Drinking + Duck Hunt = Drunk Hunt
It’s a generational thing. If you’re within five or six years of my age, in either direction, there’s a pretty good chance you spent a chunk of your childhood sitting about two feet from the television, cursing like a dockworker as you sent an 8-bit Mario careening to his doom off the end of a giant, bendy mushroom.
These days, if you own a Wii, Nintendo will be happy to sell you all those old games again over their virtual console. And of course you can play them for free on your computer through a perfectly legal NES emulator (and some sketchy but incredibly easy to find ROM files). There are also sites that will let you play them right on your browser. Somehow, though, the PC options never quite scratched the itch for me. To be honest, trying to navigate even an easy level using my arrow keys and space bar usually proves to be a bigger pain in the ass than it’s worth.
That’s why I just about peed myself when I discovered that, through some gaping hole in international patent law, cut-rate Chinese manufacturers are selling brand new fake Nintendo consoles that play the original cartridges. There are a bunch of them on the market, but I chose the Retro Entertainment System because it was only 22 bucks, and because (and this is VITAL, MY FRIENDS) it has the original old-school controller ports.
The controllers that ship with the system are perfectly serviceable, but what you really need to do while you’re waiting for the UPS guy to deliver yours is to run down to Goodwill and drop 99 cents on the real deal. Seriously, last time I checked, every thrift store in my area had at least forty of these things, and once you get that uncomfortable, rectangular hunk of plastic into your hands it’ll be like it never left. I swear to God, the sense memory is still there. I instinctively knew how to keep the B button pressed while hitting A with the edge of my thumb to get extra distance with a super-speed jump. I even nailed the invisible mushroom before the first pit in Mario through a spontaneous tic, without even consciously remembering it was there.
Put that controller in my hand and suddenly I’m in seventh grade again.
Technically, all these NES clone boxes are just software emulators running on a single chip — if you’re way nerdier than I am you might notice a few minor flaws in the color palettes or sound quality, just like you will on the PC. But most of us threw out our original hardware 15 years ago (after it took 45 minutes of blowing on the cartridge to get Mega Man to boot up) so this is as close as we’re going to get to recapturing the magic of our youth. You’ll need some games, too, but eBay is a pretty easy source for those. And before you start thinking that you’ll play all this stuff once and toss it in a closet with the rest of your junk, let me share with you the Retro Game System Killer App. And this is where the original controller ports are most important: I’m talking about picking up a bottle of tequila and hitting the Goodwill one more time for a Nintendo light gun.
I’m talking about Drunk Hunt.
The rules of Drunk Hunt are simple. Two people play Duck Hunt head-to-head, and the person who misses the most ducks each round drinks. It’s best with small to medium sized groups — you can play the standard variation where the next person in line takes on the winner of the last game, but I prefer Slippery Slope Mode, where the loser has to play again. This keeps that one guy who’s way too good at Duck Hunt from running the table, and cycles out the worst players quickly (you lose when you decide you really can’t take another drink, or when you fail to hit a single duck in the first round). The game also ends if you get belligerent and start throwing air-punches at that GOD-DAMNED LAUGHING DOG.
Before you rush off to make this wonderful dream a reality, a word of warning: Duck Hunt just doesn’t work on modern, digital TVs. The light gun relied on the old cathode tube technology, and is worthless without it. I learned this the hard way recently when I tried to set up a Drunk Hunt party after finally trading up to a nice LCD flatscreen. I also discovered that those 8-bit games were NOT designed for high definition. You could cut yourself on the edge of those pixels, man.
If all you have is a $3,000 54-inch plasma, it’s still worth it to grab a faux-tendo (see what I did there?) and a used controller to experience the games more or less as they were meant to be played. But if you have an old tube TV laying around in a spare bedroom, you OWE IT TO YOURSELF to make this happen. Granted, if you missed the 8-bit party the first time around, you needn’t bother, since nostalgia is pretty much the entire attraction here. (I can spend a whole afternoon rocking Bionic Commando, but retro games I didn’t play as a kid tend to fall completely flat, no matter how many people seem to love them. Kid Icarus, you are dead to me). If your own wonder years came a little later, though, it turns out they have clone systems for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis on the market as well.
Awwwww shit — I think I just heard Sonic the Hedgehog calling my name.
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Mario cloud hopping STILL gives me sweaty palms. What if he FALLS?
I am some kind of crazy duck sniper at Duck Hunt, baby. I’d have to drink just to stay entertained while you ate it raw.
Oh, it’s ON.
It was 1977. We lived way out in the bush and could barely pick up CBC on our TV, but we had an Atari. Four kids in a newly blended family, and Pong was our king.
The olden days were old.
My dad used to have an Activision console, and so many drunken custody weekends passed in a haze of… BURGER TIME.
Those were the days. Not so much for me, though. I sucked at Burger Time.
Ugh.
We used to play Burger Time on a tabletop in the arcade at West Edmonton Mall.
We had a dedicated pong console in the late 70s as well, and an Atari 2600 sometime around 1980. I remember sneaking downstairs on Christmas eve, opening a game-shaped present with precision care, staying up all night playing STAMPEDE, resealing it and then acting all surprised on Christmas morning.
Hah! You were a child ninja, my friend.