What I Did On My Spring Vacation




Opening screen to the great Hunt of a Lifetime!
Opening screen to the great Hunt of a Lifetime!

Choosing a place to hunt
Choosing a place to hunt.

I'm not stepping in that!
I'm not stepping in that!

We have moving pixles here!
We have moving pixels here!

The instructions say that is a deer
The instructions say that is a deer.

Come to me... I have a present for ya!
Come to me... I have a present for ya!

Bambi takes a dirt nap
Bambi takes a dirt nap

Murdered and on display... because it's such a beautiful creature!
Murdered and on display... because it's such a beautiful creature!
Ahhhh.... there is nothing quite like the hunt.

The smell of the wind, the early morning cold, the sudden and strong need to urinate once that perfect hiding place for killing innocent animals has been found.

But, I'm not a hunter.

I went on vacation to my mothers place on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington State. As the weather in early April isn't exactly suntan lotion and speedo friendly, we were forced to spend much of our time in her house.

My mother does have a computer though, so not all was lost. I quickly installed an IRC client and had the usual chats with the usual people. I am such a geek! I showed her how to write html, and in the end, had to download a crappy WYSIWYG editor for her to make it easy.

When that was all done, I found myself with a bit of free time. Being that I'm a gamer, I started browsing my mothers hard drive to see what kind of entertainment might be found there.

There was only one game.... Deer Hunter.

Of all the crappy Wall-Mart specials on software out there, my mother had the bad luck of getting this thing bundled with her computer. I soon came to find out why it was free.

But since this was all I had at my disposal, I gave it a try.

I'm not saying that this game is boring, but it's my opinion that a real-time simulation of an acorn growing into an oak tree might be just a bit more of an adrenalin rush than this game.

It's not the genre that bothers me... I play more first person shooters than you can point a stick at. It's the lack of action that got me.

I launched this bad boy... chose a hunting area, and proceeded to the hunting grounds where I was treated immediately to a feature poor map showing that I was standing in a large pile of deer droppings.

Oh, nummy!

I moved with a hunters grace a short ways from thus said droppings, and entered into the hunt.

Honestly... I could have evolved into a higher life from before I actually saw a deer. I experimented with different deer calls, moved all over the place, and closed the game out several times to re-read the instructions that came with it.

I chose a tree-stand, because the instructions said that it would make the deer less likely to spook. It didn't change my vantage point any, things looked exactly as they had when I had been hunting on the ground, but it did add this annoying tree trunk to by back that was impossible to see around.

Finally, I found that magic combination of calls and rattles that cyber-deer seem to find irresistible, 3 quick calls, 1 rattle, and one more quick call.

Enter Bambi, my cyber-foe.

Actually... what I first saw was nothing more than a few pixels that were moving around. But my years of training in games like Doom gave me the edge to know that moving pixels are the enemy, and my senses heightened at the thought of a kill.

I got out the binoculars for a better look at what was going on. Slowly... these moving pixels resolved into a dog shaped creature. It was still behind a small tree, so I put away the binoculars and readied my rifle, waiting for it to break to the right or left to get around it, so that I could frag it with a little "death from above" action.

It walked right through the tree.

What the hell is this!? Who programmed this thing? Am I hunting for a deer, or a ghostly apparition? My frustration with the poor design of the game nearly got the better of me.

The deer-dog thing was coming quickly now. I centered it in my cross-hairs in anticipation of the kill that would come. Funny thing about aiming in this game. The rifle has the annoying habit of swaying around when you aim it. Apparently this was done to give the realistic "drunken hunter" effect.

I waited until I had it squarely in the center of my cross-hairs and fired.

There was a loud crack and then silence. Bambi had met her match this time, and he was bored out of his skull.