DoctorSpuds Reviews Things - Skeet Shoot (Apollo)

[RSS Bot]

So I’ve been thinking back on my Skeet Shoot ‘review’ and I’ve come to the realization that three paragraphs of me saying hahaha isn’t sufficient to vent my frustration with this game, so I’m gonna go the whole nine yards and give this lousy piece of shit a full review, not because the game deserves it but because I want to insult it more. Skeet Shoot was Apollo’s very first game, and boy does it feel like it, though I’d say it feels like a first year game dev major’s scrapped project more than anything. Thankfully I can say that Apollo’s games did improve in quality, which isn’t too hard to do when the game you started out with is a dumpster fire of disappointment. So… without further ado lets dive headfirst into the still smoldering wreck that is ‘Skeet Shoot’.

Looking at this game hurts me deeply in profound places: My heart, it breaks to see such bile on my beloved 2600, my brain, because the game just looks like absolute shit, my stomach, because this is just making me nauseous… If you’ll pardon me for a moment I need to go vomit. When you boot up the game you will see the top two thirds of the screen taken up by a sickly shade of blue, this is the ‘sky’, the bottom third of the screen is supposed to be the ground but the shade of green they used reminds me more of that slime you’d make in elementary school out of Elmers’ glue and shaving cream and green food coloring, vile. There is a large blue square in the center top of the green bit, I don’t know what it’s supposed to be, but what I do know is that it’s absolute garbage. I know you have to use your imagination with the 2600 but this would push the mental limits of even the most creative of people. When you finally start the game you will see the sorriest excuse for a person that the console can muster, it looks like a front view of a folding ‘caution when wet’ sign with a circle taped to the top, and then tape a black line which resembles an oversized Mohawk to represent the gun. This. Is. Shit. The only three things I haven’t mentioned are the scores that nobody cares about, the tiny square bullet you shoot, and the large diamond shaped discus that emerges from the blue square; otherwise there are no other graphical elements to this game.

This game has four sounds, the sound of the discus being launched, the sound of you shooting your Mohawk, the sound of you missing, and the sound of you actually hitting the discus. None of these sounds are interesting, none of these sounds are really worth mentioning, they aren’t making my ears melt or my head explode, they simply exist. There are very few words that can in this moment describe by anguish and disappointment in this game, WHY DID THEY RELEASE THIS GAME!!! WHO LOOKED AT THIS GAME AND SAID “YES, I THINK THIS IS A GOOD GAME AND SHOULD BE PURCHASED BY PEOPLE FOR REAL, ACTUAL, MONEY”? WHAT SICK DEPRAVED LUNATIC THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?!?!?

Playing this game is stupid. The skeet launches in one of three directions, diagonally left, diagonally right, and straight up, you will not know the trajectory of the skeet until it has left the screen (there may be a game variation with a slower skeet but I don’t give a shit). Your restroom sign of a person will appear randomly in one of three predetermined locations, you can see the issue already right? You don’t know where you’re going to be so you can’t aim accordingly, but that doesn’t matter since you won’t know which direction the skeet is going. If you think this is bad enough well I still got more for you, you can aim in only FIVE directions. This all means that you have to hit a skeet moving in one of three directions from a location that you do not know until AFTER the skeet is in the air, by shooting in one of five directions and hoping that the bullet and skeet miraculously intersect. The window of success is so tiny, and so quick to pass, that from certain locations you may not actually be able to hit your target when allowing the average human reaction time. This game is absolute bullshit.

Do not buy this game, to not be tempted to buy this game. I’m going to take a page from the Video Game Critic and give this game a letter grade… F-… This game goes into the Collector’s Zone as far as it can go, further than even the trash from Mythicon. The bar has been set so low that if you dug for it you’d burst into flame before you even got halfway there. FUCK THIS GAME!

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/729/entry-15169-skeet-shoot-apollo/