08 January 2015

GAME SEVEN: SAFARI HUNT (1986)

INFORMATION:
Publisher/Developer:  Sega
Format: Cartridge
Game Size: 128K (2 games)
Rarity:  2
Game Type: First Person Light Gun Moving Target
Region: USA
Other Ways to Play: Good question...
Power Base Convertor Playable?: Yes if you have the Phaser.

PERSONAL DATA:
Price I Paid: Don't remember.  Came with my Master System I got second hand.  In like 1991 or so.
Price I Would Pay: 5 Dollars
Condition: Game, Case, Manual
Game Rating: OK (Counting both games on the cart.)
My History:  It is one half of the original Master System pack in.  DUH!  Played it a bit but.. yeah.


  Ahh the other half of the main Master System pack in.  A three screen bog standard light gun shooter.  Hooray?  No, not really.  Yet it has a little bit more content than the NES' Duck Hunt though less variety if that makes any sense.

  See me after the pictures below.

Game contents

Next set of images are from Kega Fusion Emulator
1986 Sega needs some sensitivity training.

The round score info.

Fishie tells us the score we got for him.  A duckie is flying, another one I shot so it is cartoonishly dead.

Bears and birds and armadillos.  Not sure where bears hang out with tropical birds and said dillos of arma-ing.

I shocked the monkey but the panther and the bat are still around.

(Next two shots are from a Genesis with Power Base Convertor.)
 Sometimes you can even hit things with the tree fruit.  Sometimes.

Already qualified.  But out of ammo.  


 Stage 2 SMS in motion.

Stage 1 SMS in motion.


  In this game you are tasked with shooting a number of cartoonish critters worth various points with limited amounts of ammo under an invisible time limit to prevent players from only waiting until the random spawns turn out the ones that are worth the most.  If you hit the ever increasing score requirement you move on.  Miss the par and game over.  Three screens with different creatures in different sorts of places to get your Ted (I only like shooting things that can't shoot back.) Nugent on in.

  That's pretty much it.  Score gets harder to hit even if you got a big buffer from earlier rounds (your score carries over so you can sometimes have an edge if you have a bad round or your cat gets in the way..) and eventually the faster and faster moving animals will ensure you have a game over before you get entirely bored with it all.  So about 20 minutes one way or the other.

  Yet...  I cannot hate it.  Let me explain a little.

  See, the game is kind of cute.  Instead of animals going into screams or buckets of blood they do cartoony things.  Bandages.  A hurt look and holding up a score sign.  Turning into a cooked bird.  Losing their fur.  It's amusing!  The sounds let you know if you hit or miss as some animals require multiple shots to take out and the cartoony style isn't going to show bullet wounds.  This also provides some strategy as towards the end of a stage you have to decide if it is even worth the risk or do you use your last bullets on one shot targets or go for the big guys and hope you don't hit the trees they are running behind.

Master System Play: Basically plays and looks about the same as it does on the Genesis.  The Phaser works fine on both.

Rating: Well there just isn't much to the game!  3 stages with no real variation other than getting harder and harder.  It is merely OK.   It seems to control ok and everything but it doesn't have what you need to play it for more than 10-15 minutes every now and then.  But alongside Hang On it is honestly an OK title.

Next Time:  Light Gun Month continues with another barely there game:  Shooting Gallery!  Is there a reason a couple of these games got combined into one single cartridge in some regions?  Hmmm.  On the upside it gives me a game I can quickly play and review in two weeks.  I have more Borderlands 2 to play!


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