So, here’s the thing. I could easily roast Deer Hunter for the Game Boy Color. Just go full “Seanbaby in his Electronic Gaming Monthly” era on it. It wouldn’t even be hard, this game is very ass! You pick a location with a deer in it, wait for the sprite to get close-ish, line up your cursor, and push the button. Any given hunt can fully end within a minute or two. There’s barely a playable product on this cart, just a catastrophic waste of 90’s dollars. Why would you produce this in the first place?
That question is a lot more interesting than anything on the cartridge itself. Surely the hunting enthusiast/GBC owner venn diagram was not a single circle! It took effort to code, produce sprites and art, manufacture, and sell something this lousy! Who would do such a thing?
To address these unknowns, or at least attempt to, I need to introduce a villain to this website. A short lived game company purpose built to produce crap for unscrupulous IP holders and publishers at an incredible pace. And as my luck would have it, they shunted out more products for the Game Boy Color than all their other platforms combined. Cool. Good. Cool and good. It’s as good a day as any to rail against the MSM – no not that one.
Morning Star Multimedia was a slop factory. Not in the contemporary “your AI slop bores me” way, I mean in the older “we churn out actual garbage and try to scam grandmas at Macy’s” way. With maybe one exception their releases were exclusively licensed, and it won’t shock you to learn that their average quality was quite low! From digital adaptations of board games and toy lines to ports of some of video gaming’s most venerable arcade titles, nothing and no one was safe from their greedy grasp. Even after the bottom fell out and they seemingly shuttered, several of their employees went on to work for DIFFERENT slop factories! This is why I specifically note the dev studios on The List – I want to give credit where credit is due. Vatical had a few decent games to their name despite this playable lapse in judgement! MSM made this thing, they deserve to be held to account.
There will be many more MSM games in this site’s future. I’ve already played several, and they were all truly heinous. If this site shutters under mysterious circumstances and I can’t be reached, it is because I finally found the limits of my tolerance for wack ass Game Boy games and fled for the hills, free from the tyranny of AA batteries and cynically produced advertainment.
You really do just pick a weapon, a map, and press the gun button until a deer falls over, by the way. That wasn’t a joke. One out of five.
1/5
Bonus Zone: After finishing this, I found out that VGJUNK did an excellent writeup of The Deer Hunter Experience! Here’s the link if you are truly, bafflingly curious.
Wack Game Boy Zone 