Did you ever play Pokémon Snap? When I was a little younger (but not so young it would have been socially acceptable), I used to play that game with my stepbrother all the time. There was something interesting about the way you'd have to time each picture just right, take advantage of the best opportunity to get a good snapshot. You had to conserve your pictures cause you could only take so many on your rolls, and you had to know what was coming and the little tricks to get the monsters to come out. It was sort of an on-rails shooter, but not really—you could hardly interact with your environment. The point was that it was not so much about aggression, more focused on finesse, on technique. What a piece of shit!

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A far superior new game is Outdoors Unleashed: Africa 3D, which comes out on the 3DS eShop this week. It's kinda similar, except for a few awesome differences. First of all, it's 100% mature (for adults). No Pokémon here bro! Just pesky wildlife creatures like elephants and stuff. Also very minimal colors. Second, it does not matter how exactly you line up your scope, except you should put it so the dot is right on the animal's head. Blat! One more awesome thing is that you do not need to conserve ammunition like you needed to conserve film. You can just shoot and shoot! Like a thousand times, more even. Finally, you don't need to make the animals come out. They will just run at you, charging ahead to their deaths, chasing after the sweet embrace of a slug of hot lead right between their stupid eyes. Anyway, sometimes I shoot a hippo in the butt, who's gonna notice.

When I am playing this game, I like to enter what I call "Africa Time." It's sort of like bullet time? From the Matrix. You know how when Neo would go all "fshhheww" and everything, he was sort of in the zone? I put on my headphones and the jolly, ethnic soundtrack puts me into kind of a hypnotic, cultural trance which is really suitable for this action. Did you ever see The Lion King? The music is sort of like that, it kind of inspires me on quest to cleanse "the outback" or wherever I am from all wildlife and reclaim it for the The Occident. And wouldn't you know it, the game even has COOL RAY-BANS MODE where you tap the ray-bans and everything slows down kinda like Neo, then you can blast it all real sweet-like.

Speaking of blasting, the controls are totally swank and solid. You touch your pen stick on the bottom screen to aim, and the 3D view on the top screen puts you kind of in the moment. Then you just use the L button to shoot, it feels really awesome. Oh also this game is lefty friendly, unlike that recent steaming load Kid Icarus Uprising. Just point and shoot, like real hunting. I think you can kill almost 80 animals in an average stage's three minute time limit? So maybe slightly less realistic than when I go normal hunting and kill about 300.

There is one bogus thing about this game, which is that in the first level they tell you to not shoot the grey wildebeests, because they are female or something? Whatever though, if you shoot them anyway nothing happens except you lose a few points. I like to kill them. Actually I took this video of me shooting some animals, I think I got some lady animals in there, uh oh! Haha just kidding, it's not a big deal to kill them.


The game itself is pretty addictive. When you shoot a lot of living trash without missing, you build your chain and get more points. You can even get stuff like sick quad kills for ending several lives within seconds of each other! Each level has a secret hidden artifact that if you blow it into smithereens lots of money pops out, and if you shoot the money you get more points, and then the artifact appears in your trophy room, which seems to be inside a hut that you stole from some villager somewhere. As you beat the levels you even unlock new hunting gear, so you can upgrade your stats to do stuff like shoot faster, reload faster, kill harder. There are five safari worlds and each one has I think seven stages, so that is a lot of animal murder.

When I was finishing up the seventh level of the first safari, there was this scenario where my whole camp was overrun by fucking meerkats! I never even seen a meerkat before, but I was not about to allow this to go down. When I blasted them they flew back into the air and for some reason I was reminded of my childhood. It made me think back to shooting soda cans with a BB gun off the little fence posts in the backyard, and I sort of wished that instead of doing that kind of stuff, I could have had the chance to be on a real safari like in this game, so I could shoot all the animals and just leave their corpses there to rot, sort of like in Oregon Trail, where you shoot way more buffalo than you can possibly bring back to the wagon? Only instead of bringing back 200 pounds I would just bring back nothing.

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This game only costs about 10% of the price of New Super Mario, which has no crocodiles in it. For the sequel I would like to suggest Indoors Unleashed: Petco 3D, that would be dope.