Fun with a tranquilizer gun.
If Congo Bongo’s half-baked monkey-chase made it SG-1000’s Donkey Kong analog, then Safari Hunting—a game about tramping through the bush to capture wildlife for the zoo—makes it the dark mirror of Donkey Kong Jr. [see NES Works 1985 & ’86], where the villainous Mario sought to enslave poor Kong for the amusement of the rubes. The good news is that Safari Hunting does not concern wantonly slaughtering wild animals despite appearances. That would have been in poor taste even in 1983.
No, in arcades, Safari Hunting appeared under the name Tranquilizer Gun. This action game gives you the relatively benign goal of navigating a sort of Pac-Man-inspired maze, using your tranquilizer rifle to knock out (not murder) various forms of exotic animals in order to stock up the local zoo. It’s a slower, more methodical game than the usual maze-action title; even if the layout reeks of Pac-Man, the pacing certainly doesn’t. Your hunter creeps around the jungle paths, and he can only fire a single dart at a time. Your quarry doesn’t roam freely around the wilds, either; animals emerge from the foliage at random spots and go back into hiding after a moment.
You need to land a clean hit with your stun rifle during these brief windows of opportunity while also avoiding close contact with the creatures, as they will tear you limb from limb if they get ahold of you—well, one assumes. The single-color sprites aren’t especially graphic, but the intent seems unmistakable.
Simply stunning an animal doesn’t accomplish much, though. Once you’ve sent a gorilla or lion into a deep sleep, you need to lug that slumbering critter back to your Jeep in order to collect it and, one assumes, send it to live a comfortable and humane existence at the world’s most ethical zoo. You can also hop into your Jeep and drive it around the perimeter of the maze for the sake of efficiency. Several openings appear around the edges of the jungle, and you can station your ride at any one of these for a quick getaway.
The animals move at random, and your intrepid hunter moves slowly, so it’s not exactly the kind of thing to set hearts aflame here in the year 2023. But, as an SG-1000 launch title, it did the trick of giving the console its very own maze game right out of the gate—practically a de rigueur requirement for game systems of the era, yet one it would take the Famicom a year to make good on.
