Developer(s): HAL Laboratory, Nintendo R&D2
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 1990
Region: USA
Win Condition: Get par or better in both the Japan and U.S.A. courses
Another of my childhood Game Boy games revisited. Golf is sort of a sequel to the NES Golf, in that it uses basically the same mechanics, and has some courses derived from the Japan-only Famicom sequels Golf: Japan Course and Golf: U.S. Course. It’s also much harder than the NES version, in that I couldn’t get away with saying any score under 100 was good enough to “win”, and, at least for someone of my skill level, getting par in these two courses is massively challenging.
But first, a brief introduction. This uses the now very familiar mechanic of the three-button golf swing: one to start, one to choose power, and one to choose accuracy. You can add height to the ball by holding down, or make a lower shot by holding forward. If you hold left or right and hit the accuracy meter dead-on, you’ll add backspin, making the ball stop in place and then, well, roll a little backwards. Adding height also makes the wind have a higher impact on your ball and makes it roll less when it lands, and making a lower shot does the opposite. As in the NES game, it doesn’t tell you what your clubs are rated, you have to look at the manual for that, and those numbers are for perfect conditions on the fairway with no wind, which is almost never the case. Even being in the rough or bunker isn’t that predictable, with five different depths of rough and three depths of bunker, which all place different invisible limitations on your shot.
So yes, this is a tough game. I did take a few mulligans here and there on my way to “victory”. I still don’t use save states to make a game easier, so I had to do what anyone could do on a real Game Boy, which is reset the game when a shot is going poorly, as it autosaves (with the backup battery!) after the ball stops moving. That means if you’re quick enough you can press SELECT+START+A+B at the same time to have another go at it. If you worry that I might’ve abused this, well, I still only shot exactly one under par in my best ever games on both courses, so not really anything to brag about.
High difficulty aside, this is an incredibly impressive feat for a Game Boy launch window release. I was fairly stunned when I realized how many ways I could affect the shot, and how many other factors of ground and wind speed and direction and ball height and ball spin all factored into the result. They probably didn’t need to go to the lengths they did but I’m glad they bothered, because it feels incredible whenever you actually manage to hit the precise shot you wanted to, or when you sink a tricky putt through a maze of different slopes. I am so looking forward to one day getting to play Mario Golf on the Game Boy Color when things, as I understand, start to really get going.
Dante Plays Old Games 