Big game hunting is intense. Massive beasts that’ll trample you like a cockroach and ferocious man-eaters who will hunt you as much as you are hunting them. Stand on the wrong side of the wind, and you are dinner. Get caught in the bush after dark and you’ll never go potty sitting down again. That is the intensity of big game hunting.
Or, at least, that’s how I imagine it to be.
I’ll never know what it’s really like. I’ll never go hunting – not even duck in the local pond, let alone on the African wilderness. My personal feelings about hunting aside, I do want to experience – as close as possible – the feeling of being in the wild with these incredible creatures, tracking them down and having one in your sights.
That’s where Gyroscopic Games’ Big Game Hunter: Africa comes in. It’s currently on Kickstarter at $21.00 of $15,000 with 27 days to go. On first look, it looks like an unfinished first-person hunter, very similar to Deer Hunter and Cabela’s African Adventure. Unfinished is an understatement. It looks extremely raw based on the gameplay shows on the Kickstarter video. But the big sales point for Big Game Hunter is that it will be on Oculus Rift. 6D world where you put on some goggles and you’re big game hunter in Africa. That sounds pretty cool. The game will also be on mobile, but let’s disregard that until we see a finished product.
Going back to Oculus VR, the hunting game has to be intense. You can’t just point and shoot like it does on the Kickstarter video. You’ve got to incorporate tracking – digging through feces and putting your fingers on fresh paw prints and all that. That’s the essence of real hunting. And tall grass and foliage where you have to battle the elements, and the unknown, and the crazy possibility of that big mad gorilla or lion hiding a few feet from you, ready to trounce on your face. That’s how you take full advantage of a hunting game on Oculus VR. Work on some of that and I might fund this. Gyroscopic’s hunter is just too raw, but I’m thinking it’ll come eventually.
For now, back to Deer Hunter and blasting some wolverines!