The Golf Clock

Some Christmases ago, my dearest mother handed me a stocking full of wonderful little trinkets and candies, as had been our off-and-on family tradition for a while. Sure, we're all adults now, and we don't really need to, but the joy is arguably more important in my family's lives than anything else. Mom is usually meticulous enough in her gift-giving to make sure that every family member gets more or less the same package. Handful of Ferrero-Rochers, bag of egg nog jelly beans (or for Dad, noted egg nog-disliker, cola flavored ones), maybe a Hot Wheels that made her think of us, maybe a cute pair of socks.

Mom, I should say, has been a believer in the Golfshrine Mission for almost as long as I have. It's harmless, inexpensive fun. So when she said she'd found something for my shelf, I had no idea what it was about to be.

It took me a bit to realize what it was and why it felt heavy. By this point, Golfshrine already had two copies of NES Golf (well, one NES, one Famicom), but this one had a hole drilled through it to fit a hobby-store clock body. Sure, it didn't have any markings for hours or minutes, and the hands were a bit flimsy (I had to bend the seconds hand back in place immediately), but some silly person had turned this NES game into a clock. Included with the gift was a Command strip, which I used to affix it to the front lip of one of the physical Golfshrine's shelves.

In the years since then, I'd wondered about it. If I were to remove the clock body... no, maybe the cartridge casing around the clock body... with my knowledge of the physical dimensions of an NES game, I figured the ROM board inside this casing was probably not nearly large enough for the clock body to disturb it at all. I had to know if this thing still played. So, in mid-September, I gave it a whirl. And I filmed it, for authenticity's sake.

Tonight, on Hard Copy...

In short: I couldn't conclusively tell if it worked or not, because the clock body was preventing me from even putting the thing in, even in a top-loading NES-compatible. One commentor on the video even called the results a "Fuckin' tease".

But that was not the end. Suggestions came in to try using a Game Genie cartridge as a riser (unfortunately, I don't own one), or to remove the top case from the console and plug the cartridge into the bare connector.

It would be a precarious fit. The console, a Yobo FC Twin bought from Game Trader in 2008, has never been my most reliable console (at least, not on the NES side); the A/V signals come in way too hot, resulting in a blown-out image and clipped audio in certain applications. The cartridge slot doesn't even get a very firm grip on the edge connector, requiring multiple insertions to boot a game that "worked just fine" the last time (the plastic slot, part of the top cover, has a fairly loose tolerance; this would be made even worse without it). And to top it all off: the cables that came with it were very, very short.

So, as I very carefully held the FC Twin a few feet off the ground, hovering in front of the TV to get a decent angle with the camera, I awkwardly held the cartridge in place with a free finger and slid the exposed power switch to the "8-Bit" position. If any of my fingers were not occupied, I would have been crossing them.

This, believe it or not, was not the first result. It took some failed attempts, with the edge connector not making good contact, producing scrambled results on the screen in the vague shape of the word "GOLF." Encouraging results, even if undesirable ones. I eventually found the correct amount of pressure in my left hand and got the game to boot to the first hole, even succeeding at sinking the ball a couple of times, before accidentally letting the cartridge out of alignment and scrambling the screen.

Just because it's now one thing, doesn't mean it ever stopped being the other thing.

So I suppose, on a very technical level, Golfshrine owns not one, not two, but three copies of Satoru Iwata's Golf. I'm probably going to keep them all; the clock is the only one in the room, and some times I'd like to play Golf without needing to partially dismantle a console to do so.