound are decent. I see that Nintendo failed to include any blood’n’guts. Perhaps they didn’t wish to create too much controversy.

Anyway, to pass each level, you have to hit a certain number of ducks with your limited ammo. Obviously, the higher the level, the higher the duck requirement. I’ve always found this game pretty hard – I guess I’m not much of a sharpshooter. If you can really pass this game from twenty feet out, then you’ll have to be pretty good at shooting. In the later levels you’ll inevitably be tempted to move closer to the TV, though.

If you’re tired of shooting one or two ducks over and over, simply unplug the gun and go out on the streets and…uh, I probably shouldn’t finish that sentence. But seriously, if you’re bored, you can either turn off the console and do something meaningful (I recommend this), or you can try shooting flying clay targets. Or, you can get a friend over and get him to control the ducks while you try to shoot them, or vice versa. This multiplayer feature is probably the most (the only?) fun part of the game. See how close or far you can get from the screen and still miss the ducks.

Overall, Duck Hunt is a moderately fun gimmick of a game. The light gun is fun to use, and the control and graphics/sound are good. Playing against yourself (and the dog) is not only hard but also irritating, and in the end you’ll feel frustrated by the fruitless ordeal, but the multiplayer can make for some interesting and fun moments. The biggest problem about this game is that it teaches young ‘uns to aim at moving objects using realistic weapons; it’s like some sort of army training camp! The violence of it all repulses me. However, if you can tolerate the mind-numbing horror, you might actually like the game.

For the twelve people out there who aren’t familiar with Duck Hunt, let me give a brief description of the game’s theme and mechanics: Ducks fly up into the air. While in the air, they zigzag around erratically in an effort to stay on the screen longer so you may shoot them. While smirking smugly at the ducks’ futile efforts, you pump the water fowl full of lead. If you get tired of this, you may switch it up and shoot clay pigeons instead. There is a dog as well, but you don’t shoot him. Of course, all this shooting is done with Nintendo’s proprietary Zapper light gun – a futuristic looking pistol (well … futuristic in a Buck Rogers sort of way) in the U.S. and Europe, and an actual semi-realistic looking revolver in Japan (lucky bastards).
Due to the light gun requirement, this is one of those 8-bit titles that you just can’t experience properly through emulation. Using a mouse to pick off the ducks as they flap around lazily on your computer monitor just zaps (pun intended) the fun. You have to feel the weight of the gun in your hands – hear the twangy snap of the Zapper’s depressed trigger. If you have access to a NES/Famicom, a copy of the game and Nintendo’s light gun, then some good times can undoubtedly be had with Duck Hunt. This is largely due to the remarkable accuracy and responsiveness of the Zapper – an impressive feat considering this was one of the first light gun games that could be played in the home, on pretty much any size television.
You have three game modes to choose from: Game A which launches a single duck at a time, Game B which will launch two ducks simultaneously – although still with only a three-shot limit – and Game C which replaces the ducks with clay pigeons and removes the dog altogether.

If you're playing by yourself you'll probably want to play Game B, as it features the most interesting movement patterns and presents more of a challenge, but if you happen to have someone else nearby you can thrust a second Wii Remote into their hands for some light multiplayer action. The second player can interact on Game A by controlling the single bird in an attempt to make the player with the 'gun' fail in their efforts. This is actually more engaging than perhaps it sounds, as you can really ruin someone's day by quickly dashing off in a direction when they least suspect it; this makes Game A much more interesting for the main player in the earlier levels. Game C is a more predictable mode, as the clay pigeons follow an obvious trajectory and are quite easy to hit. You can still make the game harder by removing the crosshair, but it's still nowhere near as enjoyable as the other two modes.

shooting ducks and clay pigeons can only provide so much entertainment, and that’s where the game’s biggest weakness shows up – there’s just not enough to do. Even by 8-bit standards, Duck Hunt is a simple game, and one that could have used a few more modes or variations to spice things up. That said, what’s there has been crafted with enough loving care to give the game a good amount of personality and make it worth popping into your system every now and again. The ducks themselves are animated well, feature nice big sprites and come in a variety of different colors – in fact, they are cute enough to illicit an occasional twinge of remorse after plugging one with a well timed head shot. Don’t worry about the pacifistic side of you gumming up the works though, as the mocking laugh of your hound dog when all the ducks “Fly Away” will surely drive you back to the dark side – and on a mission to blast the dirty mutt right between the eyes (which, much to millions of gamers’ collective chagrin, can’t be done).

I have no doubt that it was the Super Mario Bros. half of the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt pack-in bundle that won over most gamers’ hearts during that crucial time in the mid-eighties. Even so, Duck Hunt is a fun, if not brilliant, little light gun game with colorful visuals and a peppy soundtrack (which, incidentally, was created by legendary Zelda composer Koji Kondo) that definitely deserves a place in any NES gamer’s collection. Just make sure that you do actually add it to your collection and not just experience it via humdrum, Zapper-less emulation.

For those who have played Duck Hunt before (it was, with the original Super Mario Bros, the first video game I ever had) then the gameplay remains the same. The core game – available in one and two player flavours, with the multiplayer option having some more depth – sees a succession of ten ducks flying out one at a time to be shot at. Either you hit it and score points within three bullets or the time it takes to fly away, its murdered body then presented to you with glee by your dog, or you miss it or it flies away as you have taken your time, to be presented by the aforementioned dog laughing at you.

Each shot scores you points – the quicker you kill the bird the more points per hit you get – with a 10,000 point bonus for a clean sheet. Each round gets subsequently more difficult with faster birds coming out from the long grass at different angles, but thankfully the collision detection box around each bird is quite forgiving. That said, there’s still a fair bit of challenge for the casual player and you must, on each round, reach a certain quota of duck kills else it’s game over, but shoot-em-up players will find this game a doddle. Purists will be happy to note that the graphical error when the dog retrieves a duck is still present, showing a particular coloured duck no matter which colour you killed.

Accompanying this traditional duck fest is one player clay pigeon shooting, with a similar premise of a hit quota, 10,000 points for a perfect score, and three shots and you’re out, but this time with a theme more suited to the peace-makers among us, a solitary duck on each round replaced with two clay pigeons which get subsequently smaller as time goes on as they head into the distance.

Outside of these two styles, it’s pretty much a barebones package as the thirty year old game (it was released three years earlier, in 1984, in Japan) would suggest, the menus only other point of note being a generic high score from all the games.
If you played the game – like me – as a child and want to finally relive those happy times once more long after your NES stopped working or the cartridge gave up the ghost, or just generally enjoy being laughed at by a pixelated dog when you fail to kill one of god’s creatures, then this will be £3.49 well spent. For younger players who aren’t eager to relive gaming history you’d be best picking up a copy of Wii Play and playing the shooting range mini-game as part of that, with other games thrown in as well for that cash, including the fun table tennis, fishing and charge, or as I know it – knitted cow racing. Or perhaps just enjoy the dog and duck characters as part of the recent Smash Bros home console game.