Golf

"Beats the real thing, in my book"

I've always been a little suspicious of golf. My first indoctrination had me hitting the ball off a tee, actually taken from a puzzle game, with a putter. The ball tended to bounce off our chain-link fence if I was lucky. Then there were the embarrassing times my mother and sister beat me at miniature golf, and I may have been scared off for good after bouncing one ball off a neighbor's Plexiglass window. Video games made golf more bewildering after I saw the different irons and woods you had to use, and there was still slope and wind to judge. Then, after I moved to an upscale Chicago suburb, I began to view golf as a snobby upper-class past-time. This view softened after a brief night out at college orientation when I did fairly well in a mini golf game with a bunch of attractive women around, leaving only ''real'' golf to hate. And when recently I got an Atari Golf cart on the cheap, I found it wasn't so bad if you swept away the details. As long as I never step on a golf course, my view of the game will probably be pretty decent.

On the Atari, Golf is broken down pretty simply. It's probably more like billiards on oddly-shaped tables. You often have to curve the ball around the course with several shots. There are sand traps, trees and lakes that you can try to shoot over. If you can't, the lakes give you a stroke penalty, the traps get your ball stuck for a random(possibly zero) number of turns, and the trees must be rubber, as they may bounce your ball significantly backwards. Additionally and perhaps most annoyingly, your golf ball cannot leave the greens into the blue area, even if it would be in the air at the time. So if you hit a side wall, you will often have to hit the ball at a lateral angle to the hole next time. It's most annoying, but on the bright side, there is no penalty for hitting the ball out of bounds, which is nice if you overshoot the green. There is still clearly some strategy involved, though.

Your controls certainly take a while to get used to. You control a canary-yellow fellow(I suppose standard golf plaid and argyle would be beyond the Atari 2600's capabilities, but they still managed to get a weird color in) around the screen, and when he gets close to the ball his golf club bends at an angle to the ball. Your guy is right-handed, so the ball's flight is ninety degrees counter-clockwise of your club. There are only about twenty different angles at which you can hit the ball, and the range seems strictly determined by how far back you wind your guy's swing up, so there is much less chance involved. In the event that you have the golfer positioned to hit the ball the other way, you can just move him away while holding the button down, and he won't be penalized. Once you get the ball on the green, the game zooms in, and you are in an octagonal area, unless you're lucky and drain the shot from outside. Unless you hit the ball way too fast, you just need to get it over the cup, but you never go off the green. There's a bit of look-and-feel in order to get the ball to go as far as you want, and it's a slight bother that the ball never slows down but comes to a complete halt. It took nineteen strokes and probably a few divots that won't show up with the Atari's resolution on the first hole to get the hang of this, but the whole layout seems reasonable.

The only variation in games is that you have one- and two-player modes. The holes seem to have a decent variety, with number nine being H-shaped and a monster compared to the others. There are a few greed-traps(''Sure, I can make it past this tree'') and all in all it is usually a challenge to make par, and you really only have a hope of breaking it on the par-five holes. It's a bit disappointing that you can't focus on any specific hole as well.

Graphics are nothing subtle; I've mentioned your guy, and calculating the ball's perpendicular path to the club is an interesting challenge. The playing field is, of necessity, cut down so that your guy may move above and to the side of it for certain strokes. You also have a stroke counter for the hole and for the entire nine along with a marker indicating the hole, and before you start the hole the par is posted. The trees look a bit like mushrooms, but they probably need to, or they'd wind up blocking most of the field. I suppose the monochrome water and sand-traps are tough to mess up, although I find it odd that the ball and hole change colors as you move from the fairway to the green. As for the sound, let's just say there's no harm in turning the volume dial down(anyone who uses a TV with remote and Atari is not a purist :) ,) as golf is supposed to be about peace and relaxation. I suppose they have to throw sound in, but golf and electronic sounds--that includes cell phones with annoying ring tones, as a non-sequitur--don't mix.

Overall, the game is ultimately too simple to be absorbing for a huge length of time. With only nine holes, it gets old faster than it should. There was probably enough variety in the barriers to warrant nine more holes and possibly to add difficulty levels, but a dumbed-down version of golf is not a bad thing for people like me who wish it were as simple as sitting on your duff, taking a whack at the ball, and hoping it goes in without wasting too much time--I'm pretty wretched even at those practice greens in the sports store where you can practice putting. There's also a problem that you can never shoot a hole-in-one(see: a green with lakes around it as an additional hole.) But it is a good low-impact stress breaker every so often.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/02/01, Updated 09/02/01