Sporting Clays

Sporting Clays is a homebrew game by Charles Doty released on 17 Sept 1999. It’s a shooting gallery game where you shoot down clay pigeons in a variety of landscapes.

You can get the ROM on its download page by using the password clayhunt. The file comes in .bin format, but works fine when you rename it to .n64.

About Sporting Clays

If you’ve played Duck Hunt on the NES, you’re probably familiar with the concept behind Sporting Clays. Two clay disks are shot out towards the distance, and you have two shotgun shells to take them down. Though in this version there is no light gun, you’ll have to aim by moving the crosshairs around.

You get five rounds before the scenery changes and three sceneries before they loop back to the start. At the end of each scene, your score is added up so you can keep track with your opponents.

Each scene is a little different:

• First scene has red clay pigeons; standard fare.
• Second scene has white pigeons, but these differ by flying off the top of the display before falling back down.
• The third scene has the same white pigeons, but this time they are sometimes replaced with a rolling ball.

That’s all there is to it.

Review and conclusion

This is one of the later games of the original homebrew scene for the N64, and it shows. It has 3D graphics, interactivity and sound which is pretty good for a one-man team of the era. It even has a decent game loop that’s fun for a few minutes.

Something that I particularly enjoyed about this game is that the aim has a speed limiter. The problem with most FPS games on the N64 is that if you have a modern controller (without a worn-out joystick), the crosshairs slide around the screen like crazy and you can’t aim to save your life. Sporting Clays fixes this by having the cursor move and not re-centre after releaseing, if that makes any sense.

Overall, it’s a good game. Give it a go, it’ll keep you entertained for a few rounds, and it can even be a bit competitive if you have a friend to play against. The developer Charles Doty even went on to have a career in game development after making this game, which is really cool to hear.