Tonight’s game presents a bold and daring vision of a dystopian future with flying cars buzzing around a bustling megalopolis, where law and order hangs by a thread, and where you are a special breed of quasi-vigilante charged with using deadly force to bring down what is tenuously identified as the criminal element (hard to say since everyone is corrupt in this future). Presumably, the ‘B’ in BHunter stands for “bounty”, though that’s never actually specified in the game. For that matter, the title ‘BHunter’ never appears in the actual game, not even on the main menu. It could be that ‘bounty’ does not translate well across Castilian Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and U.S. English, which are the 5 languages I have to choose from on installation.
Cutting straight to the action, BHunter strikes me as being a Descent clone. You float around in your little ship, rotate about your axes with the cursor keys or mouse, and go forward/backward with A/Z. I know there must be lots of other controls but darned if I can find the manual at the moment.
On the tutorial mission (the only one you have access to at the start) the mayor welcomes you to town and assigns an officer to tutor you on the first mission. The officer instructs you to use your radar to track down your first target. Should be an easy mission and sure enough, when the car is in view, it is highlighted as the “TARGET”, so there’s no confusion. It didn’t really seem fair, though. Seems like his only crime was being a leisurely driver. Well, apparently, I serve as neither judge nor jury in this game; only execution duties, thanks, and I earn 5000 credits for my trouble.
I don’t get much farther in the game, however. I’m apprehensive about whether I am getting the full experience without the benefit of the manual. More importantly, though, the game has a lot of trouble running on my system. Visually, the graphics are quite detailed and fluid, but only with 3D hardware acceleration. I disabled acceleration in an effort to make the game run better. The graphics look atrocious without hardware help and my program problems didn’t go away.
I liked what I heard, however. The developers did a great job with the 3D sound effects when other cars whiz past. The game also features an appropriate techno soundtrack which turns out to be a continuous 22-minute red book CD audio track. A track that keeps playing even after the game crashes (fix: eject the CD).
It didn’t take long before I started pushing the limits of this immersive 3D world. First, I wanted to see how high I could fly. Answer: Not very. There’s a magic force field that hovers at right about the height that all of the buildings are constructed. That’s some strict building code enforcement! Here’s a curious quirk related to the magic ceiling force field:
Check out the first screenshot depicting city hall. Notice the slanted roof. I tried going over that portion of the building only to bounce furiously between the roof and force field which resulted in the above situation. I was stuck, but I don’t think I was actually destroyed. Thankfully, the game didn’t crash at that juncture.
saadow says:
I’ve experienced the same bug as well, the entire screen goes into a HOM(Hall of Mirrors) effect we all remember from games like Doom or Duke 3D when a level was ‘leaking’ or if you used a dev code to go into empty space. I’m unsure what exactly triggers the event, it depends on what you do and it’s really touchy. Does anyone know from experience if this situation occurs on any older operating systems? Is there any 3rd party fix for the problem? I know the company isn’t supporting it anymore.
Multimedia Mike says:
I just know that the graphics generally went wonky on me as soon as I destroyed a target. That greatly limited any possible derived enjoyment.
MegaTherion says:
If you can manage to play for more than ten minutes, it’s a far enjoyable game, nevertheless the games crashes to often not allowing that amount of time. I can’t really sort out why the game keeps on crashing as I played without music, tried different screen resolutions and it did anyway.
The only progress I did make was finidng out that the crashing seems to get less ususal by playing with no Cd on your Cd driver.
John says:
I played this game a lot, years ago, and I’m trying to find it agai. do you know a place i can download it?
Straylight says:
Whoa, i found someone who PLAYED this eh? I bought a copy off of ebay for 5$, im loving it. However, i get no 3d acceleration. What OS and cideo card did you use to play this? All I get is software emluation which is pretty crappy.
With my luck its probably Vista that is the problem. Those “Compatibility modes” dont work so well…
Multimedia Mike says:
When I played this, I had an ATI All-In-Wonder 2006 (Radeon-based) card.
lab says:
I have an old cd copy, and just happens that error. It´s because the operating sistem. Any idea?
Multimedia Mike says:
Try telling Windows to treat the game as a Windows 95 program.
Wightboy says:
I used to play this game a long time ago.. trying to find the CD so i can do so again and bring back some fond memories!
not sure it will work on vista though…
Raknha says:
There just doesn’t seem to be a fix for this problem.. i tried everything; change resolution, disable 3d acceleration, tried every compatibility mode. nothing helps.. the malfunction seems to be triggerd while shooting or killing any target, while sometimes it doesn’t occure. maybe i should check it on a pc which has w95 oparating it, but i don’t know anyone who has one. Very depressing.
Bhunter says:
I managed to got it working on windows XP without the bug ever happening. I played it for a few hours and no bug appeared.
What I did was I downloaded Virtual PC 2007 (from Microsoft) and installed Windows 98. Then I installed the game and I can play it now, finally! But not with 3D acceleration… still have to figure out how I can turn that on. But at least I can play it again!
BeauChaotica says:
I know I’m way, way behind on this but I thought I’d give my input.
I played the demo for this game back in the day and thought the basic system was awesome.
Finally now I’ve tracked down a copy of the full version (I won’t give a link; it was a case of trawling places that stock classics) and it ran right away. I did unfortunately encounter the bugs people have already talked about, like the “Wall of Mirrors” effect.
I’ve taken 11’s advice and got a Virtual PC running win98, and it runs with no problems at all! That is, aside from some joystick throttle issues and also the fact that it won’t run with 3D acceleration. I think that’s because I haven’t yet installed my graphics card on the virtual machine.
Anyway, here’s hoping there’s still some of you out there, and keep up the good work, Mike!
Anonymous says:
I’m using windows 7 64bit.
you can play this game by setting win98 compatible mode.
but you can’t use 3d acceleration.
oeo says:
I’m using windows 7 x64
you can play this game by setting win98 compatible mode.
but you can’t use 3d acceleration.
Anonymous says:
Same problem with me to.But when i had Windows 98 and old Pentium 2 processor back in 1999/2000 the game was running perfectly.
Martin says:
Absolutely no problems with Win 98.acceleration and all…It all ran perfectly.
Leatra says:
Good old days. When I played this game I knew nothing about it. I just started playing blowing shit up. I guess it’s time to play the game for real.
Bret says:
I got BHunter from eBay, as I wanted some nostalgia. I loved this game. Used to play it for hours. I think if they re released it, people might buy it on mass. The soundtrack is superb. Though obviously not so nice after playing flat out for 8 hours LOL. Unfortunately, Crash crash crash, unless I run it on 98se with lousy graphics quality. Such a shame. My virtual PC calls my radeon xpress Graphics a Trio card no matter what I do and the drivers are limited. Anyone got any ideas ?
Bret says:
I finally have it working great without crashes…..
I previously tried xp, virtual 98-2000-xp, Compatabilty mode in Windows 7 for all versions of windows available. And Because of the age of the game there were no graphics drivers I could get for my Radeon card that would work on my PK Bell imedia. In the end I dug out an old desktop machine and installed 98SE. It’s all very low spec… (Pentium 3 – 256 RAM – 3d Prophet Hercules Graphics Card but runs BHunter really well. I use a download of BHunter instead of the CD, so I have no music playing, but my CD wouldn’t play the soundtrack on my 98SE PC anyway ? (I’ve ripped the music instead now). It’s lovely to be in the driving seat again, especially knowing the cheat codes. But I have to say I zoomed through the levels pretty quickly and the game does wear you out and after a good while you have to yell “Get me out of here” …. Love it. Playing it again now see ya. God Bless. Bret
Bret says:
PS. Without 3d acceleration the Game looks absolutely awful. All green and pixally. It looks beautiful on 7 or XP or 2000, before the inevitable Big Crash happens. So that’ll give you an idea of how it’s supposed to look.
Bret : )
TG0 says:
Goodday, I am looking for a specific demo version of the game B-Hunter. I was wondering if someone could help?
I have the very first demo version, which is an exe file and a 3,8Mb BHUNTER.DAT file. This is a very basic demo with a single small world and a small ‘city-ring’ section.
However there’s another demo version which I once downloaded many years ago, which I’m unable to find anywhere today. Even on the Internet Archive & Wayback machine I was unable to find it..
In this demo, there was a small city-ring, with green tunnels leading you out of the city ring and into a map what most resembles the industry-complex/scrap-yard of the official released game.
If my memory serves me right, there’s also a small space port map included and I believe there’s some interaction between the police cars and suspects shooting each other.
This version seems to be a ‘bridge’ version between the aforementioned initial demo and the official 5-mission-demo/full release.
If someone still has this demo version of B-hunter, or any other version or info about it, if you’d be so kind to let me know.
I’d be very grateful!!
Thanks in advance!
t_g0@outlook.com