Easy to Play! Dynamic Audio & Visual!

Go Go Golf, released for PlayStation 2 in Japan and Europe only, is almost precisely the kind of Weird Old Golf Game that I had in mind when I started collecting and playing Weird Old Golf Games. The best part is that I don't think it's Weird intentionally. No, I'd say Go Go Golf was created more or less in earnest, albeit perhaps with severe budgetary and/or time constraints. For starters, it was released on CD-ROM in 2002, when a lot of PlayStation 2 games had since transitioned to releasing on DVD, so there's probably not a ton of space on the disc for high resolution textures, good-looking tree models, or more than three courses. What's less explicable is the fact that it only runs at about 18 frames per second, despite it really not doing a lot visually. But that's not really what I'm here to focus on.

In Go Go Golf, you do not have direct control over your club selection, ball spin, or even aim. Instead, you are offered a selection of 2 or 3 predetermined shots, with names. You do still need to correctly time your swing (with Beatmania-esque callouts like "WHAT SKILL" and "A BIT SLOW"), and nailing the timing correctly means your ball will go pretty much exactly where the shot marker says you will. Messing up means you're more than likely going to either miss the hole or wind up in a bunker or water hazard, in a way that makes me believe that it's not actually simulating anything so much as it's been heavily scripted ahead of time. You also occasionally get prompts that your golfer's skills have leveled up, but I'm not fully sure if they actually do anything.

Where Go Go Golf gets particularly Weird, though, is that they've gone out of their way to name everything. The individual holes all have titles, and every single shot you are given also has a name. You'll be seeing holes with nonsensical titles like LAND OF SADNESS and A STONE FOR PRAYER, and you're often given shots named I LOVE GROUND, HOLY HIGH BALL, or my personal favorite...

What is probably my favorite part of this game, though, even beyond all the silly names (which are, I'm told, in English even in the Japanese release), is the soundtrack. You probably expect golf game soundtracks to be very Weather Channel - easy listening, lots of soft instruments like pianos and guitars. This one leads off with a menu song that might as well be from some forgotten Time Crisis spin-off. Give it a listen! If I hadn't just told you that this was from a golf game, you'd probably think it belongs to a game that has guns in it - and the menu sounds making gun-racking noises really doesn't help, either!

Go Go Golf makes its appearance in Golfshrine by way of a tip by TangoBunny of the excellent Tangopunk zine. Were it not for her hard work, I would not have ever known about this one.

Further screenshots: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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