As someone (Arthur?) mentioned previously, I’m not necessarily someone you’d expect to find reviewing video games. I know some folks who work in that industry, and they’re pretty serious about their stuff… way more intense than I’ll ever be.  But hey, I spend so much time on this computer working and socializing, why not play here too?  So honestly, I’m not a big-time video gamer, but I do enjoy messing around with a couple of the games. 

One that I used to have fun with was the original Deer Hunter.  In this game you started every hunt with a shopping trip.  You had a budget that you had to contend with, and you also had to consider things like weight.  The more gear you carry, the slower your character moves.  The artificial intelligence (AI) in the game calculated things like how far you could go before you needed a break, and the character’s health status was impacted by having too much stuff, or by not having enough of the right gear for weather conditions.  You even had to choose your clothing based on the season and geographical location, or you’d freeze on winter hunts or overheat in warm climates.  Don’t pay attention to these things, and your hunter can actually kick the bucket.  You even had to plan to carry food, or you would have to return to camp from time to time in order to replenish.  It added an element of semi-reality to the game experience that I’d never seen before. 

Anyway, this was my previous experience with Deer Hunter, so when I was contacted by the marketing company for Atari, I was excited at the chance to give this new version, Deer Hunter Tournament, a try.  When the package arrived, I tore into it like a kid at Christmas.  I’ve spent several evenings in the game now, and here’s what I think.

The first thing I noticed was that the shopping experience has been eliminated, and outfitting your character is significantly streamlined.  Selecting your hunter (or huntress) is more akin to setting up an avatar.  You select physical attributes like hair color and body type (only one body type for female characters, apparently), and some clothing.  However, the clothing choice really doesn’t appear to have any relationship to the hunting environments.  In the game you hunt from Alaska to Arkansas, and from the southwestern deserts to Finland… and you can do it all in the same clothing without consequence.

The remainder of the outfitting process is selecting your weapons (you get two weapons for each hunt), your optics, and your means of transport.  There’s a pretty wide selection of weapons, from traditional longbow to centerfire rifle.  With each weapon, there are a handful of additional options, such as sighting systems and caliber or arrow and broadhead type.  This is probably the most comprehensive part of the outfitting process, and it is important to select the proper weapons for the game you’re hunting. 

Optics choices are limited… too limited in my opinion.  You get to choose either binoculars, a spotting scope, or a heat-sensing scope.  I suppose there are players who can make the most of these choices, but I found that my own choice was the same I’d make in real life…  binoculars.  The thing that’s most painfully lacking is a rangefinder.  Maybe I’m missing something, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to measure range in this game… more on that later.

Transportation choices are foot (no selection), horseback, or ATV.  I usually chose horseback, because I like horses.  The game hints also tell you that the horse is quieter than the ATV (duh!) so you can get closer to game with it.  You can play the game just fine on foot.  Since there’s no health status in the game, your hunter can literally run the entire map for the entire game without ill effects.  The only downside to playing on foot is that you can’t travel as fast.  The horse is faster, and the ATV is fastest. 

OK, so you’ve made all these choices and you’re ready to hunt.  You get to choose from 13 hunt locations around the world, and each location offers a selection of game from axis deer to mountain lions.  The locations are nicely done, drawing from real geographic features and rendered pretty nicely (for a computer game).  I couldn’t decide which area was my favorite, although Siskiyou is relatively close to home.  It was also one of the harder areas to hunt.  The easiest hunts were the Sonoran Desert and Missouri.  I don’t know if that’s by design or just because they lent themselves to the way I played the game. 

The only location that really didn’t make a lot of sense to me was the shooting range, since there are no distances marked on the range, and there are no adjustments on your sighting systems to tweak.  Basically you can shoot at the targets and look at where you’re hitting… but I couldn’t figure out how to tell how far each target was, so it really didn’t make much difference.  When you select your weapon, you can “calibrate” it for a certain range, which I’m assuming is Atari-speak for zeroing the sights.  Unfortunately, since I couldn’t find distances at the target range, I had no way of really verifying my settings.  For what it’s worth, I relied on my own knowledge of ballistics to figure out where to zero my rifle so I wouldn’t have to rely on holdover.  That seemed to work. 

Anyway, with that one exception, I really liked the hunting locations, maps, and choices of game.  And yes, we all realize that you can’t really hunt mountain lions in Siskiyou (CA), but I know a lot of folks who would love this single aspect of the game. 

Instead of selecting all of your other gear, the game selects accessories for you based on the game you’re hunting in each location.  For example, when you’re deer hunting you’ll be equipped with a doe-in-heat call, a buck grunt, and a set of rattling antlers.  Elk hunters get a cow call and a bugle.  Bear and lion hunts are outfitted with a predator call.  And you get a supply of bait corn, regardless of where you’re hunting (something else I’ll get back to in a moment).

The calls are another area I had some issue with.  You’d think that with all the call-makers, instructional videos and CDs, and other access, the guys at Atari would have be able to come up with some reasonably accurate call effects.  In the old Deer Hunter game, the call sounds were a little better, and I saw a pretty cool learning opportunity for hunters who’ve never used calls.  What should they sound like and what are some good calling strategies?  This would have been a good direction, but it looks like the game makers went the other way instead.  You’re rewarded for overcalling, and persistence will always bring the animals in. 

A far as gameplay, I understand that there’s a really hard line to define between realism and fantasy.  I know a lot of people complain about hunting games where the hunt is presented more as a shooting gallery than a real hunt.  The complaint is that it gives an inaccurate depiction of hunting, and lends itself to the short attention spans of today’s kids. 

The opposite end of the spectrum is that real hunting is slow and often unproductive… attributes that will definitely NOT sell games.  Who wants to play a hunting game where you don’t kill anything (the same mentality that drives the hunting TV and video industry)?  You’ve gotta throw the players a bone or two, or they’ll turn it off and go find something else to play. 

Deer Hunter Tournament toes the line on this.  My first impression of the game was, SLOW.  You really have to look for game, and it took an awful lot of patience to keep waiting.  Combined with my early difficulties figuring out how to use the weapons (remember that rangefinding issue?), I got pretty frustrated early on.  I was almost ready to give this game a major thumbs-down, but decided to give it another go.  I abandoned traditional hunting practices, and jumped on the horse to “spot and stalk” game.  This worked pretty well and I started to fill up my “trophy room”. 

Later, I found that a little patience pays off.  Each map is dotted with stands, tripods or ground blinds, and if you sit in one for a little while, you’ll usually see game.  If you spot game in the distance, you can call it in using your arsenal of calls.  You still have to move occasionally in order to fill all of your tags, but I found it wasn’t unusual to be able to take at least a couple of species from a single stand if I was willing to sit there for a while.

The passage of time in the game is part of what made things seem slow.  Each hunting location allows you the space of one “day” to fill your tags.  When time is up, the hunt is over.  One complaint I had about this is that there’s no indication that time is up, except the clock stops spinning.  In the old game, you reviewed the local regulations, including shoot times, in the camp before you went out to hunt.  This version doesn’t appear to offer that, so you don’t know what time to stop hunting until time actually runs out.  If you didn’t notice the clock stopping, it’s entirely possible to keep hunting.. although if you shoot something after time runs out, you are penalized and lose all your tags and trophies.

In the game settings, you can adjust how fast time goes by, from real-time to eight times normal speed (eight seconds pass for every real second).  Honestly, though, even at eight-times normal, waiting could start to seem interminable.  I can see where a lot of gamers aren’t going to like this at all.  I have become ambivalent… if I wanted a shooting gallery, I’d pick a different game.  There are plenty of them out there.  There aren’t many like this one, though.

The game does rely on a strict set of “regulations”, which I kind of liked.  You have one tag for each species of animal in an area.  The tag is either-sex, which isn’t particularly realistic, but I think that’s a concession to the gamer who has to shoot something.  Once you fill that tag, you move on to the other species, and take as many as you can before time runs out.  If you shoot another of the same species, you lose all of your tags and trophies… but instead of taking you back to a menu, it leaves you in the environment.  Kinda strange…

I learned about the limits the hard way after shooting a big, boar grizzly in Denali.  As I went to “tag” my trophy, I was charged by the sow.  When you get mauled by the bear the system knocks you down and then respawns the character after a period of time.  Unfortunately, every time I got respawned, I got attacked again.  I fired a couple of shots to turn her a time or two, but finally she ignored my warning shots and came right at me.  I finally shot her at the end of my muzzle, and was immediately informed that I’d over-shot my limit.  I guess that’s realistic enough, but I’m still wondering what else I was supposed to do. 

Another regulation prohibits shooting game in the water.  You’ll often find animals swimming, and you have to wait until they’re completely clear of the water before taking the shot.  That’s fine and realistic, but in some cases you can’t tell if an animal is in or out of water… particularly at a distance or over an obstruction.  This applies to shooting wounded game as well, as I learned the hard way. 

Speaking of wounded game, you are responsible for tracking a wounded animal.  If the wound is fatal (as determined by the AI), you have to recover the animal.  If you lose it and shoot another, you’ve exceeded your limit and the hunt is disqualified.  While I like the tracking requirement, the game makes it pretty tough.  A blood trail will disappear quickly if you don’t get right on it.  I found that it will even go away while you’re looking at it, and it did cost me a couple of animals.  This was really frustrating.  The blood trail should stay in place until you recover the animal, unless the animal is not fatally wounded. 

How about all that technical stuff?  I tried this game on two computers, my desktop, which is pretty high-end and designed for multi-media and gaming, and my laptop which is still pretty powerful, but not totally optimized for gaming.  I won’t get into all the megahertz and gigabyte stuff (you can find full system requirements on the Deer Hunter Tournament website or on the game box), but the bottom line is, the laptop barely handled the game, and stalled regularly.  The desktop handled it fine.

I think I missed out on one of the key selling points of Deer Hunter Tournament… the ability to play in online tournaments with other gamers.  Due to my home firewall and the fact that I’m running on Vista, I wasn’t up to the convolutions required to connect to an online tournament.  That’s not really something I am personally interested in anyway, but after reading up a little it does sound pretty cool.  Not only can you hunt with or against other players, it looks like tournaments can be set up by corporate sponsors, and players can play for prizes.  I don’t think this is a new thing overall, but I don’t know of any other hunting games that offer this functionality right now. 

Anyway, I’ve gone on quite a bit, and really haven’t addressed a lot of features.  They’re not all that important anyway… the question is, did I like it? 

And the answer is…

Yeah, I kinda did.  There’s an awful lot of room for improvement, and a few things I just hated… but I could say that about every game I’ve played.   I find myself firing it up from time to time when I’m bored with the Web, and once I’m in the game I tend to lose track of time.  After playing for a while, I’ve learned the tricks to keep the game moving when it feels slow, although I’ll still often run out of time before I fill all my tags. 

It’s a fun game if you enjoy the first-person hunting games.  It should be a perfect stocking stuffer for the younger hunters on your list, which is probably why they released this new version right here at Christmas time! 

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