Recently I set up a Nintendo Entertainment System in my home. I’m just slightly too young to have any personal nostalgia for the NES (I was more in the SNES/N64 cohort), but my girlfriend is a different story. Despite being excited about having an NES in the house, she thought I was being ridiculous for also dragging along the CRTV it was attached to. But she changed her tune on the mere abstract idea of being able to play Zapper games once she got started on Duck Hunt.
The version of Duck Hunt I’d probably spent the most time with was the (unofficial) port to the Wii, which fairly straightforwardly repurposes the Wii pointer to shoot ducks. Duck Hunt is such a comically simple concept it was a bit hard for me to really even guess whether the difference would be important. But it really is. See, the Zapper is very…loud. There are other differences in regard to using original, rather than emulated, NES software on a CRTV. The scanlines, the constant on-screen flashes anytime the Zapper is fired, the blowing into cartridges despite knowing I should be using isopropyl alcohol because I’m impatient to get gaming.
But the sheer loudness of the Zapper is the jankiest charm of all. The Zapper is a clunky bit of plastic, crude even compared to the light guns of the nineties. Yet there’s something about that loud clicking noise that just really amps up the adrenaline. Missing a duck, any duck, feels like a personal insult. How can they escape my shots when I’m shooting so angrily? I’ve had to remind my girlfriend many times that you only get three shots per round, so getting too angry instead of taking time to aim isn’t really a great strategy.
So far, she typically gets as far as round 13, which really ups the difficulty not just by having faster ducks, but also requiring at least eight kills before going onto the next round of the endless arcade shooting gallery. It feels strange to use the word “kill” here because those bug-eyed ducks don’t look especially gloomy. They’re actually quite cute, even in death, and it’s easier to imagine that the duck hunt dog is simply holding up the same one or two ducks every round as they prepare for another playful jaunt rather than that the whole backdrop is piled up with duck corpses.
Despite the seeming obscurity of Duck Hunt, the game remains an icon, as noted by the inclusion of the Duck Hunt dog and a very alive duck as playable characters in the Smash Brothers series. But it’s also a bit of an artifact of a time when even explicitly violent games were just presented in an adorably cute way. The loud clicking sound the Zapper makes probably drove most parents crazy. Given time, it might drive me crazy too. For now, though, I just love the sheer viscerality of it. Yes, I probably could play Duck Hunt on a phone if I wanted to. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun though.
You must be logged in to post a comment.