This is golf played exactly like everyone who steps onto the links for the first time: hammer always in hand. You also always default to the driver at the start of every new hole, even if it’s not a hole where you’d want to bring the thunder. There IS a chart in the instruction manual but you have to pause the game for it (which will automatically end your game if you’re playing Caravan or Hi-Score mode), but still, it’s not the most user-friendly golf game. If you don’t know the difference between a 3 Wood and a 6 Iron, you’re on your own to figure it out. There’s no computer assistance with choosing your club, nor anything on-screen that tells you how much yardage you get out of each. And, by the way, if you don’t know anything about golf, you’re going to need time to read the manual and memorize the max shot length. Because this is a golf game that basically does one thing right, and everything else horribly wrong. I know a lot of my readers get annoyed when I talk about the dribblty-ball or other assorted sportsballs, but this is where I have to let the sports nerd in me come out. Apparently, Miki got deeply into golf during the Japanese golf boom of the 80s. And man, talk about a pedigree! Golf was designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, directed by Kenji Miki (who also directed NES Open Golf and Wario Woods before going on to be a very prolific producer at Nintendo), and programmed solely by Satoru Iwata. ![]() So, this is a little more historically big than I thought about. I’ve heard from people who bought an NES just to have it. System arcade games, so much so that they had one in the country club before I was born. Golf was one of the most successful of Nintendo’s Vs. They just took the NES/Arcade Golf course and made it 3D. If you played golf on Wii Sports, you played these holes too. If some of these holes seem eerily familiar, they should. I wish the same could be said about the one that started it all. Mario Golf for the Nintendo 64 shockingly holds up very well to the test of time. I even had an elusive albatross! It was like no time had passed at all. After a brief warm-up period, I was draining eagles and holes in one like there was no tomorrow. I played Mario Golf on Switch Online a few months ago, a game I played a lot as a kid, and it was like putting on a comfy pair of old shoes. YOU try to make it interesting! Really, the only reason to put all this here is to make it clear: I know my golf, and even though I consider myself a mediocre-at-best video game player, I usually annihilate golf games. None of that has anything to do with golf video games, but what do you want? They’re usually games about stopping a meter on time. He couldn’t even get halfway to me, and if you don’t think I didn’t take a moment to rub that in his face every single time we hit the links, you don’t know me. In essence, I got good enough where you wouldn’t expect me to bogey every hole. Which, for you non-duffers out there, that means if I were to play a full eighteen hole round of golf with a score of -14 to start, you would expect that I’d finish the round at 0, or even par. Meanwhile, given my size, strength, and complete lack of coordination and athletic ability, I wasn’t too bad a golfer. Why wasn’t that included in this set? Because it’ll be an extra $7.99 when it inevitably lands on Nintendo Switch. Hell, there’s even a re-sprited version with women called Vs. Like Satan himself, this goes under many names. “It’s been a pleasure playing with you, Pops.” His swing is such a disaster that I wanted to learn to play the violin and strum out Nearer, My God, to Thee after every tee-off. Like most middle aged men suffering a midlife crisis, Dad overdid it with all the best equipment money could buy and lessons from the club pro, and whatever he bought for himself, he bought for me too out of guilt. ![]() So, bitching and complaining the entire walk over to the clubhouse, I took-up the sport with my old man. I said “you wouldn’t do that” and turned around to find my copy of Eternal Ring sitting under his mug. ![]() I refused, and he threatened to repurpose all my disc-based games as drink coasters. I was on my brand-spanking-new PlayStation 2 when my Dad said I was coming with him to take-up golfing too. I went back to my normal routine of staring blankly at the screen while playing video games. Yea, because golf has NEVER been known to cause stress, right? I was 11-years old and, content that my father was on the mend and not, you know. Then my father had a mild heart attack and the doctor suggested he needed to take better care of himself and take-up a nice, relaxing physical hobby. ![]() I grew up literally right next to a country club that we were members of, but we never went next door to do anything but eat.
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