Pong and Beyond

206th played so far

Genre: Sports
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1986
Developer: Bruce Carver & Roger Carver
Publisher: Access Software

Golf is an interesting game. It looks incredibly boring to my eyes – hitting balls in a direction and getting it in a hole, nothing new compared to other sports, yet without defenders now, so they made the hole sm…

Sorry, that was going in the wrong direction.

Anyway, I’ve never played golf in real life (I plan to rectify this). Something I probably ought to try (connections and such), but just haven’t been interested in it. Still, I have played golf games in the past – in particular just one I remember played lots that allowed you to modify the courses yourself, which was always fun. Can’t remember the title of it, though, unfortunately.

Anyway, Leader Board precedes that, and while we’ll reach Tiger Woods’ undoubtably better golf game, we now start with the first semi-3D game.

Our Thoughts

Unfortunately, I remember that game being better. Possibly in part for that same construction, but also just gameplay…

The game seems to get the basics of a golf simulation right – swing and force, picking a club, and so on. In practice, it just doesn’t work as well. First of all, the courses are annoying in how they’re set up. There’s two types of terrain: Grass and water. Grass is easy. Water means you need another swing. There’s a lot of water around and between courses (and no bridges, making you wonder how your golfer gets from place to place). Thing is, that turns a lot of the game into trying to guess how far to swing to avoid the rivers/lakes and have the ball land on grass instead.

That leads to step two, the controls. A bit unclear, it’s difficult to know what the best course is and there’s no indication to what the meters mean. Yeah, manuals help here, but it’s not intuitive – first bar, longer is harder, second, shorter is a harder hit and further movement, which doesn’t entirely feel like it makes sense.

Of course, that system isn’t universal, and when putting you just have one power meter. Because consistency is for wussies! I realise that’s probably how golfers have two different ways of doing the different actions, but it’s odd.

Putting is probably the most frustrating. You see, the hole isn’t that, it’s actually a list of three or four dots that vaguely specify where it is. The ball can bounce out of this (though rather mysteriously) if it goes too fast, but the angle is weird. But then there’s step two. Your golfer is supposed to face the hole when you try to put. When you’re too close, however, it’s not a straight line. Instead, you seem to pretty much be standing on the hole and can’t put it from the angle you have. It’s frustrating and can make you feel quite screwed over – your good record can easily be spoilt by some bad game mechanics.

During our first round of golf I found myself fall victim to this putting problem, to the point where not only was I getting incredibly frustrated by it but was really wondering why the player was standing on it. Another piece of frustration occurred on our next round of golf. Anyone who knows anything about golf knows that it is not played on uniformly level courses. There are hills and dips (and of course some wind issue) and to give this game some credit they have tried to incorporate some of these in. What does not help is that the ground is always the same shade of green without any hint of contour meaning that your ball can curve in a random direction for no rhyme or reason. As I always say; difficult is good but play fair.

I see how the gameplay of the game is revolutionary and had an influence on future games. When it worked, it was fun and great to play. It’s a thing that has potential. Just… not how it works right now. When a game makes you want to throw stuff at the screen, then you know you’re doing something wrong.

Final Thoughts

Like we said with John Madden Football we can see the merit behinfd this game but it does not stand up well to modern games (casing point, every hole had to be actually drawn by the game which took a while an became really tedious after a while). The fact that this was the firs golf game to not do a top-down view of the sport is really impressive and that alone means this game deserves a place on this list.