One Hour Reviews: Game #002: Duck Hunt, Released: October 18, 1985

Introduction & Bias:

A neat consequence of reviewing NES games in chronological order was that Duck Hunt is my second review and the second NES game I got to play. Of course that trend will finish once I this review is completed but it was nice while it lasted.

Not pictured: My five-year-old self wondering why I should shoot clay

Duck Hunt: one of the three launch games to justify the existence of the Zapper. This one will probably be my favorite since I owned it but maybe the other two will surprise me. What I do know is that I was capable of playing this game for hours at a time since it was one of the only games I got to own. I think this love was more like Stockholm Syndrome than true love, however. When I only had two games, I was desperate to wring every drop of enjoyment out of them. Super Mario Brothers had a pretty long journey with musical classics and gameplay innovations to keep the player company for hours on end. Duck Hunt, well, did not have those things.

First Impressions & Conveyance:

Duck Hunt is a shooting gallery game. This was about as much as you could do with a light gun game in the NES days because the Zapper only had one button: the trigger. With that in mind the only thing that light gun games could do would be to give the player things to shoot. Intuitively Duck Hunt's two of three game modes involves shooting ducks. The third mode requires the player to shoot down clay pigeons.

The title screen is clean of clutter and gives the player a choice of game mode and shows the highest score achieved in each mode since the system was last turned on. The high score was an exciting feature to my five-year-old self but looking back now I think it is kind of silly since there was no way to record the high score on the cartridge permanently. Oh, well. The only counterintuitive part of the menu is that the player needs to press the Select button to switch game modes. The Up and Down buttons would have worked but I guess Select needed more justification and love back in those days.

The gameplay is pretty simple. After a brief introduction targets jump onto the screen and the player has a limited amount of time to shoot the targets before they escape the playing field. Gameplay is intuitive as long as the player knows they need the Zapper plugged into controller port 2 to actually play the game. The targets are obvious, quacking ducks that fly around in random directions and the player has three shots per gallery round to take them all out. There is no mistaking the targets against the background. As an additional bonus the player is given a split-second warning as to when the duck will fly away on one-duck mode. The screen will turn pink and the vaguely Engrish phrase "FLY AWAY" is given. The two duck mode just has the ducks fly away after a brief time and the clay shooting mode's targets will disappear off into the horizon if they are not shot in a quick fashion. The player must shoot a required amount of targets to get to the next round or face a game over.

Pictured: Knowing what to do

In short, the game is intuitive to play and that is helped by the fact that the player is given so little to do. This is one of Duck Hunt's biggest problems, too.

Experience & Presentation:

When I opened this blog I said I would play each NES game for an hour. This is the first game that was a challenge to play for that long. I wrote above that I played this game for a few hours straight when I was a kid but now I have choices and adult things to do that prevent me that luxury. It only took me about fifteen minutes to get my first Game Over in each of the three game modes. Now I had to make my own fun for the next 45 minutes.

Don't get me wrong, there is fun to be had. There is a certain amount of charm with the few characters in the game. First, the ducks themselves. The ducks come in three different colors which establish the behavior of that target. Black ducks give the lowest amount of points and are the easiest to shoot. Blue ducks are a step up in points and difficulty. The red ducks are maniacs but give three times the amount of points as the black ducks. When the ducks are shot they freeze in the air for a moment with a comical bulged eye before falling to the ground whistling. That is when the other main character comes into play: the Dog.

The Dog is a non specific hound dog that spends the beginning of each duck round sniffing the ground before jumping into the background behind some tall grass to flush out the ducks. This dog is the most memorable part of the game since it comments on the player's ability to shoot the ducks. If the player successfully shots at least one duck in each volley the dog will pop up where the duck landed, dead duck in hand, and a big smile on his face while a positive jingle plays.

Pictured: Murder well done!

Miss all of the ducks, however, and the dog comes back up chiding the player for coming up empty with a laugh noise that is hard to put into words.

Not pictured: My child self firing furiously at the dog

Between the dog and the score the player should have enough incentive to attempt to perform well. The only real change in the game as play proceeds is that the targets will speed up and the hit requirement for each round will increase. The early rounds only require 6 out of 10 targets to be shot to proceed. By the time the player gets to Round 20 the player needs to hit all ten of the targets or face a game over. Overall, it is pretty simple stuff.

Verdict & Score:

I had to try really hard to play this game for an hour straight. While the taunts of the Dog could incite me at a young age it just represents a charming part of the package these days. As the hour wore on I came up with a self imposed challenge. I would attempt to get a six-figure score in each round before the hour ended. Clay shooting is pretty simple. The clay pigeons move in an entirely predictable manner so I purposely gave up after Round 20. This was the mode that I could play for hours on end as a kid because I wanted to max out the score and the level counter. They max out when they get to full nines, by the way.

Shooting one duck at a time is not very challenging at first but the ducks do speed up quite a bit by the time I hit Level 10 and beyond. As it was it only took me a couple of attempts to get to a score of over 200,000. No big deal.

Shooting two ducks became very difficult very early. Even though my emulation allows me to shoot with my mouse by point and click, the ducks fly in very erratic patterns. I am pretty sure that real ducks cannot turn 180 degrees on a dime and keep flying but these ducks sure can. I consistently failed out of the game at about Round 8 and I depended on early perfect bonuses of 10,000 points to get to my target goal. Did I succeed in my hour time limit?

Pictured: Success!

In spite of its charms Duck Hunt really is a one-note game. Playing with the Zapper was great fun as a kid but it certainly loses some nostalgia points when I can't play with a light gun. There will be a couple of light gun games that will appear later that have more depth.

For some short-lived shooting gallery fun I will give Duck Hunt a 5(4)/10. It is an average playing experience on the Nintendo but I could be convinced to lower this down a stage to a 4 due to its length.

I have two more black box Zapper games left so I will tackle those next. Coming up next: Hogan's Alley.

Factoids & Trivia:

There is a lot of worthy trivia regarding Duck Hunt and the Zapper. The Zapper will get covered better in the next two reviews so I will be covering Duck Hunt information here.

Duck Hunt is an older game than you might think. The first version of Duck Hunt was actually a 1973 game called The Laser Clay Shooting System, an arcade setup that was set up in abandoned bowling alleys. The game proved to be a hit until a hard recession hit Japan. Smaller versions of the game were developed for arcades and finally a home version called Beam Gun: Duck Hunt was released in 1976. The arcade and home versions were big enough successes to get Nintendo out of hard times. The next notable version of the game was the 1984 arcade version of Duck Hunt that came out on Nintendo’s VS. series of arcade cabinets. That’s why the NES Duck Hunt title screen shows a copyright of 1984 in spite of the NES being released in 1985.

The game’s graphic designer, Hiroji Kiyotake, has stayed in Nintendo’s employ for many years. He is responsible for creating the character design of Samus and Wario along with the Duck Hunt dog and ducks. Not a bad set of contributions all told.

Finally, the arcade version of Duck Hunt had quite a few differences. The game would rotate between duck, clay pigeon, and bonus stages. The player would lose a life if they failed to shoot every target. The bonus stages had one excellent feature that should provide many of us 30-something gamers some closure: you can shoot the dog.