Updates & Acquisitions

November 09, 2024

I have been dragging my feet about this update for over a month. The realization did come to me that, maybe, people are not as interested in "hey I bought some golf games" as they are about me covering exactly why these golf games are interesting. But me putting off this update is especially bad because there's an item in this one that I should have included in last month's update, that I just forgot to put in the photo pile, and I'm getting to a point where I'm actively forgetting which games I haven't even put in the Enshrined list yet. Not great for organization. So, better actually do the content about this while I feel up to it.

Frequent Golfshrine contributor nebula came through once again and found me a couple of Japanese-only PC Engine games, and one of only two golf games for the Atari Lynx. And on top of this, I decided I should own the only golf game for the Nokia N-Gage.

Winning Shot, Data East Corporation, 1989. In-game screenshot from MobyGames user Ƒreddƴ.

Winning Shot is from Data East, a HuCARD-based PC Engine game that never left Japan. Like Hudson Soft's original Power Golf, it is played entirely from the overhead perspective, and offers play in stroke, match, and tournament modes. I feel like the only reason it didn't leave Japan was because Power Golf was already very similar to it and came out around the same time. But it's fairly functional, and I like the cover art. And it's not too difficult to muddle through the opening menus and get into the game.

Hu PGA Tour - Power Golf 2: Golfer, Hudson Soft, 1994.

Hu PGA Tour - Power Golf 2: Golfer is Golfshrine's first PC Engine CD-ROM game, and another one that did not leave Japan. Released in 1994, it does come a year or two after NEC decided that the TurboGrafx-CD had flopped in the States, so there was probably never any chance it'd get released in English. That said, it's just as easy to muddle through the menus into a stroke-play game and see what makes this different from the first game. And the answer is... everything, really.

Manually positioning the TV cameras around the course for Power Golf 2's 3D fly-by mode.

Unlike the first game, Power Golf 2 renders in 3D, with the screen spending a second or two to redraw any time the camera angle needs to change. And with the right settings, the camera angle can change a lot. You can set how the camera behaves when you take your shot, from not moving at all, to cutting to a reverse-shot of the ball's landing point, to being able to place 3 other cameras anywhere you want around the hole, with the game choosing the camera closest to the ball whenever it flies out of frame. This does mean one shot can take a long time to land (since the game needs to redraw the screen a lot this way), but it's kind of a neat option. Also, this game is CD-based, but outside of an opening video (in a little computer-like window), the CD space is largely used for pre-recorded nature sounds that play while you are out on the links, which is an interesting approach.

Awesome Golf, Hand-Made Software, 1991. In-game screenshots from MobyGames user festershinetop.

The other one that I get to put in my Analogue Pocket (bless ye, cartridge converters) is Awesome Golf for the Atari Lynx, one golf game out of two available for the platform, and the only full golf sim (the other is a mini-golf game that I'll probably get much later). The Atari Lynx is such a weird machine, hardware-wise; its screen resolution of 160x102 is actually less than that of the Game Boy, but the graphics hardware is capable of some nigh Amiga-tier nonsense (like the colored bars cycling up and down the title screen, an effect that reminds me a lot of the early demoscene) and sometimes even beyond. I do not know why the Lynx is capable of hardware-based scaling, but Awesome Golf uses it to great effect, as your drives fly up and away from the course and back down again, and you are capable of zooming the overhead map in and out at any time. It's not often that a handheld golf game can be considered a technical marvel, but if ever it can be, Awesome Golf is that golf game.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, Electronic Arts. GBA version on left, N-Gage version on right.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 - god, how many versions of this game am I going to end up with? He practically gets a shelf to himself - is, as far as I can tell, the only golf game for Nokia's N-Gage mobile phone gaming platform. I don't really have any intention of buying an old N-Gage (not when they're that expensive second-hand), but thankfully, emulation of the platform is trivial, and the storage media for physical games is nothing more than an MMC memory card with no apparent copy-protection. I was able to insert my copy of the game into a USB memory card reader, copy its contents to my hard drive, and boot it up in the emulator with no problem. And... N-Gage Tiger '04 is basically identical to GBA Tiger '04, outside of a couple of little things. Outside of the color depth being very slightly nicer than the GBA version, one course is locked ("The Predator," a fantasy course set in a South American rainforest near some ancient ruins) behind Nokia's "N-Gage Arena" online play service. There is also one golfer locked behind Arena service, but where The Predator is unlocked by default in the GBA version, the extra golfer is unlocked by using a GameCube link cable. Beyond all that, it has all the same courses and golfers between the two handheld games, and the same polygon 3D renderer (which is way more impressive for a GBA to be doing, even if it means loading screens).

But now for the game that I forgot about last time.

This is Kidz Sports Crazy Golf for the Nintendo Wii, a budget-tier game from Data Design Interactive. I picked this up for almost nothing, at the 2024 Portland Retro Gaming Expo, without really knowing anything about it. Well, it turns out one of my old follows from Cohost, a user going by Qwarq, once worked for the company that made this game. Their old posts on Cohost about that are not long for this world, but I've at least taken backups of those before they are consigned to the abyss (discounting, of course, any sort of backups they've taken themselves). From these posts, I know that Qwarq was not involved in the production of the Wii version of Crazy Golf, but did do work on a Windows port of it (that, for historical reasons, I am now obligated to see if I can locate).

The loading screen - one that you'll see a lot if you're playing it on Wii.

Kidz Sports Crazy Golf, on the surface, does not really stand out very much as a minigolf game. Despite some quibbles with the swinging interface (because motion controls, of course, were never perfect in this era), it's mostly just a regular old minigolf game. But Qwarq's accounts of their time at DDI revealed that there was one reason that it did stand out: the threat of a lawsuit by Nintendo.

One would think this would be lawyer-friendly...

Crazy Golf features "NuYu," an extremely Mii-like character creation system. And, weirdly enough, the creation system itself was not the reason why Nintendo would threaten legal action. "(...)they weren't always called NuYus; the original name was Yuu," writes Qwarq in this Cohost post. "Nintendo did not like that Yuu was so similar to Mii and they very quickly threatened a lawsuit. They didn't care about the extremely Mii-like functionality - it was entirely the name they took issue with... at first."

Some NuYus generated with Crazy Golf's "randomize" button - one of my favorite buttons.

Qwarq continues, "Later on, another lawsuit came in from Nintendo. They were going hard on patent trolling even back in the Wii era, because they were suing over the concept of generating a static image from a 3d model, or something like that. Whenever you saved a NuYu, it would create a thumbnail image with the character's face so you could browse them at a glance. Well, apparently Nintendo tried to patent some part of that process. I believe the suit was dropped or dismissed, thankfully, because I don't think anything ever came from it - we were still using the same thumbnail process the whole time." Not coincidentally, this post was written not long after Nintendo filed lawsuit against Pocketpair over patent infringement in their PC game, Palworld. And it's not like Nintendo hasn't already had a long, long history of similar lawsuits over similarly odd small things. As I am not a lawyer, I can only speculate as to whether Nintendo are legally in the right over any of these things, but as a basic consumer, it does all kind of strike me as - and I'm using the technical term here - a series of protracted dick moves.

One thing in which Qwarq's writing does spark my interest, though, is DDI's other golf game - a far more serious production intended for use by actual golfers: My Personal Golf Trainer. Time to go amend the wishlist, I think; the history of digital golf demands it. (Or at least, I'm going to pretend it does.)