Updates & Acquisitions

July 2, 2024

Still not done picking things up, this stretch, and I've got some fun weird guys today. And one particularly notable one that also happens to be really weird in its own way.

This extremely 1990s "ValuePAK" contains CDs of ESPN Golf Presents: Lower Your Score with Tom Kite and a 9-hole version of Picture Perfect Golf, encased in solid styrofoam.	And this is the DVD-ROM edition of Accolade's Jack Nicklaus 4, containing both the game itself, and a DVD video version of Jack's "Toughest 18 Holes" highlights video.

Tom Kite does already exist in Golfshrine as a Japanese 3DO title 🎥, but I was not specifically targeting the Tom Kite disc with this purchase - I was interested in the copy of Picture Perfect Golf that came in the same box (and, honestly, the box itself). That'd be a DOS and Windows golf sim that aims to use only actual photographs of the real golf courses to display the game, from various fixed angles. This doesn't quite work as well as it should, but it's a cute idea for a dev that maybe aimed too high with it.

First impressions aren't strong with this very low-budget top view map, shown to you before you set up a given shot.	But once you get to the course itself, you are shown these nicely digitized photographs from the real Harbour Town Golf Links. This works great if you're a good shot, but the nature of the photos means if you hit past the rough, it's very strict about going OOB or hasn't got very good photos to show you.	This version only contains the front 9 of Harbour Town though; a full 18-hole version is advertised from the menu, as well as versions for two other courses - I have not seen evidence (yet) that those were ever released.

With Jack Nicklaus 4, I admit I haven't actually tested the game part yet; I did verify the disc was good by playing parts of the included video, though.

The video is encoded at 60 fps, which would have been incredible to watch in action on your brand new 1997-era DVD-ROM drive. Video playback was a difficult thing to do back then, because it largely had to be done in software, but hardware people were already pushing out cards like the ReelMagic MPEG decoder, or the Creative DXR2 multimedia kit, to take the load off of the rest of the computer. These days that hardware is usually baked right into our regular video cards. By way of comparison, here's a couple of pictures from that Tom Kite thing.

ABOVE: Here's Tom Kite introducing himself, in the Windows version. This is encoded in Apple QuickTime 2.0, at around 240x160 pixels and intended for 256-color displays. The software is also pixel-doubling the video, though even then, it does not take up the entire screen. Due to the shallow color depth of the video (and the UI buttons also hogging some of the palette), a lot of the non-green colors are getting lost, like the yellow of the flag and the blue on the name card.

The 3DO version uses the 3DO hardware's onboard chips to decode and display the video (which I think is not MPEG but something else). The 3DO can display 320x240 video in true color, so the yellow flag and the blue namecard aren't suffering from color banding as badly. It does still lose a lot of detail (particularly on Tom's face) and still only pulls 15 FPS, but it at least fills the screen.

But the real weird thing I got this time around is...

Links LS: Legends in Sports, 1997 Edition. This one came to me complete in original wrapping, in magnificent condition, with the price stickers and everything. That's kind of important here, because...

The price sticker on this one (that you can barely make out in the photo) comes from Pelican Hill Golf Club, a real golf resort in southern California. Now, I gotta admit, in all my years collecting these things, I never stopped to think that you could buy a golf computer game from an actual golf course! So of course I had to preserve the plastic wrap as best as I could while also still unpacking the contents of the box, with just a careful incision on the top flap. I gave Links LS a top position on the Shelf, replacing LS 1999 just for the sake of being way cooler (even if 1999 functions better).

A random other note, though, for the sake of trivia: Links LS 1997 is the last Links game to emphasize the Callaway "Big Bertha" golf club on the cover, but only the second to last to still have it on the box. Here's some comparisons, because I love comparisons. (Scan credits here go to the people at MobyGames.)

Links: The Challenge of Golf (1990). The iconic Big Bertha addressing the ball against pure black.	Links 386 Pro (1992) lightens up the background to a pleasant gradient from navy blue to royal purple, but once again focuses on a Big Bertha (this one shinier and less wooden) addressing the ball.	Links LS (1997) takes the same club from 386 Pro, but lights the ball more dramatically, and positions it all over a ritzier green marble backdrop.
For the 1998 edition, the Bertha (the same composite from 1997) takes the back stage, to bring a greater emphasis on the real star of the game: Arnold Palmer himself. (He's also on the box of my 1997 edition, but much smaller.)	The 1999 edition finally removes the Bertha altogether, and zooms in on Arnie's face, while making more room in the composition to show off the St. Andrews course behind him.	The real Big Bertha, specifically a 5 Wood, from a late-1990s production of the set. Callaway Golf still make these clubs, but they look quite a lot different now.

Aaaanyway, that's about as much infodumping as I can do in one sitting. Still waiting on one more package that is currently something of a mystery to me, but may serve to highlight some unusual business practices among 90s game publishers. ...When it shows up.