Prank Call of the Wild(e)

Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2010 focuses on the thrill of hunting record-sized trophy animals across the globe. You'll take on the role of Jack Wilde, a skilled hunter who's been contacted by the elite hunting organization known as The Royal Ancient Order of Orion. They've invited Jack to join their Order, but first he has to successfully complete their membership trials. As Jack you'll explore some of the most prolific hunting grounds across the world, and eventually gain access to the Order's own private hunting reserve. You'll hunt Bighorn in Colorado and Reindeer in Finland. you'll track down Red Stag in New Zealand and Cape Buffalo in Tanzania. At every turn your skills as a hunter and marksman will be tested. After all, the Order only wants the best.

When the demo for Cabela's Big Game Hunter 2010 popped up on XBox Live I immediately downloaded it because I knew I could, at best, hope for something laughably terrible. I did not expect it to be as laughably terrible in the truly astonishing fashion in which it has been delivered. I have never investigated the genre, other than briefly playing Deer Hunter 2 on an old laptop (running Windows 95) we dug up here at work, but as far as I can recall I've never heard of any title trying to present a narrative to your wilderness slaughtering. The idea of trying to join a worldwide, top secret hunting organization, who have access to military-level technology to track your every move, is the exact type of ridiculous bullshit I need to care about this game. You do battle with mountain lions and bears in quicktime events, you gain experience and level up, your character swaps jokes over the radio with his mysterious handler from the Order, these things should not be in hunting games. So I purchased it, knowing full well the joke will not last much longer than the first hour, and then it will become an endurance trial to see it through to the end. It is a forty dollar prank I have just played on myself.


-K.