To experience the smartest deer the sims have to offer, you really have to get hold of some old copies of DH3 and round up a few friends. That was the last title that allowed people to play as the deer in multiplayer. Dodging bullets, hiding in hollows, defecating on the boots of AFK hunters... The Endless Forest it was not. Today there are still a good few people playing DH2005 online. Personally, our preferred form of communal competition is the offline challenge. Get hold of HU3 or HU4 then head over to huntingunlimited.scssoft.com and you can download user-designed “tourney” missions. These dump you in a particular locale with a certain weapon or weapon selection and task you with bringing home the biggest and best trophies. Once the tourney deadline has expired, uploaded results are published and you get to see whether anyone has bettered your arrow-riddled moose calf or Magnum-despatched boar runt.

We intended to end this fireside chat with a pessimistic passage comparing the hunt sim genre to a deer bleeding to death unnoticed in the middle of an anonymous thicket (most publishers seeming to have lost interest of late). Happily it looks like the morbid metaphor won’t be needed. A little bird told me that Atari is working on a new installment of Deer Hunter. Don’t tell a soul, but we won’t be dreaming of Crysis or Quake Wars tonight.