Ultra Golf

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. There's even two player hot-seat mode in addition to link cable support. There is a sense of progression as the tournament mode requires winning on the first course before the tournament on the second course becomes available. Like with Awesome Golf on the Lynx, Ultra Golf avoids putting walls of text on the portable screen, and the visuals are quite good by Game Boy standards with plenty of detail on the courses and a decently animated golfer in the middle of the swing meter.

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The problems override all those good points without surpassing them. While the putting mechanics are quite good, overall the swing gauge is very finicky. Similarly to Masters Harukanaru, if you try to hit maximum power and hit the button a nanosecond too late, the shot goes haywire. Adjusting the stance for fades and draws is a nice touch, but there's a lack of consistency with the results. While the visuals are top tier for the Game Boy, the sounds are awful. The music has random bursts of static, and the sound effects can pierce at random moments. Finally, the thirty-six holes making up the two courses are up and down in terms of quality. For every challenging but fair hole, there's an unfair one with curves sharper than found in a rally race. Though my O.B.s in this game didn't come anywhere close to the infuriating levels of Power Golf, it still happened too much for my liking.

Ultra Golf is quite simply the most average game I had ever played in my life. I had some great moments with it and some irritating moments, too. However, the majority of my time with it was decidedly meh. This was easily the hardest golf review I've ever had to write because, on the whole, the game left so little impression on me, one way or the other. If you absolutely must have another golf game for the original Game Boy, you can certainly do worse, but you can also do better.