Remington Great American Bird Hunt Review

It's Duck Hunt...

And that's about it, really. You can all go home now.

Oh, but that can't be it? Remington Great American Bird Hunt (RGABH) is a game on a modern game console, it has to be more in-depth than an NES classic! But it really is, I assure you. The only thing that's missing is the pink screen where the ducks fly away. And the dog that makes fun of you when your aim sucks.

There are only four modes to choose from in RGABH [Gesundheit. ~Ed], and they're all just replicas of each other without any variation: A single-player mode with twelve tournaments to play through and three multiplayer modes, all of which consist of either shooting ducks together... or shooting ducks apart. And if you shoot them apart, you'll get to see the way the round plays out before you play, and adapt accordingly. It's like not only seeing your nephew go first in that old board game Memory (y'know, matching the cards up and stuff?), but seeing where every card is placed before you play. Hell, for three bucks I can buy a deck of cards to play that game, and if you let me go second, I'll show you how it's done... and in record time!

Winning certain tournaments along the way will unlock a new shotgun for use in... well, in future tournaments. For the life of me, I couldn't find a way to do anything special with them. I couldn't find a trophy room, or any way to even see the full gun that I successfully earned. Why would it bother to tell me that I've “won” a new gun without any way to take advantage of it? Why not give me an option before a round to choose what gun I'd prefer, or at least adjust the aspects of my gun, like a bigger magazine maybe, but more recoil? Quicker shot, but more reload time and fewer bullets? No reloading, but stricter penalties for shots missed? Even if they're licensed guns, just give me some kind of options instead of throwing me some default boom-stick.

Even where I'm shooting is dull. None of the environments are particularly beautiful, just sort of what one would expect: a forest, a swamp, a field, and a frozen lake. None of them stand out at all, though you get plenty of time to stare at them, because the birds are slower to show up than new screenshots of Duke Nukem Forever. All of the action is birds flying in, birds flying out and in certain areas your dog jumps through the bush to scare a flock into the air. With either the Wii-mote or the Wii Zapper, you just aim and fire, cursor on the screen, and e'rythaang.

The game automatically reloads your gun, so you don't even have that to worry about, and the power-ups littered throughout the rounds (shooting “this” duck gives you a weapon upgrade, while “that” duck is an extended magazine) make shooting the same targets all the easier. Hell, there's even a “Hunter Vision Meter” that fills up as you take down those little feathered bastards, and when it's full, you can slow down time and rack up more of a combo. Yup, you have the ability to slow down time to shoot ducks. I don't know what those birds did wrong to piss off the programmers so much, but it sounds to me like the whole reason this exists is for revenge.

The more I think about it and the more I try and describe it, the more I want to wax nostalgic about my old-school orange Zapper: a single screen at a time to shoot at, only a few ducks on screen at any given time (Duck Hunt only had two at a time, at least the Wii can handle more than five flapping around at once). Worse yet, true to the legacy of NES Duck Hunt, you can't even shoot the damn dog! [You could, in fact, shoot the dog in the arcade version "Vs Duck Hunt" ~Ed]

If this is supposed to be a realistic simulator, in any way/shape/form of actually going out bird hunting (which the real rifles, bird types, and what you're allowed/not allowed to shoot might suggest), why can't I shoot anything else? The one thing I've wanted to do for years is shoot the dog that pops up to heckle me when I miss, and I can't do anything of the sort here... it just resets my multiplier. Dammit.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not normally for the shooting of dogs, but that one... oooohhhhh, that one knows what he did...