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Bird Hunter: Waterfowl Edition Wizard Works/GT Interactive Wizard Works has taken aim again with another addition to their popular hunting series. Like their top selling Deer Hunter game, the objective of Bird Hunter: The Waterfowl Edition is to kill game - this time the game being ducks, geese, and other assorted species and sub-species of water fowl. But know that like Deer Hunter, this is not an action packed, arcade-style shoot and kill game. It's a mostly sit and wait, watch and listen affair. Often the prime target seems to be the hunter's patience. And your biggest asset isn't your gun, it's experience - it takes time and practice to find where the little birds might be migrating. Still, Bird Hunter's strong point is realism, since anyone who hunts in the actual world will tell you that a good part of hunting is not shooting game, but learning to find it, and then how to kill it. So not surprisingly then, when the game starts you find yourself rummaging in the back of your pickup truck, gathering your "tools" to go out and hunt the waterfowl. There's a choice of guns, choices for ammo, either a small boat to sit in or a duck blind to hide behind. Then there are the ducks calls, which seem to be the tool that will either make or break your hunting experience. These are used to attract fowl to you, so if you've got the wrong one, well, you'll be doing more watching and listening than anything else. You can even repel birds off into the wrong direction with the wrong duck call. Apparently waterfowl tend to prefer the sound of certain other waterfowl. But let's not get ahead of the game. After you've gathered your killing paraphernalia, you'll have to pick a location, of which there are four - Louisiana, Arkansas, North Dakota, and Manitoba. Once chosen, a rather fuzzy overhead map of the area will come up from which you pick the exact spot you want to hunt from - basically land or water. If you've taken the boat from the pickup truck, water makes sense - these are waterfowl you're after - and if you've chosen the duck blind you'll find you can only hunt on land. The directions tell you it's a good idea to get yourself to some water. Again, that makes sense. (Note: If you're at the North Dakota map, the Canadian border might be easier to find than a body of water.) So, once you've chosen your spot, it's time to lay some decoys out. Waterfowl fly and land into the wind, so you'll want to keep and eye on the wind direction and lay your decoys accordingly. Now you're ready to hunt. Soon (depending on the speed of the computer processor) up comes the landscape. This is a first-person game, so you scroll up and down and 360 degrees left or right by moving the mouse to the edges of the screen. The scenes are nicely constructed, most notably Arkansas. There's a pair of binoculars for a closer look, which seems about all they're good for. Anyway, here's where the duck call comes large into play, along with your choice of spot, and your placement of decoys. If you're serious about hunting birds, or if you're just determined to get your money's worth from the game, you may want to take note of wind directions, locations, decoy placement, and, of course, which duck call you're using. Listen first - the sounds of the woods are calming, and off in the distance you may or may not hear some waterfowl. Either way, you start using your duck call, which makes three sounds depending on where you click your mouse on the duck call icon. The directions warn not to overuse the call. With good luck or skill, depending on your expertise up to this point, you'll hear and then see waterfowl heading you way. The birds will fly right up to you or land in the water in front of you if you're patient and wait for them to come. Then the juices get flowing as you click and raise your gun and shoot away. Make it good, because the first shot will send the fowl scattering off and away. You might get a second chance if there's a particularly lame duck. But with bad luck or no skill, none of this will happen. Then you may hear birds off in the distance, you may even see them in the treeline (perhaps one use for the binoculars) but they'll never come near you. Again, realism is what we're talking about here - not every expedition is successful. So depending on your degree of patience, your choice is simple: click the duck call in every imaginable fashion and scroll around the landscape, or click back to the map and choose a new spot. This is where Bird Hunter seems to lose aim. For all of its fine graphics, realistic sound, simulated weather conditions, and choices of paraphernalia, it forgot one thing: computer gamers are probably not as patient as hunters. After all, we're not trying to put dinner on the table here. So the developers might have allowed the hunter the option of changing some equipment without having to completely back out of the hunting site, then out of the map, and trudge all the way back to the truck to fetch another duck call. This could have made the game a bit more compelling, a little less time consuming in loading and unloading the program, and might have made it even more realistic. One could imagine carrying an extra duck call in his ditty bag, or bringing one or two different types of shotgun shells for varying conditions. But that's not possible. Then again, maybe this is Bird Hunter's way of weeding out the mildly curious from the serious would-be hunter. Maybe the game aims at teaching the novice and the experienced hunter how to be a better-prepared hunter. But the developers make no such claim. All in all, Bird Hunter: The Waterfowl Edition is well made hunting game. It's possible those who have never hunted before, those who've hunted on occasion, or those who hunt regularly might find something to enjoy about the experience. There's something exhilarating about patiently watching your quarry approach from the horizon and taking careful aim upon the unsuspecting feathered critters. And there's something even rewarding about it if you've put some time into perfecting your hunting skills. Just keep in mind that earning it isn't what you could call duck soup. -Dan D. |
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