Go Go Golf

Easy to Play! Dynamic Audio & Visual! Go Go Golf!

Let's first begin this article with some appropriate mood music.

Wait - what game is this from? It sounds like it belongs in some Time Crisis spin-off or licensed Top Gun game! Nope, this is actually the music from Go Go Golf, even if it sounds like it was written for something else first.

Magical Sports Go Go Golf, was developed by Magical Company in Kobe, Japan, and released for PlayStation 2 in late 2000, coinciding with the PlayStation 2's launch in Japan. Roughly two years later, it'd see an English release, exclusively in the United Kingdom, from publisher Midas Interactive. Magical Company used to be known as Home Data Corp prior to 1993, and if we Western gamers are likely to know them for anything, it'd be the likes of the SNES versions of Yoshi's Cookie or Fatal Fury. They were much more prolific in Japan, producing a lot of Mahjong and Shogi games, as well as the Koushien series of high-school baseball simulations. I've never played a Koushien game, but I remember it fondly for enabling players to completely customize pitching motions to a hilarious degree.

But Go Go Golf is on the opposite end of the spectrum from Koushien. It's 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. See, while Magical Company were certainly a prolific developer, they probably didn't have the advance budget of, say, Electronic Arts or Squaresoft, so when they were tasked with getting out a game to make the PlayStation 2 launch window in Japan, it is likely that this was the best thing they could get together in such a limited time. MobyGames gives the game's Japanese release date as September 21, 2000, which would be mere months after the PS2's launch, and only one month before the system would launch in America. So it released as a "blue disc" CD-ROM, as DVD-ROMs were not yet widely available for production, and features a graphics engine that pulls a blistering 15 frames-per-second, despite not very much going on to warrant it.

But honestly, Go Go Golf's technical constraints are not my concern here. I'm here to look at the weird way in which it plays.

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. You do also get multiple golfers to choose from, with purportedly varying degrees of skills from the start, but they don't seem to make much of a difference either - then again, I was playing as Rikiya the entire time. (Superficial resemblence to Yakuza 3's Rikiya Shimabukuro, of course, being a complete coincidence. Ryu Ga Gotoku didn't even exist yet in 2000.)

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 - these names are 100% in English, even in the Japanese version. 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 the named shots, is the soundtrack. You probably expect golf game soundtracks to be very Weather Channel - easy listening, lots of soft instruments like pianos and guitars. Go Go Golf's soundtrack likely wasn't originally composed for it; the devs at Magical Company were probably making a flight simulation game before and found that they had extra assets. What we get out of that is a golf simulation with music that is far too action-packed, not that it's particularly bad to listen to, and a menu system that makes gun-clicking noises. One half-expects to hear a gravelly "Let's rock." as soon as they hit New Game.

Go Go Golf makes its appearance in Golfshrine by way of a tip by TangoBunny of the excellent Tangopunk zine, where she covered the game in greater detail than me in her third issue. Were it not for her hard work, I would not have ever known about this one. It is now a grand cornerstone of the Golfshrine proper.

The shot name gallery