Hi! My name is Paul and I love cycling, games, and cars. am in dubai, it's amazing!!
Hi! My name is Paul and I love cycling, games, and cars. am in dubai, it's amazing!!
Member since:26.10.2005
Reviews:16
Members who trust:1
I must confess to readers that before I go any further with this review, I know hardly anything about Golf. I understand the basic rules, and what the objective is, but apart from that I am mostly in the dark.
I will therefore carry on with this review in a way that any average guy who bought this game would write it.
When you first load it up on the PSP and get to the menu screen, you will see that there is no cohesive help or a training mode for amateurs like me. In order just to play the game, and I mean hitting the ball with the club, preferably hard, you have to skip the character selection, and if you do you will have to play as a rubbish fat guy who is uglier than a photo of Michael Jackson superimposed with a dog. There is a (at best) 15 minute tutorial, which tells you virtually nothing about how to play the game, only the very basics. After you have completed the tutorial, the game starts out as actually a whole lot of fun (until the novelty wore off).
But the game really hasn't survived being ported from
it's bigger, older siblings, like the Xbox and PS2.
For a start , the graphics, even by PSP standards, suck. There is a hugely detailed character customisation mode, which is wasted, because the character models are no better than a PC game from the year 1999. The game makes a big issue about buying branded clothes (like Nike shorts and Adidas caps), but actually has little about the gameplay which seems to have been overlooked.
Who cares if I can alter the breast size, change the eyebrow style of my female character model and buy her Lacoste shorts if she is simply no fun to control. The analogue stick, which is used to move back and swing forward the golf club when shooting, is a unique and very fun idea. This works brilliantly on a proper stick like on PS2 or Xbox, but the analogue stick on the PSP simply does not have the weighty depth that the other consoles sticks have. This is not noticeable when the ball is being belted 300 yards down the course, but when you're on the green putting the ball into the hole it is really more about luck than skill.
Also, unlike real golf, the ball seems to hate going in the hole, often rolling round the edge of it like a basketball rolling on the hoop, but not actually going in. Unless you have enough PSP fanatical friends to sit in a room with you and play PSP, few will ever get to test out the multiplayer. And I didn't so I'm afraid this part of the game will have to be overlooked.
Aside from the analogue stick club control, there are some other features to this game that are (just) worth mentioning. The player can magically add spin to the ball while it is in the air, by holding the right shoulder button and moving the stick in the direction they want the ball to spin. It's a lot like the "Aftertouch" button from the recent Burnout Games, only a lot less responsive. Putting spin on the ball while in mid-air may seem pretty inventive, but it's gimmicky and the camera angles do not always let you see in the which direction the ball is headed, sometimes zooming in on your golfer's reaction. The golfers react pretty well to how good your shots are, but the animations repeat themselves a lot and are really only amusing for the first few times.
The Standard EA PSP game mode is the "Pocket Trax" option, which gives you a few licensed songs by people like Snoop Dogg to listen to from the game UMD, as well as an option to play the tracks stored on your memory stick. These are played with a visualizer, which the MP3 playback on PSP lacked, but now that PSP Firmware Version 3.00 comes with a visualizer this feature seems rather antiquated. There are two paltry bonus mini games as well, which are basically just different game modes and are not worth bothering with.
In my ignorant opinion, and judging from what I've seen of real golf, this game is a lot like golf. The hole is too small and too far away, it's too slow paced, and the rules are very, very traditional and have not been updated since Golf Buggies came out many years ago. In the same way, this game lacks innovation, decent graphics, and is very boring and slow to play. Not worth your time or money.
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Dec 6th, 2006
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