Good ‘Quil Hunting
After the amazing success of Ninja Princess, I’m back on the SG-1000 with Sega’s own Safari Hunting. The original arcade version was known as Tranquilizer Gun, though it is spelled as Tranquillizer Gun on the flyer.
This is a fascinating game. At its core, Safari Hunting is a maze game, and I’m a maze game guy. Pac-Man and its various spinoffs are mostly very good, and I think Nintendo’s Devil World is awesome. I love some good old fashioned fast paced maze chase action. And that’s why I found Safari Hunting so interesting; it’s actually a game of slow paced maze chase action. Like, really slow.
A simple rundown of how the game works: Animals slowly pop out of the jungle and into the maze, ducking in and out of the play area every so often. You need to shoot them unconscious and carry them back to your jeep to score points. Enemies are only unconscious for 30 seconds and if they aren’t in the jeep before that timer runs out you’re as good as dead. You can shoot from inside the jeep but the enemies will still kill you in there if they touch you.
You are spending a decent amount of time waiting around, which I think many players would view as a negative and certainly seems like a negative at first, but I actually think the waiting plays an important role in testing your patience. This is a game where you have to wait around for the right opportunity to act, but when that opportunity presents itself you need to swing into action ASAP. There is not a lot of time to shoot an animal before they hide themselves once again, and even though all the action is pretty low speed, you are still in a race against the clock as your jeep’s fuel meter depletes. More on that later.
My initial experience with this game was that it was frustrating above all else. Death comes quickly and while learning the game it felt like most of my deaths were by accident, but as I figured things out a bit I began to appreciate its strangeness. The hit detection is definitely not good, and the controls are a little bit sticky. Your aim is sort of limited to a pseudo-grid, but the enemies are not, so you will sometimes end up in situations where you can’t shoot an enemy that’s right in front of you because your character’s gun is a bit too far to the side and there’s no other way to stand in order to fix this. It’s clunky. But at least it kind of pairs well with the slow and dangerous pacing of the game.
I suspect this is not the only slow paced maze game out there, but I can’t think of any others off the top of my head. I guess if you count the original Bomberman that’s kind of slow? But it’s not really anything like Safari Hunting. The arcade version came out in 1980, only a month after Pac-Man sent the maze genre to the moon, so I doubt that the game was designed as an intentional inversion of the norm. But nowadays it certainly stands out as one.
Now, the first big problem you’ll have with Safari Hunting is that at first it doesn’t seem to work properly. Your jeep will run out of fuel before too long, and you also will notice that you never seem to advance past Round 1. It turns out the way to get to Round 2 is to shoot all the animals at once without capturing them, for some reason. As for the fuel situation, well, in the arcade version my understanding is that it refills as you score points, but this just doesn’t happen in the SG-1000 version. The only way to get your fuel back is to progress to the next round (or die). So the game boils down into two phases. The first phase is about hit and run action, building up score until your vehicle’s fuel depletes. And in the second, once the fuel is gone, you have to wait around for the perfect moment to bang all four animals and clear the round. If you get into the jeep or load an animal while it has no fuel, you cannot even get back out of it and are doomed. So this is the only way to play it really. Build up your points, then go for the round clear once you are out of gas.
Once you realize this is what you have to do, the game feels a lot less broken and more like an actual functioning game. But until you figure all this out it does kind of feel like you’re missing something. And I do have to stress that advancing a round is frickin hard as heck. What you’ll want to do is get every enemy down to 1 HP ahead of time (their HP does not come back when they go back into hiding) and then try to blast everything in one clean sweep of the maze, but it’s still tricky to pull off and to an extent you’re at the whim of when the animals decide to come out. But there really isn’t a time limit for this part, so again it is about being patient and picking the perfect moment to strike.
By the end of my time with Safari Hunting I did appreciate the idea of what it’s trying to do and once I figured out that there is a way to reset the fuel gauge I thought it was a reasonably fun albeit very challenging little score attack game. The unpleasant subject matter and general clunkiness are not great, however there is a certain appeal to a maze game that is about being careful and waiting around for the perfect opportunity. Safari Hunting is not exactly good, but it is interesting, and sometimes that’s all I care about.