Hunting for disgraceful games' saving grace

Web posted February 1, 1999

By Aaron Curtiss
Los Angeles Times

The warning label on ``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D'' pretty much sums it up: ``Rewards injuring nonthreatening creatures.'' In all honesty, though, the game rewards players who kill only nonthreatening creatures of the African savanna -- elephants, zebra, kudu, eland.

Rarely do video games offer refuge for mankind's pacific urges, but more and more lately they seem to revel in killing for killing's sake. If video games teach us one thing, it's that God's beautiful creatures look even more beautiful when their heads are mounted in a rumpus room. That gets hard to take after a while, and the fun of playing games sometimes gets lost in their nihilistic butchery.

Sometimes.

After the unlikely success of last year's ``Deer Hunter,'' every game designer seems to have slapped together a hunting game. Whereas ``Deer Hunter'' demanded skill and patience, much of what's followed offers little more than target practice in the forest.

Of four recent hunting games -- ``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D,'' ``Carnivores,'' ``Field & Stream Trophy Buck'' and ``TNN Outdoors Pro Hunter'' -- only one matches the skill of ``Deer Hunter,'' one improves on it and one just stinks. I'm still trying to figure out ``Carnivores.'' I liked it, though.

``Carnivores'' is the most palatable of these four hunting games. Why? Because hunters are after dinosaurs -- dinosaurs that can fight back. It demands a lot less skill than most hunting games and is most like traditional first-person shooters. But it still requires a fair degree of patience and strategy. Players can call dinosaurs and use terrain for cover.

Players choose a location from the futuristic DinoHunt Corp., which permits hunting of everything from the thick-headed pachycephalosaurus to the sharp-toothed Tyrannosaurus rex. The landscapes glide by, and the dinosaurs move smoothly.

``Carnivores'' requires a Pentium 150 with 16 megabytes of RAM but runs smoothest on a Pentium 200 with at least 32mb of RAM. With graphics hardware, the environments come alive with drifting clouds and nice lighting effects.

Despite its exceptional manipulation of skill and strategy, ``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D'' is all about hunting down magnificent beasts and mounting their heads or tusks or antlers on a wall. Published by the same house that gave us ``Deer Hunter,'' ``Rocky Mountain Trophy Hunter'' and ``Bird Hunter,'' ``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D'' has its moments, but it was tough to get too excited about shooting a hole in an elephant's head.

Unlike the original ``Deer Hunter,'' ``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D'' allows players to move around their environment. With graphics hardware, the landscape of two Zimbabwe hunting concessions comes to life. The clouds drift slowly across the sky as vultures circle somewhere in the distance. Players are accompanied by a professional hunter who dispenses advice. Moving about is easy with the mouse and keyboard, and players can run, crawl or climb trees to track or sneak up on unsuspecting animals grazing on the grasslands.

Pulling the trigger can be tough, and I had more fun wandering around in ``observer'' mode, which allows players to get up close to the animals without shooting them. Why not make a game that allows players to go on a photo safari? All the same skills would come into play, but at the end of the game there might still be a few wild creatures left.

``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D'' runs best on a Pentium 200 with 48mb of RAM, but will work on a Pentium 133 with 32mb of RAM and 90mb of hard disk space.

Like ``Deer Hunter,'' the aim of ``Field & Stream Trophy Buck'' is to bag a prize buck. For hunting enthusiasts, ``Trophy Buck'' offers all the right features. And its interface is the best of the bunch. Play takes place in a window, with the rest of the screen devoted to mapping information and icons that allow quick transition from implement to implement.

``Trophy Buck'' requires a Pentium 166 with at least 32mb of RAM and 200mb of available hard disk space.

``African Safari Trophy Hunter 3D'' seems like a piece of Greenpeace propaganda compared with ``TNN Outdoors Pro Hunter.'' This game sounded intriguing because it uses the Unreal engine to create some pretty extreme terrain -- by far the most realistic of any hunting game.

But it's no hunting game. It's a first-person shooter populated by all sort of furry little critters. Walking along the edge of one environment, I spotted three rabbits in a row running nowhere against the boundaries. Rather than use skill and cunning to track down an animal, ``Pro Hunter'' demands little more of players than simply walking around taking potshots at unarmed forest creatures.

Within five minutes, I had shot a deer and my character shouted excitedly, ``Who's the man? Who's the man?'' Sadly, it was me.

E-mail the writer: Aaron.Curtiss@latimes.com