Updates & Acquisitions

March 13, 2025

I seem to have a habit of sitting on these updates for weeks. I could make excuses and say that I just have a lot going on in my life, but the fact is I really don't. But the cardinal rule of hobby projects (like Golfshrine) is that you shouldn't work on them if you don't feel like it. That way leads to burnout. Anyway. Item up.

Another big box with Arnold Palmer on it!

This large-format PC game box is Links: Flying to Phoenix - the Japanese PC release of Links LS 1999, published by STAN with support from Seagaia Resort (two years before Seagaia would file for bankruptcy). It is, in fact, notably different from versions of 1999 released in the rest of the world. Apart from being wholly localized into Japanese (the entire UI, and most spoken commentary besides Arnold Palmer), this edition of Links LS 1999 includes the Phoenix Country Club in Miyazaki, Japan as a built-in course. This comes at the expense of the St. Andrews Old Course, which is included in other regions' releases of '99.

Here it is alongside the US edition.

This purchase was something of a test-run for me; as much as I really should not be spending money at this point in my life (still no job or regular income; if you feel like helping out with that I'd massively appreciate it), this item was listed on Japan-based, internationally-shipped online outlet, Suruga-ya. I've never bought anything from Suruga-ya before, and they were having one of their big sales in February. I had been doing research about Japanese releases of Links otherwise, and got curious if they had a copy of a specific version. I didn't find that, but I did find this, that I had no idea even existed. Of course I had to figure out what exactly it was.

Now here's the fun bit: The Links LS series is, for the most part, widely cross-compatible with itself. I don't have to be specifically playing the Japanese version of the game to get access to its contents; if I want to play the Phoenix Country Club in another edition, I can use their built-in Add-On Installer window to absorb the Phoenix course off of the Japanese game discs, into a US version of 1999. Or 2000. Or maybe even the DOS version of 1997. (I should try that out, honestly.)

Links LS 2000, preparing to ingest Phoenix Country Club off of Disc 2 of Flying to Phoenix. LS 2000 is not Unicode ready, so the Japanese golfer animation names appear corrupted.

At the risk of jinxing it and suddenly losing all desire to work on them, I do have a couple of other things I want to do for Golfshrine, and the item in this update is a part of one of them. (The Links Extreme article was another.) Maybe, at some point, that "Links" button on the nav bar will become more than a silly joke option, is what I'm saying.