Golf

One of the great things about doing these retro reviews is getting the chance to try out game systems that I missed when I was a kid. I only had experience with the Atari 2600 and Intellivision back in the day. However, in the last few years, I got to play around with the ColecoVision, Atari 5200, and even the Vectrex. Now, for the Defunct Games Golf Club, I'm getting to try another one as I take on one of the three games simply called Golf that released for the ZX Spectrum (which I'm calling "Virgin Golf" for the sake of clarity). This one got plenty wrong and right in almost equal measure.

There are plenty of graphically impressive games that released on the ZX Spectrum, but this golf game is not one of them. The plain text menus are the most boring I'd seen since The Uncanny X-Men on the NES. When the game actually starts, the visuals don't improve much. While it's easy to tell what everything is, the garish colors hurt my eyes after a while. On top of that, many of the color choices make little sense. Why is the "green" yellow? Couldn't they have chosen another color for the rough besides pink? The sounds are very basic, just basic bleeps and grinding noises.

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Fortunately, the game does play better than it looks. There are plenty of options for number of holes to play, and up to four people can join in, even allowing name entry. Scorecards can even be printed afterwards. Five clubs are available along with the putter. The mechanics are meant more for geometry students than golfers. Rather than just aiming with a cursor or turn with the directional keys, angles have to be entered based on the compass in the corner. Put simply, if you don't know how many degrees are in a circle, don't bother with this one. While gauging the angle and shot strength (on a one-to-ten scale) require a LOT of trial-and-error, it's made even tougher by the presence of wind with no indicators. I didn't realize there was wind in the game until I saw a shot curve in a weird fashion. There are inconsistencies in the rules all over the place. While the game does kill a lot of shot strength when shooting out of the rough, it actually allowed me to shoot out of a water hazard with no stroke penalty. All this is made even harder to stomach by the excessively long load times. Damn cassette tapes!

Virgin Golf was one of the weirdest games I played in the Golf Club. Once I figured out the mechanics, I found the very technical take on the sport rather satisfying and addicting. I also acknowledge that I would very much be in the minority on that opinion. The game requires more trial-and-error than is preferable, and the load times can make one game take hours. It's not a bad game for its time, but it's not one to seek out for the Spectrum. Well, at least it's better than the one the Odyssey 2 got ...