No.

I would not even pay $1.29 Canadian to relive duck hunt, and I have no particular fondness for ducks.

I had hoped it would be sufficient for me to say that much but I foolishly had to read the page and now must comment on that.

Modern televisions do not flash light in the way that is necessary for light gun games, such as duck hunt, to work properly. And people know that because they have tried to play Duck Hunt on modern tv screens. The solution proposed here is to buy a kit of things called “Modern Mallard” with which to make the game work on a modern television, at the price stated. No other things are included. This means you need to already have a working original Nintendo Entertainment System or the redesigned version from the mid 1990s, a working light gun for it, which were NEVER reissued, a real duck hunt cartridge, which admittedly were manufactured in great amounts, the desire to PLAY the duck hunt cartridge, the willingness to do technical manual labor on it, and 129 dollars with absolutely nothing better to spend it on. Such as apparently a device that puts BLACK LINES on your screen!

We get to pay 300 dollars to make our screen dimmer and blurrier! What a world we live in! back in the soviet union, the screen puts scanlines on YOU Since the original screens that old games played on had these lines, that means those lines are MEANT to be there! They weren’t just a side effect of outputting graphics at a lower resolution than screens could show which created an idiosyncratic appearance that was retroactively associated with video games, they were part of God’s Plan.

Also: you have space enough for all that stupid retro purist garbage that it has not gotten shoved around or stepped on at all in nearly 30 years but NOT a cathode ray television set even though those are physically sturdy and are perfectly capable of receiving modern television signals and people who never played video games in their lives owned them. I had a cathode ray television in my house until just yesterday and I fervently believe in console emulation. I have emulated video games off my hard drive without having to assemble and preserve clunky fragile obscure peripherals for eesh twenty years now and I had no idea I couldn’t play NES Duck Hunt because I never had any reason to care enough to try.

You could probably acquire an original duck hunt arcade cabinet for the same accumulated amount of hassle as getting and installing this product and you can actually shoot the jerk dog in that version, because you are just going to shoot every fictional animal you see. Either way you will probably realize after about 3 minutes what a boring game it is. But since the Modern Mallard system patches the light gun itself that should make it work on other gun games, right? No, it literally only works on Duck Hunt (AND apparently has a chance of STILL NOT WORKING if you have an orange gun like I did, and like THEY do judging by the header graphic, instead of a grey one which I have never even seen in person). The manufacturers do not rule out the idea of patching other games in the future but grips then suppose you want for some reason to play Gotcha! The Sport! instead of duck hunt, would you still have to buy the duck hunt version to get the gun alteration kit? Or if you wanted to play both, would you have to possibly buy two sets of the gun attachment since none of the game patches are sold separately?

Am I a jerk, making fun of a niche enterprise so soon after I expressed my own frustration with being niched? I do not think so; this is not somebody creating an original product, this is somebody trying to milk the supposed nostalgia of others to justify a hobby, and isn’t even going to make this thing for you, in the event you want it, unless nearly a thousand other people also do, so it isn’t like this is a work of passion. If you are the only person in the world who wants this, you can’t have it because the unpopular thing you like isn’t popular enough. And if there ARE others who would buy this but they don’t learn about this scheme fast enough, then they apparently don’t count even though the game is probably older than they are. Whoever runs the page claims in the comments section that a thousand units is the minimum amount at which this endeavor makes financial sense. Maybe they CAN be made individually but would cost even more than the already ludicrous sum pitched here, but then why put the one month time limit on it? You probably need a system of smoke signals to reach some of the people who still give a quack about playing Duck Hunt. This really can’t go very far before any attempt to explain an odd aspect of it seems even odder because this is not something that anybody remotely needs. I doubt the onceler could sell a thneed for $129.

I have been told by people off the internet who don’t realize that not only have I never had any clout online, I have less than I did ten years ago, that I “should” make a kickstarter page for my comic books. I don’t think I would do that. That means if I fail to generate an arbitrary amount of interest, I don’t get to make my comic book, like that’s the only reason I thought of making one. And then I would look like a bigger doofus than usual when it flops. There are apparently a decent amount of people willing to pay obscene money to buy and rebuy crummy old nintendo games but this one seems like it is overreaching.

Hey partners! A conglomeration of people trying to resell a ludicrous childlike urge to you. No they’re not crazy! They’re shrewd and calculating looking for a guaranteed financial profit off of someone else’s 30 year old bland game! There is probably more text on that kickstarter page than there are bytes of code in Duck Hunt. I prefer people admitting that they are calculating compared to the “welp i think i made a thing guys?” scumbags but in the end they are all charlatans.

I say all this as somebody who can’t tell a playstation 2 game from a playstation 4 game, or a $50 million dollar 1998 movie from a $200 million dollar 2018 movie. I think a lot of the “progress” in electronics is frivolous and potentially imaginary, just to keep people employed, and I think the mass commercial media’s co-opting of “social media” has homogenized a greater quantity of people into infantile dolts than ever before, but I don’t believe in hiding in a fake wood-paneled bunker and pretending it is still 1994 either. I think people will pay a lot of money to prove they are at an extreme edge of technological belongingness. Just playing old video games isn’t enough; you need to be willing to spend as much money going out of your way to make it totally authentic and de-enhanced as somebody at the other end gets talked into by Best Buy representatives to prove they are totally enhanced beyond human perceptibility. And then you have to up/downgrade everything else you use to be compatible with this fringe ability/inability. I was trying to figure out what software I used to record video a few years ago and came across

which can record at 144 frames per second. I didn’t even know you could put that many frames in a second, much less determine you have seen less than that to be willing to pay extra to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. And there is 4 scale high definition! Who is that for? Who has a screen so big that you could even tell the definition was that high? Alex Trebek?

I tried discussing this matter with somebody else recently and I think this created an unpleasant mental state

[1:50 AM] pookydooks: well then how about tht
[1:50 AM] frabaginarf: game recording software for gamers
[1:50 AM] pookydooks: I assume the U in UHD stands for ULTRA
[1:50 AM] pookydooks: I mean it pretty much has to
[1:51 AM] frabaginarf: i might have said it stood for unnecessary. or maybe “uhd” is just a noise i make when i hear about 4k video
[1:51 AM] pookydooks: it seems like the sort of thing that strains your eyes and gives you a headache after watching it for too long
[1:51 AM] pookydooks: 144, how overkill can you get
[1:51 AM] frabaginarf: that car is coming OUT of the screen! that would create a number of health risks
[1:52 AM] pookydooks: it’s a crummy TV that can’t even contain its images
[1:53 AM] pookydooks: you wouldn’t buy a fish tank that won’t hold water, wouldja
[1:53 AM] pookydooks: 144 FPS, that’s fish per second!
[1:54 AM] pookydooks: and that’s a lotta fish to be breaded and fried!
[1:54 AM] pookydooks: in oil heated to 4K degrees, naturally!
[1:55 AM] frabaginarf: this is more serious than i thought
[1:55 AM] pookydooks: Don’t forget to stream it in UHD! Wait I think we caught the fish in a stream! WOW
[1:56 AM] pookydooks: we’re steaming while we’re streaming before we even knew we were streaming, intense! awesome! tubular, dude!
[1:57 AM] pookydooks: I’m leaving before I find out what such a beastly boob tube costs! Cowabunga!

a july 17 update: it appears that this mallard matter will not reach its funding goal, which means something I thought was dumb will not go forward and be rewarded, for once, but I wish dumb stuff would be prevented on a grander scale; I would have traded letting this happen for ensuring the computer animated Lion King replacement celebrity voiceover remake film did not!