Duck Hunt was one of the first lightgun games available for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The title sums the game up nicely – all you have to do is murder ducks. There are three game modes: Game A has one duck on screen at a time, Game B has two on screen at a time, and Game C is clay pigeon shooting. You have 3 shots to clear the screen of ducks or clay pigeons, and each round has 10 ducks/clay pigeons to be shot.

This is one of the only NES games to make good use of the awesome Nintendo Zapper. There were a few lightgun games on the NES, but most of them aren’t that good. Personally I played Operation Wolf recently and ended up banishing it from my console after dying in the same place three times in a row. You can’t see where your shots are landing as the sprites are so small and the whole screen flickers every time you pull the trigger. While the game offers much more variety than Duck Hunt, I found it almost unplayable.

Duck Hunt is so simple that anyone can play it. The game suffers from none of the issues that hampered Operation Wolf. The graphics are clear, well animated and large enough to make out properly when squinting through the sights of the Zapper. And the music is classic 8-bit Nintendo, very reminiscent of the company’s other games from the era.

The game starts, traditionally, with Round 1. Here you see on screen the landscape that will be seen for the rest of your play time. I told you the game was simple, remember. Also note your trusty dog sniffing along the ground and diving into the grass as the game starts. Dog lover or not, you will attempt to shoot him in the very near future. Unfortunately it’s not possible to shoot the dog in the console version of Duck Hunt, although Wikipedia tells of an “urban legend” (their words, not mine) that the dog can actually be shot in a bonus round in the arcade version. I would love to know whether this is true or not, but the chances of me being able to find an original arcade cab of Duck Hunt in the UK are slim and none…

Anyway, one or two ducks will soon fly onscreen (depending on which mode you are playing), and you have 3 attempts to shoot them. As expected, in the early rounds the ducks fly slower and change direction less often. As you progress through the game they get harder to hit. Each time you hit a duck it will stop dead in the air with a startled look on its face, then do a spinning beak-dive to the floor. Your trusty dog then picks up the duck corpse as a little congratulatory jingle plays. WARNING: this bit of music gets played every time you hit a duck, and gets VERY annoying. Possibly more annoying however, is the dog when you miss a duck. Rather than console his master, or offer some constructive criticism, he merely stands up and laughs at you. As if he could even load a shotgun, let alone kill a duck with it! Anyway, this is the reason you’ll want to blast the dog – because if you’ve never played before, chances are he’s going to be laughing at you a lot.

Although you can only have one Zapper plugged into the NES at a time (as a controller needs to be plugged into the second port to select games), it is possible to play Duck Hunt with two players. The second player is unable to shoot at ducks, but can use the direction pad on the controller to control the direction that the ducks fly.

The clay pigeon shooting mode is very similar to game modes A and B, but the clay pigeons are smaller targets, and always fired two at a time. This mode provides a little more of a challenge, and the annoying dog is absent too.

The only problem with Duck Hunt is the repetitive nature of the game. It goes like this: shoot duck, watch dog animation, repeat. The game requires extreme patience and concentration – I can’t imagine most gamers sticking with it for longer than 10 minutes at a time. I have never finished this game, in fact I don’t even know how many rounds there are. I recently had a Duck Hunt session where I got to Round 17 but I had to stop in the end as my arms were aching from holding the Zapper and the squinting to aim was giving me a headache. And I was also starting to think to myself that life has probably got more to offer me than this.

Duck Hunt has been around pretty much as long as the NES itself. It was packaged with the console for some years, sharing a game cartridge with that other early NES classic, Super Mario Bros. The game even has a cameo in the movie Boyz ‘N’ The Hood, that’s how legendary it is. Although the gun they used certainly wasn’t a NES Zapper!

To summarise, Duck Hunt is a well made early lightgun game that works well in small doses but will test even the strongest-willed gamer’s patience. The game can easily be picked up at car boot sales, second hand game shops or eBay for next to nothing. Right, I’m off to find me the arcade version. God I’d love to kill that dog…