Updates & Acquisitions

September 7, 2023

No pictures this time - turns out, committing as hard as I do to maintaining this website on a Pentium laptop from 1997 makes it rather a pain to transfer photos from a mobile phone from 2020 without several go-betweens. But I've got a few new milestones, and another item on the Wishlist fulfilled.

With my recent acquisition of a Game Gear Adapter for Analogue Pocket comes a sudden desire to begin owning Game Gear games. I already owned three (out of the four released) Poker Face Paul games (Solitaire, Poker, and Blackjack - I'm missing Gin), but of course, this isn't my solitaire blog. What I actually got is Golfshrine's first Game Gear game: World Class Leader Board Golf, Tiertex's handheld adaptation of Access Software's pre-Links golf sim. Amazingly, the GG version even still has (most of) the speech included! "No doubt about it - that's deep in the sand trap."

The second is Bandai Golf: Challenge Pebble Beach for the NES, which I suspect I've played very briefly in an emulator before. No particular comments here, but it was in the Clearance area, so.

Thirdly, a PlayStation acquisition: U.S. Gold's World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, a 1998 reissue(?) of their multi-platform World Cup Golf: Hyatt Dorado Beach. This one was on the Golfshrine Wishlist before, and it'll take a bit of explaining what makes this one interesting. Prior to about 2000 or so, the problem of rendering something as complex as a golf course had quite a handful of solutions. 8-bit games like NES Golf simply drew the course from the bird's eye view, representing hills and slopes as arrows. Computer games, like World Class Leader Board, Jack Nicklaus Golf, or Great Golf for the Sega Master System, would take their time rendering a 3D view in vertical strips. T&E Soft's New 3D Golf Simulation series on Japanese PCs (and the 16-bit True Golf Classics) would attempt to draw filled polygons, even at the expense of calculation speed. Links and its ilk would try to render using fractal techniques. Each of these took time to draw to the screen; some hid it better than others, while some preferred to make it into a spectacle. World Cup Golf, however, solves this problem in a way nobody else did: the course is 100% pre-rendered as video and a series of stills from expected camera angles. Drive your ball off the tee and watch your ball fly through a pre-rendered flyby video. It's actually kind of neat in motion, especially bearing in mind that this was originally released in '95 for 3DO and Saturn consoles (and Lord knows why it took until 1998 to come to PlayStation). It does result in the golfer appearing in some strange places on screen, and aiming is a bit of a hassle, but. Come on. FMV golf. Not even Digital Pictures tried that.

The last item in today's Acquisitions, and I will not explain yet: Original Frisbee-Disc Sports: Ultimate and Golf (Nintendo DS). That's right - Golfshrine's branching out. I slightly fear what shall happen next. But it may yet be entertaining. Somehow.