Defunct Games Golf Club: The Final Round

Hello and welcome to the Final Round of the Defunct Games Golf Club. For the fourth and last time, I am tackling eighteen retro golf games. For full details on why I've been doing this, watch this YouTube video created last year. Now, my picks have not been limited to pro golf games. Every variation on the theme of whacking a ball toward a hole has been considered, including miniature golf. Considering the pathetic nature of Miniature Golf on the Atari 2600, I didn't have high hopes when I booted up Krazy Golf on the ZX Spectrum (also known as Crazy Golf). However, I found plenty of fun in this 35-year-old relic to counteract the aged design and other annoyances. In terms of the basic design, Krazy Golf is similar to its Atari 2600 ancestor. You have nine very basic holes with very basic mechanics used to navigate them. There are no moving hazards to worry about in this game. However, the challenge comes from the more intricate course designs. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Golf games in the early 80s were very limited due to the limited technology available at the time. As the second generation moved into the third in the wake of the Video Game Crash, advancements allowed for golf games to be more detailed than previously possible. Nick Faldo Plays the Open for the ZX Spectrum was one of the first to replicate the golf experience in a digital format and come close to the real thing. While that may have been an impressive feat back in 1985, that doesn't make Nick Faldo worth taking on tour now. Nick Faldo was a certified legend back in the 80s including three Open Championships (hence the name of the game) and three Masters. However, Nick's name means as much to this game as the PGA license did for the Intellivision's first golf game. The real star of the game is the rendition of the Royal St. George's Club which was the site of the Open Championship in 1985. [READ FULL REVIEW]

There are few golf games in existence that provide the kind of nostalgia bomb that Golf on the Nintendo Entertainment System does. Often referred to as "Black Box Golf" due to the packaging that all first-party NES launch games had, Golf is often one of the first golf games any retro gamer has ever played, if not THE first. (Note: It wasn't my first; mine was the previously reviewed Great Golf on the Sega Master System.) Funny enough, I personally had never played it until recently; thus, I'm looking at it without the rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. Fortunately, this veteran can still hang with the new blood for the most part. The fictitious course presented checks all the same boxes as the one in Great Golf. Look for plenty of sharper-than-usual doglegs and multiple tough island-hopping holes. Wind conditions are very random in speed and direction as well as how much they impact shots. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Over the last few years, I had established ways in which a golf game would get on my nerves. Though there were plenty of smaller reasons that have come up in various games, the biggest ones fall into two categories: 1. Great gameplay with too few options 2. Lots of options with flawed gameplay Sega World Tournament Golf fell sharply into category 2. I was stoked when I saw all the options Sega crammed into this Master System cartridge. The fact that it had two courses would have been praise enough seeing as it was all too common for third gen golf games to tap out at one. Both courses are well built and single pieces. Remember how EA promoted how Rory McIlroy PGA Tour on the current systems rendered entire courses all at once eliminating the load times between holes? Sega World Tournament Golf did essentially the same thing twenty years earlier. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Back in the 80s, there were few third-party developers as prolific and as polarizing as Data East. Their games in the arcade and on consoles tended to be very hit-or-miss. When they're good like with RoboCop on NES or BurgerTime, they're excellent. When they're bad like with Karate Champ or Joe & Mac on NES, they're memorably horrible. It's not often that they didn't hit one extreme or the other, but their Japanese golf game Winning Shot was one of those times. Winning Shot is, in many ways, what I've come to expect from a golf game on the TurboGrafx-16. The HuCard has only one course. The visuals show off the system's huge color palette and level of detail that blew away what the NES could do. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Okay, I am now fully convinced that miniature golf and the Sega Genesis mix about as well as oil and water. Last year, I suffered through the cheap aggravation of Electronic Arts' Zany Golf. Whatever hope I had left that the Genesis could at least get past the annoying windmill that shows up on almost all mini golf courses was dashed when I played Putter Golf which, somehow, managed to be WORSE! Whereas I initially thought that Zany Golf was the Genesis sequel to Putt & Putter, Putter Golf actually is the game that came before it. The course is very similar in design to the later games on the Sega Master System and Game Gear. [READ FULL REVIEW]

During the first round of the Golf Club, I looked at Jack Nicklaus' Turbo Golf on the TurboGrafx-16. That was one of the most painful D's I've had to give a game. That was because I could see the ambition and the potential there, but those things were horribly defeated by the inadequate hardware. The legendary Jack Nicklaus definitely deserved better than that disappointment. Fortunately, the Super Nintendo was a piece of hardware strong enough to realize that ambition and potential with Jack Nicklaus' Golf. The overall style and gameplay of this one are just about the same as Sculptured Software's previous game. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Average games can actually be the hardest games to talk about. They're the games that do things right and wrong in about equal measure. They end up being the games that leave the least impression and you forget about the moment the machine is turned off. That is the issue I have when I try to talk about Ultra Golf on the Game Boy. Ultra Golf has a few advantages over a lot of games on the Game Boy and portables of the time in general. There are two courses crammed onto the cartridge where most portable games struggled to provide one. Two players can save profiles onto the cartridge which also saves stats; that wasn't even common on the home consoles at that time. [READ FULL REVIEW]

You know the feeling you get when a perfectly aimed putt stops just an inch short of the cup? Isn't that one of the most frustrating experiences in existence? Well, I had a similar experience while playing Super Golf on the Game Gear, a great game that stopped just a bit short of must have. Super Golf has a good number of options for a portable golf game. Four-player hotseat is available for stroke play along with two-player hotseat for match play. There are four cute anime-ish characters to choose from along with four caddies that provide varying perks like more accurate putting and stronger recovery shots. Each character has has stats that can be adjusted at the start of a round to suit just about any playing style. All those good options are in addition to a very well-done game of golf. The text doesn't overload the portable screen when it's used. Everything is bright, colorful, and cartoony, making the game a joy to look at. The mechanics are simple to get into. [READ FULL REVIEW]

If there's one company in which I've struggled to find something appealing to play, it would be Natsume. Natsume is known for putting out Japanese games that have a very niche appeal and tend to be very slow. They're most well-known for the amazing-looking but slow Reel Fishing games and the dead-dull Harvest Moon farming RPGs. I think the most fast-paced game they ever made was the photo safari game Afrika on the PlayStation 3. One would think that Natsume's more deliberate sensibilities would be perfect for a golf game, but they really tested my patience with Hole In One Golf on the Game Boy Color. One thing I can praise about Natsume's work is that they certainly know how to get impressive visuals out of a portable, and Hole In One Golf is no exception. [READ FULL REVIEW]

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Hot Shots Golf was still very much the model for how to make a golf game that can appeal to everybody. There's a reason it was called Everybody's Golf everywhere else in the world. Apparently Namco Bandai was taking careful notes because they followed Sony's design philosophy to the letter when they made Wonder Classic for the WonderSwan Color, and by God, did they nail it! Wonder Classic checks just about all the boxes for making a golf game the Hot Shots way. There are four full courses plus a nine-hole par-3 only course, and they are all fun to play on. The first one is unlocked at the beginning, and the others are unlocked by winning in Tour mode. The difficulty ramps up at an acceptable pace so that, by the time you get to the hardest course, you're hooked. On top of that, there are twenty-two characters to choose from, most of which are unlocked by beating them in Vs. mode. Also various bits of gear can be unlocked for the characters that, when equipped, can boost stats. [READ FULL REVIEW]

I think we have all learned to assume the worst when it comes to any game based on a movie, especially one based on a kids' movie. The reason why is simple; they tend to be made purely as a cash in on a hot-at-the-moment license rather than as a means of entertainment. Usually publishers just push out an effortless platformer for these licenses, but Vicarious Visions decided to try something different. They used the license for Over the Hedge (one of Dreamworks' better movies that didn't feature a certain green ogre) for a mini golf game. That chance paid off big time! This is one of the only golf games I'd ever heard of that actually has a story mode. [READ FULL REVIEW]

One of the worst golf games I played for the Defunct Games Golf Club was Bandai Golf: Challenge Pebble Beach on the original Nintendo. In that review, I praised the detail in recreating the Pebble Beach course in California with the limitations of the NES even though the options and gameplay were piss-poor. When I learned of Pebble Beach Golf Links on the Saturn, I was sure that this will be the perfect retro rendition of the famous course. It's even made by T&E Soft. Sure, T&E's record with the Golf Club was up and down over the years, but I still had reason to be optimistic. The good news is that it is a better retro round on the course than the Nintendo game. The bad news is that it's still a barely average golf game. Despite the different publisher, Pebble Beach Golf Links is still very similar to the last Saturn game from T&E I covered, Masters Haruka Naru Augusta 3. The presentation is almost the same with each hole introduced with FMV, except here the videos include tips from PGA pro Craig Stadler. [READ FULL REVIEW]

If you had gone to a sports bar at any point in the last couple of decades, there may be a couple of arcade machines in a corner. If there are, it's almost a guarantee that one of them would be one of the Golden Tee games. Much like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz, the Golden Tee games managed to boil a sport (golf in this case) down to its base elements to create a game that's faster paced and much more accessible to a larger audience. Despite it being a fixture anywhere that can fit an arcade machine, it was ported to a home console only once. The PlayStation rendition may not be quite as accessible as the arcade or plug-and-play versions, but it is still a fine fast-paced golf game. [READ FULL REVIEW]

It may be hard to imagine the PGA license being in the hands of anyone besides Electronic Arts. After all, the PGA Tour franchise was the de facto pro golf series for almost thirty years. True, Mattel had the PGA license in 1980 for their golf game on the Intellivision, and 2K has the PGA license now for the fantastic The Golf Club 2019. However, Infogrames did manage to get the non-exclusive PGA license for one game on the Nintendo 64. PGA European Tour Golf had the ability to outdrive EA's output on the system, but it royally screwed up on the green, resulting in a mediocre performance overall. My first impressions of the game were very positive. The four recreated courses from Portugal, Sweden, and Ireland are the best looking courses in the entire fifth console generation. [READ FULL REVIEW]

I'm surprised that mascot-based golf games didn't become more of a thing. Nintendo and Sony saw great success putting beloved characters into Mario Golf and Hot Shots Golf 2 in the fifth generation. However, almost no other company looked ready to take a shot at the potentially lucrative market. I say "almost" because T&E Soft got permission from Disney to put their classic characters into what turned out to be the developer's last game. Disney Golf so pleasantly surprised me that I'm amazed Disney wasn't trumpeting this largely ignored game from the top of the Magic Kingdom. Forget what you remember of T&E's fifth generation output. Disney Golf cribs much of its design notes from what worked for Mario Golf and Hot Shots Golf. Six fictitious courses are available which sit in between Hot Shots' realistic look and Mario's cartoon style. Eight upgradeable characters are in the game though strangely Mickey Mouse is limited to the role of a nonplayable coach. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Do you remember Disney's animated version of Alice in Wonderland? Remember the scene when Alice and the Queen of Hearts played a weird game of croquet where flamingos were the mallets and hedgehogs were the balls? Okay, now imagine if the Queen used frogs instead of hedgehogs and the game was golf instead of croquet. That's the basic idea behind Ribbit King. Ribbit King is one of few sports games that have an actual story mode, but that's not entirely a positive. The story involves a kid named Scooter who looks like a squashed version of Finn from Adventure Time. His planet is running out of a special material, and the only way to get more is to win an interplanetary frolf (man, that word sounds stupid!) tournament. The story is as stupid as many anime aimed at young children. On top of that, the aesthetics are a bit on the weak side. While it is nice that each wide open course is colorful and rendered well, everything is still pretty blocky. [READ FULL REVIEW]

Well, it's the end of the line for the Final Round of the Defunct Games Golf Club. Thank you, everyone, for joining me for this four-year tour of retro golf games. It seems appropriate that I would end the series with the legendary Tiger Woods. Tiger's career may be on the low end these days, but he was THE golf champion of the 90s and 2000s. It only made sense that EA would get Tiger as spokesman for their PGA Tour franchise starting with the 1999 edition. I've played most of the games with Tiger's name on them, and almost all of them are among the greatest sports games ever made with the 2005 edition standing as one of the true pinnacles of the series. After playing so many golf games that were painfully limited on content, here's one that truly gave players their money's worth. Even leaving out the now-nonfunctional online and Real Time Event modes, there's still enough to keep you busy for months. [READ FULL REVIEW]