Sometimes, I can just take a look at a game and just know it’s the kind of port that exists just to cash in on the IP, or make a few extra bones on a new console. Or, in the case of the amount of games in the Cabela’s Big Game Hunter series, you fire a shotgun blast of ports and releases to entrench your IP and rake in as much money as you can. Judging from some cursory glances online, it’s clear that Cabela isn’t the most beloved franchise of all time, but some of their games seem to have their value. But the first of two entries on the GBA, eponymously titled Cabela’s Big Game Hunter, is one of those rare games almost no one is talking about. And for clear good reason; this initial hunting trip on the Game Boy Advance isn’t just lacking in nearly any content at all, but what’s here is not just largely quite ugly, it doesn’t seem to function correctly. Perhaps the art of hunting isn’t for a perennial shut-in like myself, but playing this game seems beyond me - but even my confidence isn’t so low to believe it’s just a skill issue, this game just doesn’t want you to play it.

The hunting subgenre of video games - let alone the act of hunting itself - is one I’m utterly out of my depth in regards to. Unless you count Monster Hunter? Uh, anyway, I’m not someone who cares about hunting, guns in any specific way, or trudging through the wilderness for the thrill of the kill. My interest in these games begins and ends at the one time at an arcade I played a really good, albeit more action oriented, hunting arcade game with my dad. But, uh, I don’t think you use machine guns in most hunting games, so I don’t know if that really counts. The point is, this is one of the rare genres I know nothing about, and that’s exciting. Or, it *would* be exciting, if I’d picked one that had any kind of redeeming value to it. I’m sure good at picking winners, no?

I might not know anything about hunting games, but I’ve played enough games *just* for this console to know when a bad game rears its head and charges out of the undergrowth, and hoo boy, Cabela’s Big Game Hunter is a doozy of a trophy in that regard. I promise you, I did give this game its dues; I spent an hour trying to crack its shell, to see if the game was inherently flawed beyond its spartan, ugly facade, or if I was just too stupid to understand what I was doing. This game is *bad*... but trust me, I followed the trail closely to reach that hunt’s conclusion.

Call of the Wastelands

Cabela gets you into the game so quickly, it makes it feel almost like an old-school arcade hunter, but I think the brevity of its menus and set-up come from a sense of cheapness more than anything else. Upon booting up the game, you’ll instantly be given the option to pick a certain target to hunt for, in a particular hunting area - i.e, a number of states within the United States. After giving you a little bit of info about the situation of the game you’re hunting - something which I found a tad interesting, like how the Elk in one state were allowed to populate without intervention for seventy years before their numbers needed culling. The more you know, even if I couldn’t imagine personally killing something so genuinely majestic. Anyway, you’ll pick your gun, each of which functions a little bit differently (not that I really got a chance to see how), and then you’ll be dropped into the, uh, ‘world’ of Cabello’s Big Game Hunter.

And by world, I mean a flat, blotchy, bird-eyes view environment that is populated by dots representing yourself and potential targets, and splashes of colour that is ostensibly foliage. This is, genuinely, 95% of the experience of playing Cabela’s Big Game Hunter, and it is a woeful one. The majority of the time you’ll spend ‘playing’ this game probably well-represents the actual hobby of hunting - doing fuck all. You’ll be wandering these flat, small environments looking for any sign of a deer or an elk for you to fill with hot lead. Sometimes, the game will flash a picture of one of the animals inhabiting the area, and an arrow which indicates what direction their tracks are leading, but not once did I ever find my target this way.

The game gives you a couple of tools to help you track animals; musk to mimic your target, or hide your own, or calls to draw them out. But again, much like the tracks, these never seemed to make an impact on my tracking; using calls never had an elk emerge from its hiding place, nor keep them still when hiding my scent. The game’s manual gives basic tips on how to track game, but following tracks, using the tools, or approaching upwind, NOTHING helped me find anything any faster than just randomly wandering around until a red dot popped out of a blurry texture that was ostensibly a forest, and rather than slowing to a crawl to sneak in, I charge in full pelt to go in for a kill.

One Shot, One Kill, Ten Thousands Hours Notwithstanding

Going in for a kill is the only time the game shows any visuals resembling the endless wilderness. When you tap B in the top-down wilderness - regardless of any targets being nearby - you’ll be placed into a first person perspective, being greeted by blurry, but somewhat charming, lonely-looking forests and vistas. You’ll be able to gaze along a full 360 degree field of view, scrolling along the four cardinal directions. If you entered this mode whilst in the vicinity of one of those red dots, an animal will be in frame, sometimes stationary, sometimes running for its life. You aim your shot, try and hit them in their head or their heart to bring them down, and…

That’s it. Track and find your target, sneak up to them, shoot them down. Maybe if you don’t get them down on that first shot, you’ll need to hunt them down again, but other than that? What I just described makes up the entirety of Cabella’s Big Game Hunter. Sure, there’s a variety of locales to hunt in, and animals you can gun down, but I found no intrinsic difference between these different hunts rather than how damn hard it was to *find* the animals. There’s no real goal, either; ostensibly, you can try and get better grade kills, but from what I gather it’s just random chance how ‘good’ a trophy can be, so getting the best kill is just nothing more than repetition and luck. Oooh, exciting.

Give Me A Hunting Game With Nothin'!

The kicker is, I don’t know if I’m just an idiot, but I couldn’t even work out how to play this game properly. In the first level, I managed to locate some game and collect my trophy pretty quickly, but the second level was when everything went wrong. First of all, actually finding my quarry? Nearly impossible. No matter what speed I walked at, what direction I came from, if I was, or were not, following the tracks the game was ostensibly having me follow along, it would take forever until I found… *something*. But the second one of those tell-tale red dots indicating a target would appear, no matter if I apply any of the scents the game provided, would instantly dash off screen, with the tracks telling me it apparently just charged off the bound of the map and out of my grasp.

I tried this level multiple times, I read the damn manual of the game, I watched a few of the incredibly sparse YouTube videos of people covering this game, and I felt vindicated to see that they, too, couldn’t seem to work out what the hell to do, either. Why do I think it’s like this? I think the developers just didn't playtest the game properly. Considering when you cut out all of the management roles out of the credits, this game only had a handful of people working on it, likely to get a quick port out for a few extra bucks with the new big console. Maybe I am just garbage at this game, I accepted a long time ago that I’m an idiot, but I don’t think I’m losing my mind when I say that the game makes actually playing it, finding game to hunt and shoot, a far more tedious and frustrating endeavor than it has any right to do. These games work on more powerful hardware - there’s a reason there’s a million of them on PC or the PS1/2 era of consoles, but they don’t work when the entire tracking element is on poorly rendered 2D maps where your game can just vanish into the ether without a single sign.

Literally the only thing I can find good things to say about, ironically enough, is still an element missing from the game. There is essentially no music in this game whatsoever, which at first as I clicked through menus felt cheap and lazy, but once I was out running about the hunting environments, aiming down the barrel of my gun… it gives the game a real isolating vibe, a reminder that you’re somewhere so remote, with just the empty wilderness surrounding you. This is further highlighted when you actually get a chance to fire your gun; the bang and following echo disappearing into the endless nothingness is quite evocative. Especially when I can’t find the damn deer I’m looking for! Still, the lack of music might have been just another layer of cheapness that pervades everything that makes up Big Game Hunting, but it’s the rare piece of cheapness that improves the game rather than takes it away.

Even if the game barely had any content, looked like a blurry, poorly textured mess and had little reason to go for more than just the bare minimum, the foundational issue is the game is just inherently flawed, and by flawed, I mean *terrible*. Even with manual in hand, any tips or tools the game gives you seem to do nothing to help you actually perform the titular act of hunting. I understand that the act of hunting is slow and deliberate, but none of that is reflected in Cabello’s Big Game Hunter. It’s a slow trek to nowhere, and one I don’t care to follow - at the very least, the follow-up in a couple of years looks like it has at least mildly more meat on it’s decrepit, wasting bones.

Thanks for reading my review of Cabela’s Big Game Hunter on the Game Boy Advance. Another game in the vaunted category of “Took me longer to review than play”, so that’s something, I guess. Anyway, Im just happy I’m playing something of (hopefully) higher quality next time for game #105, so look forward to that. As always, you can find me around the internet under GameBoyAbyss, like BlueSky, or email me at mgeorge7003@hotmail.com if you have any questions or requests! Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time!