This is the fourth in a series of essays on things to feed your golf addiction in the off-season: Play A Golf Video Game
Play a Golf Video Game
If it is too cold to get out on the course, playing a golf video game can be a pleasant afternoon’s diversion and a way to feed your addiction.
I experienced my first golf video game on an Apple II circa 1984. The screen was green and black, and the graphics primitive, but the mechanics not far off from many games today. There was a small bar at the bottom of the screen, and at the top a player’s eye view of the course. To swing, you hit the space bar, and watched a status meter race across the gauge. You hit the space bar again when it a mark at the far end, and a final time when it swept back to a mark on the near side. It was all about timing. If you hit the space bar before the status meter reached the top, your shot would be weak; hit it after the top mark, and you would overswing. Hitting the space bar before the bottom mark caused a slice; after, a hook. Once the ball was struck, the view shifted to an overhead showing where the shot flew.
Since that first game, I have owned and played dozens of others, including a hand-held lcd game, several PC based games, Playstation, Game Cube and Wii, on my cell phone and on my IPad. I’ve had games that featured Jack, Arnie, Vijay and Tiger.
I don’t own a Steam Deck or Switch, so can’t comment on any of those. I’ve been thinking about a Steam Deck, though.
For most of the games, the basic play mechanism has remained the same—timing the status meter. More recent PC games, however, have incorporated mouse movement into the control. I don’t like those as much.
My Favorite Golf Video Game
I think I had the most fun with the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Wii game. Like all Wii games, it featured a motion sensing mechanism. You actually swung the controller like a club to make the ball go on the screen. It waas part simulation, part game.
I liked it, but frankly, was not very good. My non-golfing kids kicked my butt in it.
A close second was an Accolade Jack Nicklaus PC game that had a very neat course editor. I spent more time designing courses than playing them.
Another game that I really liked was Sid Meier’s Sim Golf. In that one, you began with a plot of land and a pile of money and started constructing golf holes. Like all of the “Sim” games, it was all about management of assets, as you developed your backwater course into a fabulous golf resort. You could play on the course you developed, but game play was very simplistic.
I wish this one was available on GOG. It was lots of fun.
The EA Tiger Woods series, meanwhile, just gets more complicated, now including things like “earning” apparel upgrades and the like. In many respects, I think the franchse has lots its way. I just want to play some cool courses.
You can play a classic 1990 golf video game in your browser, thanks to the Internet Archives: PGA Tour Golf : Sterling Silver Software : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive
A game I’ve had fun with more recently is “Cursed To Golf,” a platformer style game in which players try to escape golf purgatory by becoming a “Golf Legend.” The game asks players to advance through a series of haunted landscapes by making shots between and over platforms, rebounding off walls and objects. I find the retro graphic and game play utterly charming.
A game I really want to try out is Golf Club Nostalga, in which you play your way through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, trying to gather clues about humanity’s demise.
Perhaps soon.
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