Duck Shoot

The Good
Carnival was (and still is) an addictive game where you participate in a shooting gallery. There are different sorts of targets you can shoot at, but there are two factors that hinder your progress. One are the bullets that gradually deplete, while the other are the ducks that eat them if you let then slide off the third conveyor belt. Not one computer system available at the time received an official port, and this is where Mastertronic comes in.

The game is very much faithful to Sega’s game, but there are a few differences. You will still have fun shooting all the targets. Once you have shot enough, the screen goes red to indicate that you will advance to a new level. This is a far cry from the original game where you have to stare at blank conveyor belts for only a few seconds before new targets appear. There is no single spinning wheel at the top of the screen, although I did not see the point of this at all.

The music that plays during the game is called “Sobre las Olas", the same music used in Sega’s game and associated with carnivals and funfairs. I enjoyed listening to it as I played; the music itself made me feel that I was actually participating in a shooting gallery. The instructions before the game tell you how to turn the music off if it gets annoying. The graphics are good; the sprites are drawn correctly and have the same color as the arcade parent. The front cover for the game is impressive.

The Bad
Everything is rather slow, including the gameplay and the background music. If you are running this game on an emulator, you might want to set the speed to 100%. If you are playing on original hardware, then you are out of luck. The game lacks the animation of the duck swooping down and eating your bullets. Finally, the spinning wheels found in the Commodore 64 version is missing here.

The Bottom Line
This is a very good version of Duck Shoot. The addition of the music should make up for missing features, namely the swooping duck animation and the spinning plates. Although I understand that these would have been too big to fit in 3.5K, there was nothing wrong with the VIC-20 developers programming it to require at least 8K. Other than this, the game is faithful to Sega's arcade game. If you enjoy Carnival a lot and are disappointed that a version for your machine does not exist, then this is for you.