Killing Fake Elephants

Here's another game I rented...

You know that arcade game where you shoot the deer!? I would never go hunting in a million years in real life - I don't see how taking innocent lives is a sport - but I'll shoot anything in a make believe video game. But in that arcade game you only get like three shots for one dollar to shoot the darn animal. So, I was thinking...it would be cool to get that on the Wii and then I could play it all night without pumping quarters into the machine and maybe actually score some points. So I go to the video store to see if I can rent such a game and I find Cabela's Big Game Hunter sitting on the shelf. Not only do you shoot deer in the game but there is also the promise of shooting bears and mountain lions, plus there's a picture on the back of the box of some dude shooting an elephant from the back of his safari jeep. OK, I'm in!

So, I get this game home and fire up the ol' Wii. My first mission in the game is to climb up a tree stand and shoot some deer with a telescopic lens on my riffle. Done! Next, I'm supposed to track down and kill 6 of some animal I've never heard of by scoping out the forest for the animals tracks and urine scent. What??? While you're running your little hunter dude around the woods, there is a little graphic that comes up on the screen that tells you how fresh the urine scent is. Really...do I need that much realism? I just wanted to shoot some animals. Even when I found fresh animal pee-pee, I didn't know what I was supposed to do with the information.

I tried another level where I ran around a mountain side for the better part of 40 minutes before I found some other hunter who told me to go shoot some ducks. I was actually able to pick off 6 mallard ducks standing on the banks of a river. I was then awarded a new gun to use in the game. It was at that point that I realized there are about 4,000 guns, gadgets and other items that you can unlock and use in the game. Included among them were your own bottles of urine scent to lure animals out into the open. It was also at this point that I decided I was in way over my head with the particular video game. I returned to the mountain side and ran around for another handful of minutes before I was savagely attacked and killed by a giant brown bear.