Updates & Acquisitions

July 25, 2024

You find me this [arbitrary time unit] branching Golfshrine out into new and unexpected platforms. But first, the obligatory group shot!

Let's cover them in order from Least to Most Interesting. Firstly, we have Greg Norman Ultimate Challenge Golf from our friends at Friendly Software Corporation; previously, they appeared before Golfshrine as aboutGolf Ltd, the makers of Infamous 18. Well, Friendly Software was their previous name, and I did also recently discover that aboutGolf are still in business, and are not so much making computer golf sims as they are making golf sim computers. Like, bespoke golf simulator installations for businesses and homes. It's kind of awesome, and yet, I'd probably never, ever be rich enough to play one. In their previous life as Friendly Software, they seem to have developed an awful lot of budget priced (but still perfectly valid) golf sims for an assortment of publishers, ranging from Microsoft, to ValuSOFT, to Grolier, who were more famous for publishing print encyclopedia volumes than games. But it was the mid-90s. Everybody wanted in on the multimedia boom.

Greg Norman Ultimate Challenge, then, is a multimedia golf game from 1995. It's a fairly reasonable golf game, with nothing that particularly sucks about it (though it did take a few attempts to find a VM on which it'd install correctly). I apparently previously downloaded a copy of this one from the internet, and dumped it into a folder named "GregNormalGolf," a typo which I am continuing to make every time I try to mention Greg Norman. It's a slight oddball in that it absolutely demands 16-bit color support, which was maybe not a tall order by 1995, but certainly a bit difficult for an average computer to pull off.

Beavis and Butt-head: Bunghole in One belongs firmly in the Offshrine. (Well, in practice, the Offshrine games get mixed in with the main Shrine physically anyway, but whatever.) Bunghole in One is a mini-golf game featuring the principal characters from Mike Judge's music video commentary vehicle, except without the music videos. Or, really, the music - it's a rather quiet game, apart from Beavis occasionally yelling things like "What the hell's taking so long, butthole?" It's presented from a weird orthographic 2D projection where the angle of your swing doesn't make much sense (it's one of those pull-back-and-release swing systems), and the course is full of things that just pile up penalty strokes for the sake of being evil. Land mines suck. Let's go back to Burger World and throw french fries at the ceiling fan. ...In all seriousness, the primary reason I bought this copy of it (apart from being dirt cheap) was because it has a sticker on it, indicating it's "Property of Hewlett-Packard Compatibility Lab." This thing has been used for Official Purposes. I don't mind the mild amount of damage the cover sustained (or it being covered in thumb prints on the data surface) when it has that kind of a history.

Golfshrine's fourth-ever Jack Nicklaus game is Jack Nicklaus Golf & Course Designer: Signature Edition, complete in its big box with 3 floppy disks and a hundred-page manual. Accolade had one particular leg up over the other golf sims of 1992, in that this game's course designer is surprisingly user-friendly, if a bit limited. You get to pick a pre-made plot of land, then draw lines over it to generate playable holes. You can then use paint tools to alter the terrain, place objects wherever you want (ten or so different kinds of tree, and a clubhouse), and my personal favorite thing: you can write a hole-briefing text that Jack will say when a player plays each hole.

There really is no limit to where you put your objects. You can put the tee right next to the green if you want, and then cover the green in trees if you want to be a jerk.	Make Jack Nicklaus say anything you want, within 120 characters. It's like proto-Twitter! I should probably go ask Foone if they want to put this on Death Generator.

I feel morally obligated to inform all you readers that, yes, I have drawn a penis with the course editor, and no, I will not be taking a screenshot of that. If you should like to terraform your own penis into a golf course, I shall neither endorse nor explicitly condemn this activity. ;)

But the real oddball, this period, is the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 Family DVD Game. I have no idea what kind of dark wizardry was done over at Bright Entertainment, but this is a special version of Tiger Woods that plays on an ordinary DVD player, with a remote. For every shot, you pick from a few clubs in a pop-up menu, pick one of a small handful of directional arrows, and then time your press of the Enter button with the on-screen swing meter. The footage is carefully cut around, so that it will never show the ball in a place where it very obviously isn't supposed to be; lots of shots of the ball in the air and ultra-close-ups of it rolling on the ground, but very few wide-angle shots of the course. Inside the way too ritzy wooden slide-cover box is a two-sided map poster of the included two courses, and two separate DVDs - one for TPC Sawgrass, and the other for the St. Andrews Old Course.

It's not exactly the most riveting golf experience, but I would herald it as a technical masterpiece for somehow making it work on a plain ol' DVD player. (Even if I recorded this footage from an Xbox 360.)

Yet more on the way shortly, of course, but I had to get an update out to justify pushing some of the under-hood changes on the rest of the website. Like, hey, the Enshrined page is now all cross-linked with the Articles and Updates pages! And each Update is its own page! Eventually I hope these efforts will give way to having a few modern-internet niceties like an RSS feed. (Yeah, hello, 2005? Can I come back? ...No, no particular reason...)