Updates & Acquisitions

November 26, 2024

There are times when it's nice to be reminded of the sorts of hearts that have been touched by the Golfshrine project. I'd thought I was going to need to put these updates on hiatus, or at least focus on the kinds of things that don't need me to be spending money. Well, a new thing arrived, this time by way of a friend of Golfshrine, Herzog Zwei, a fellow enthusiast of weird old things found at thrift stores. Herzog says this was about to get trashed at a Goodwill outlet store (the kind with the wheelie bins).

This is PGA Championship Golf 1999 Edition, Sierra's sequel to Front Page Sports: Golf (which presently exists, twice, in Golfshrine's inventory under the name All-American Sports Series: Golf). I had truthfully been monitoring a few copies of this one on eBay (by which I mean, I put them on my watchlist to remind myself they existed for when I'd have money again), because I'd always wondered how Sierra had iterated on their golf game tech. Herzog mailed me this without asking a single thing in return. Well, I do offer a thing in return, and that's a link back to your website, because everybody needs a shot of weird thrifting and retro gaming in their day.

Oddly, the jewelcase for this game did not come with a rear tray insert, so out comes the Golfshrine tray insert template again!

Much like Front Page Sports: Golf, this game places heavy emphasis on its fully 3D golfer model, drawn on top of a slow-rendered 3D course, and Sierra's much-vaunted TrueSwing system, which can now be configured to use a horizontal movement instead of a vertical one (like The Golf Pro does). (Regrettably, they removed the Easter egg where you could make your dude fall over. Because of course I had to check.) It comes with a surprisingly customizable character model, too, featuring a few different kinds of shirts, pants, shoes, and hats, which can be colored to your specifications. Nothing quite worthy of the Golfer's Gallery, but I was able to go full private-eye on the links here.

And just as dramatic as a P.I. down on his luck, too.

In keeping with what I'm hoping doesn't become a tradition, also, I've actually had a copy of ProStroke Golf: World Tour 2007 for the XBox that was supposed to go in the previous update, that I'd forgotten because it was still sitting by the XBox when I took the photo for it. I at least remembered to put it into the Enshrined list, but didn't feel like giving it its own update. Well, it's in an update now. Congratulations, Weasel, you now own every ProStroke Golf game. If you didn't see it, I spent some time on its course creator last week.

A lot of my website-updating effort over the past couple of weeks has been spent sprucing up my personal front-page (now accessible at the index), as well as copying over and similarly sprucing up a bunch of the fiction I wrote for Cohost, and finally abandoning ship from Wordpress and getting my old solitaire blog on here too. It's been a lot of fun. So just because I haven't been updating Golfshrine doesn't mean I haven't been busy.

(Arguably, I should be busy pursuing a job, but there's only so much I can do on my end besides throwing my resume out everywhere I can and waiting to hear back...)