By Gary Kearney
The Wii has had some good, even tremendous, games. I'm not looking to bash on
the system but it seems like it unfortunately has had more than it's fair share
of really bad games. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe it's because not many
developers know how to properly utilize the Wii remote. Or maybe there are just
so many systems out there that developers and publishers just want to try and
make a quick buck off of it's huge install base and figure whatever the put out
someone will buy. I don't know why I just know that some of the worst games of
the past few years has shown up on the tiny popular platform. Well, add another
log to that fire with the amazingly bad Ultimate Duck Hunting.
Ultimate Duck Hunting was release for the Wii back in 2007 and, as of this
writing, it's now 2009. I don't know if it's been re-released by a new publisher
or what, but for some reason it has shown up here at The Gamers' Temple and that
has made me unhappy. When reviewing a game, well at least a bad game, I tend to
think of all the work that went into it and that the designers, developers,
programmers, and such are people with friends and lives. I mean they didn't set
out to make a bad game, right? This time I'm not so sure. Ultimate Duck Hunting
should have never been released, it's just that simple. I feel bad for the
people that created it, but my job here is to tell the readers what I thought
about the game and I thought it was just horrible. For the first time in my many
years of reviewing I feel the need to apologize to all that worked on this game
for being so vicious but I really wish they would have just sucked it up and did
the right thing by not letting this out of the door.
So. Where to start? The controls are horrible. The graphics are horrible. The
sound is horrible. The menus are horrible. The loading screens are horrible
(“Finalizing???”). Heck, even the manual is horrible. Grrrr!
Ok...calm down Gary, calm down....
Whew...
Ultimate Duck Hunting tries to provide a more realistic style of hunting.
That is, it's not like the old Nintendo classic Duck Hunt, but rather a more
life-like game. There are two game modes, Quick Hunt and Career. Both suck. The
only real differences in the two modes is that in Career Mode you have to train
your dog before you can go hunting and high scores are tracked. The basic idea
is for you and your dog to head out to one of six states to get your hunt on.
Each state has a different environment from snowy to woodsy to swampy. Once you
pick the state you go through a quick setup where you select things like how
many decoys you want, what type of gun, what type of camouflage and the color of
your dog unless you're in Career Mode where you'll have already picked your dog.
Yeah, I said the color of your dog, because these things are important in
hunting!
The hunt is basically you sitting around making calls to lure a flock of
ducks into range. There are two types of calls; the Hail Call which is used to
call ducks that are a long ways off, and the Hen Call which is used to call
ducks that are closer. Using these calls the ducks sooner or later will fly over
you and then you shoot. If you hit one you'll see it fall out of the sky.
There's a limit to how many ducks you can shoot in any given session. Once you
have either met that limit or, more likely, are just ready to stop it's time for
you and your dog to retrieve the downed fowl. And that's it, that's all the game
is.
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