Updates & Acquisitions

October 10, 2024

Hello, former Cohost people; this is the first Golfshrine update to be posted after the unfortunate closure of our favorite Fourth Website.

I spent the last couple weeks on a kind of vacation. Well, I don't know, maybe the last year and a half has been a vacation, seeing as I haven't had a job since last April, but this in particular has been a change from the norm. I've gotten to visit the Portland Retro Gaming Expo - this time as a volunteer helper for the Video Game History Foundation (hi Frank!) where I got to help them set up the technical end of their exhibits. The Expo is always a lot of fun, lots of neat people show up for autographs, or panels, or bring their arcade machines for free-play, or just bringing whatever weird-ass games they can find to sell from their tables. Also a lot of handcrafted goods that I always love seeing. So between that and a trip to Seattle with my grandmother, I've been a bit tired, can you blame me?

Of course, no trip to the PRGE is complete without me spending unwise amounts of money (wow, forty whole dollars!) on a pile of impulse purchases - and I'm going to chronicle even the non-golf ones here.

• Mario Golf 64 (Japanese version) - Camelot Software Planning's first golf game for a Nintendo platform. This finally fills a hole in the collection, and while it probably won't run as-is in my American Nintendo 64, I enjoyed finding it for this price as a complete-in-box. Dig that message around the logo: "For all players hoping to touch the true entertainment." I would hope to do much more than that to the true entertainment.
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (XBox 360), Heroes of Might and Magic: Quest for the DragonBone Staff (PS2), and 2K Sports World Poker Tour (PS2). One of the vendor booths was doing a "6 games for $20" deal, which I happily split between myself friend-of-the-site beverly jane. You can read about what bev bought over at You Found A Secret Area (Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Prison Break, and Trivial Pursuit Unhinged). Almost none of these would have been worth it on their own, I think, but the bundle deal more or less encouraged the both of us to just dig for whatever absurd nonsense we could find. (And I, a Castlevania nut, have been putting off trying Lords of Shadow for over a decade...maybe it'll be worth the roughly $3.33.)
• John Daly's ProStroke Golf (PS3). Advertising support for the PlayStation Move controller, I've very briefly played around with the 2007 edition of this game for PS2 in an emulator, having generated a golfer I named "Schmoe"; I didn't add him to the Golfer's Gallery because, frankly, that game didn't offer very much in the way of avatar customization, but I do need to put him here for posterity now that Cohost is no more.

  I wrote of Schmoe, at the time: "I mostly just wanted to post this picture of my golfer named Schmoe, who - every time he's looking towards the camera, without fail - looks like he's found a sick kitten on the course. His appearance ought to be backed with sad violins. It's not in any way related to my already being 1 stroke over par by hole 3. He looked like that when he showed up to play this morning."

  The PlayStation 3 game came out a whole four years after this one, with developers Gusto Games Ltd. having - maybe? - learned a few more things about making a golf game in that time. It's hard to say - this game has very little written about it online otherwise. So I guess I'll have to dig the PS3 out of its storage bin eventually and try this one. (A real copy of the PS2 game is on my yet-to-buy list.)
• Mecarobot Golf (SNES). Published by Toho Co, Ltd., during their brief stint as a publisher of video games in America, and developed by Advance Communication (Super Godzilla, Keith Courage in Alpha Zones), this is a completely normal golf simulation game, and I'm being 100% serious about that. Mecarobot Golf did not have robots in it at all originally; in Japan, it was Serizawa Nobuo no Birdie Try, whose namesake is a Japanese professional golfer and five-time winner of the Japan Golf Tour between 1987 and 2000 (of which he had won three of those prior to the release of his game). For its American release, Serizawa was replaced by a golfer named Eagle, who is said to have been so good at golf that he was banned from competing against humans, but given his own golf course to play on instead. It's certainly a weird way to deal with international licensing. I've been putting off grabbing this for a while because eBay sellers always seem to want way too much money for it.
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour and Tiger Woods PGA Tour, for Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, respectively. I don't think these games were released in the same year at all, and only look the same because of EA stubbornly using exactly the same logo types and fonts across their entire sports game library. In an amusing note, the DS game case here is of the type that has a slot to insert a GBA cartridge, so of course Golfshrine will be keeping them together that way.
• Golfle Golf (ゴルフル GOLF) for Japanese PlayStation 2. Artdink is a developer who has been long overdue for representation in Golfshrine, because they're one of those kinds of developers who have found themselves a niche and just proceed to make games for nothing but that niche. Artdink are best known in the US as the devs behind the A-Train (A Ressha de Ikou / A列車で行こう) series of rail business simulations, noted for being initially localized by Maxis in the early 90s (A-Train being technically the third game in the series). But they're also well regarded in Japan for a lot of very technical, and simulation-oriented games for personal computers, such as the RPG series Lunatic Dawn, and more notably to Golfshrine, the PC-98 golf simulation, Big Honour, which later had a Windows 98 release. Golfle Golf, though, is a PS2 title seemingly meant to cater more to people looking for a Hot Shots Golf-esque experience, with an easy stick-flick-based swing system and chibi-style character models. It's enough of a pick-up-and-play game that I was able to muddle my way through untranslated menus to play it, so that's something.
• Finally, Snood for Game Boy Advance. It's Snood. What's Snood? That's Snood. 🎥 It's a dollar. Can't really go wrong with a dollar. Plus it kept me occupied for a three-hour train ride, so that can't be too bad either.

I cap this off with the obligatory reminder that, yes, I am still unemployed, and life itself is expensive anymore. If you enjoy the things that I do here, I encourage you to leave me a tip so that, at the very least, I might continue to bring you brief moments of joy for this silly little pastime of mine. Or you can drop me a nice comment somewhere.