Sports games are one of my all time favorite genres of video games, and I've probably spent more time playing them than any other genre. The top 5 in terms of total time spent are probably sports, RPG, RTS, platformers, and fighting. But my guess is that sports is number one by a narrow edge due to the countless hours I've spent playing Madden, NCAA Football, MLB: The Show, and several other titles. It's funny to me that more "hardcore gamers" seem a bit dismissive towards sports games as a genre, and I think it's largely due to the fact that a substantial portion of these people do not enjoy playing or watching sports in general. But sports games are among the first video games ever made, and some of the most common, for a very simple reason. They have an easily identifiable and defined set of rules that reduces the amount of creativity necessary to come up with a compelling user experience, and they are also geared towards allowing multiple players.
Of all of the sports which have been translated to video game form, I think the most consistently excellent sport is golf. My favorite sports game ever is MLB: The Show, but pretty much every golf game across time and platform has been at least good since Golf for the NES. One reason is that almost all golf games now use motion controls or the three click system created in Golf, and these controls just work fantastically to represent the essentials of golf in a video format. The other reason is that golf itself, as a sport, works incredibly well across a ton of platforms and at any level of visual sophistication. There's no defense in golf, which always makes games like football difficult to represent on screen. Tackling mechanics never quite look right in these games, and it's too easy to find exploitable plays and tactics to rig the game in your favor at any difficulty setting. It also has a pretty simple physics notion (wind, uphills, downhills, and slope of the green) that are easily understood and easily simulated, far more so than the random nature of hitting the ball in, say, a baseball game. Golf also lends itself well to playing with friends due to the fact that hotseat golf works really well, making golf work well on everything from a personal computer to a PS4 with any number of controllers and players. There are so many good golf games, from Golf to NES Open Tournament Golf to Mario Golf to Hot Shots Golf to golfing in Wii Sports to Tiger Wooods PGA Tour that it's difficult to find one that is objectively a bad game. Some of these games are better than others, with Mario Golf being the best ever, in my opinion, but there are at least 5 excellent golf franchises throughout history, and very few bad ones.
I've been hankering to play a golf game, and to try out a new one, so I recently purchased Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 to give it a go, and found myself, yet again, enjoying the core mechanics of the three click golf system. If you're not familiar with the series, it has a few differentiators compared to it's competitors. You play as a roster of original characters who have cartoony appearances and freakishly huge hands.
Good luck finding some golf gloves with those trash can lids
You can also customize your characters with bizarre accessories to make them, well, unique. So, if you want to eschew a traditional golf cart for a hot rod, be their guest! Or if you want to change out your club for a rubber squeaky mallet, have at it! Want your character to wear a speedo on the golf course? Your dreams have come true! Did you ever want to pick a samurai themed character and dress him up as a french maid? Go for it!
Second, you can't use any sliders to adjust your target with your clubs, making short yardage situations in which you have to hit out of a bunker onto the fairway extremely tough. This game really could have used that feature.
The game is also missing a compelling single player mode that curves in terms of difficulty appropriately. Single player mode ends up just doing "challenges" that are just doing a nine hole tournament or match play contest to unlock new items. Once you've unlocked enough items, you are then allowed to challenge the next opponent, who you can play as once you've defeated him. This gets extremely grindy, as you can unlock a maximum of two items per challenge, and at the higher levels you'll need to unlock upwards of 15 items to even be given a shot at the next unlockable character. There are really two successful kinds of single player modes in golf games, the first being a traditional campaign in which you have to bring your selected character through a PGA Tour season/whatever the story was in Mario Golf: Advanced Tour, and the second being a more streamlined approach in which you can subsequently attempt to unlock characters at will, as in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour. This felt way too grindy to me, although the golfing was fun for several days, so I didn't mind too much. It would have also felt better if the courses/competition scaled better, as I absolutely stomped every opponent for almost all of the challengers, and then got to courses on which I couldn't shoot better than a +5 in 9 holes seemingly all at once. The wind and adjustable shot difficulties simply made it too difficult to navigate these extremely difficulty holes, particularly when you factor in that at higher levels, many of the challenges will feature special rules like adding an extra shot for landing in the bunker or rough.
Despite my preference for the more polished Mario Golf series, I had a tremendous amount of fun hitting the links, again. This is a silly facade placed onto a flawed, but fun game. If you like golf games, and who doesn't, you'll get plenty of enjoyment out of this very cheap game. I'll give it an 8.0/10.
I have no clue what's coming next for handhelds. I've really tapped out a lot of my collection I have to play through due to my increased time for handhelds relative to home consoles, so I may need to purchase another game here. Check back in for a true surprise once I settle on a choice.
-TRO
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