One Hour Reviews: Game #007: Golf, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo, Published by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

Hello, sportsball fans! Here we are with the pulse-pounding second part to our Sports Pentalogy: Golf! Yeah, I'm not really that excited about playing Golf but it's on the list. I haven't played the Nintendo version of Golf, at least not much. I am pretty familiar with Mario Golf on the N64 and Game Boy Color, though, so I have played virtual golf before. My personal experience with golf was one bone-crunching trip to a driving range and several rounds of miniature golf. I've never played the real full scale game but I am familiar enough with the basic rules of golf to get by.

The sports games that I have covered so far have not exactly filled me with confidence that the NES is the best place for sports simulations but I am still early in the NES's library. Considering that we are still in the era of naming the game after the sport itself and calling it a day I don't think this game is going to raise the bar too much.

With that baggage in mind let's play 18 holes of Golf!

First Impressions & Conveyance:

Golf. Yup, it's right there on the title screen plain as day. The Golf logo actually has a cool fake 3-D effect to it with its two layers of green spelling out the title. There is no music in the background, though. It’s just a black background, a title card, and three choices. Only one choice for loners like me.

Pictured: As boring of a sight as I imagined. Also, that's the top score?

I let the title screen play out to get demos and that is not quite what I got. If you pause at the title screen the game will cycle back and forth between the title and previews of the game's 18 holes. This was a little useful to see the user interface but since golf is not played on a timer it did not prepare me very much for the game. The game is not played on a timer so I knew I would have all the time I needed to make a plan and since the game only showed static images of the holes rather than gameplay in motion it ended up not teaching me much.

Once I got the game started I immediately teed up at the first hole. There was no choice of course. I only have this one course to play. I took a moment to figure out my controls. Up and down selects the player's clubs, while left and right adjusts the player's shot angle. The A button starts the swing meter. For any player that has not played any golf game before the swing meter is a track that a cursor is stopped on twice. Pressing A will send the cursor from the right side of the meter to the left. The farther left the player stops the cursor the more power is applied to the shot. One the way back to the right the player will often want the cursor to stop in the middle of a white zone to shoot the ball straight. Deviating from that to the right or left will hook or slice the ball in the opposite direction. Stop the cursor too early and the ball will go right and stop it too late and the ball will go left. I'll elaborate more about why this is is useful in the next section.

Graphically the game shows the player a lot of what they would want to know at any time. The right part of the screen is reserved for a fixed overhead view of the hole. The only time the view changes is when the player makes it to the putting green for more precise shots. This view does allow the player to size up the length of their shots and to plan ahead for approaches to the green. The left side of the screen displays the player's avatar and a look at what's ahead from the player's viewpoint with the club selection and the club's swing meter below it. These parts of the display show a decent amount of information.

The last section of the screen is in the upper left which displays the hole, the players score, par, hole length, and the wind direction. All of this is good but there are two pieces of information that are lacking which are devastating to the gameplay experience: distance to the hole and what the range of the club is! Neither pressing B nor Select actually switched anything over to display this information so I think the game was performing as intended.

Pictured: Good information. Not Pictured: Essential information!

Experience & Presentation:

My experience in Golf was a bit of a mixed bag. In the previous section I outlined how disappointed I was to be without some very important information that the conveyance relied on. I would cut this game some slack by saying that it's an early golf video game so some things would get better over time. Screw that. Even if I can see how far a ball went after I shot it once and could eyeball the distance on the overhead map, it would have been such a huge boon to actually get up-to-date information about where I was in relation to the hole and what the best tool for the job was. There was about a dozen holes where I kept hitting the ball past the green over and over again. Sometimes I would hit the ball straight but guess the wrong club so the ball would go sailing out of bounds. I was ready to tear this game a new one in the review.

The first round of golf was awful. I shot a 136 in 18 holes which was 64 shots over par. I think that any pro golfer would lose their license to play at that point. It was a bad time but it was also a learning experience. Normally when the player sinks a putt into the hole a bored little beeping noise plays with a flashing score. Normally it would be at least a bogey (one shot too many for the hole) but sometimes I did so badly the game didn't even bother to tell me how bad it was. I guess the game thought I couldn't handle the embarrassment.

Sure, I could have done a lot better with the other information that I wanted but I also needed to learn how the game worked. For instance, merely having the golf ball near a tree after the ball stopped rolling was over put the ball out of bounds. I guess Nintendo hired the Kite Eating Tree from the Peanuts comic strip and trained them to eat golf balls. Second, I was only able to select 1 of 16 directions to aim my shot on any non-putt. This meant that sometimes I would have to choose to aim my shot straight at some trees and then purposely hook my shot so that it ended up where I wanted it. Third, the greens are really fast. If the hole is downhill from the ball the player needs to make a love tap putt or the ball will probably end up further from the hole than from where the player started.

Pictured: Those arrows aren't the lay of the green, they are turbo pads waiting to be installed in a Mario Kart track!

Probably the most humorous quirk I found was that a ball can land in the water and roll out. There were a few times where I overshot one of the islands in the later holes and instead of ending back up on land where the ball had crossed last it skipped a good 30 feet over the water to land safely on the other side. I must have one hell of a top spin on my swing.

Once I got a handle on all of these details I decided to do a self-imposed challenge to make my hour more enjoyable. I wanted to beat that top score of 100 shots. I did better on my second attempt. I shot 113! An improvement of 23 shots was encouraging. I was determined to make my goal with the dwindling time I had left. The third game showed a lot of promise. The first 8 holes were great. At one point I was confused because I landed on a green and one of the warning beepers I had grown accustomed to started going off. Instead of telling me I sucked I got a notice saying that I had a chance for birdie (one shot better than par). What, really? I was really getting the hang of it! I got that birdie and got a higher pitched beep to tell me of my success. I was only 5 above par after the first eight holes and I was really surprised. I didn't quite have the time to finish my third game but let's let the last screenshot point out how well I was doing at the end.

Pictured: Wasted opportunities...

Verdict & Score:

Golf suffers for being the first of its kind on the NES. It came up with a lot of clever ways to give the player information like an impressive forward-view map view that updates when the player changes positions. It was also one of the first games if not the first to include the swing meter which has been used in almost all golf games since. My enjoyment of the game depended on how well I was doing at the time. This made the first round of golf especially frustrating because I had additional difficulty due to the lack of information and the learning curve. If the manual had the ranges of the clubs it was a manual that I needed. As it is, the game missed a couple of opportunities to innovate a really good game of golf. Instead NES players of 1985 were left with a pretty middling experience.

Overall with its high points and lows I give Golf a 4(3)/10. You could say that this game of golf was below par. Womp womp.

Factoids & Trivia:

Golf does not appear to be a very notable entry into the NES's launch library. There aren't many notes on its development on any wiki site. Probably the most important trivia fact that I learned was that this was the first game to be worked on by composer Koji Kondo during his employment at Nintendo. He is credited with working on Punch Out for the arcade but that was before he was an official employee. Since there is no music in the game I assume that he worked on some sound effects instead. As I mentioned in the Super Mario Brothers review, Koji Kondo is responsible for making that game's soundtrack so clearly he has some much better work ahead of him.

Speaking of Mario, the fat guy who swings the club on screen? That's Mario. The second player wears a red cap, shirt, and shoes so it's a little more obvious that the intention was to have that character be Mario. I guess this was before his princess saving years so I'll forgive the paunch for right now.

The reason for the 1984 copyright is that the game was released in 1984 on the Famicom in Japan plus Golf made an appearance on Nintendo's other arcade cabinet brand: the Playchoice 10. I will go into more detail on Nintendo's arcade machines in a future article.

Golf has not been totally forgotten by Nintendo. The company has pulled it out of the vault a few times for a rebranding in 1991 for the arcade called Mario's Open Golf. The game's courses were also brought to life in 3D for Wii Sports' golf mode and Golf was used in some minigames in NES Remix which was released for the WiiU in 2013.