You should never wish death
upon a console. Every console should have the opportunity to live a full and happy life,
getting great software all the way up until the end. With that said, PS One: Please die.
The abysmal, cheap, bargain basement fodder that is polluting local Wal-Marts is becoming
too much. Case in point, Putter Golf. In the same cartoony vein as Sony's outstanding Hot Shots Golf series, this awful title gives players the ability to play some mini-golf on three different 9-hole courses with various hazards preventing the ball from getting in the hole. Players select from four different characters including a boy, girl, robot, and a dog. Yeah, dog. As in "woof woof." Each character has varying levels of ability, but it hardly has any effect on the gameplay.
The three courses are standard, trick, and a mix of both. The trick course has oddball hazards like warps, conveyor belts, and tunnels. It adds little to the gameplay and only makes the entire experience more frustrating. The ball moves extremely slow to it's destination and there is no way to speed it up. Nine holes will take at leapt 20-25 minutes of your time. There are no mode options such as tournaments, only single and multi-player. There is an intuitive course designer, but you'll find no one who will enjoy playing your creations no matter how neat they are.
Controlling your golfer is as simple as selecting between to
putters of various power and hitting a button when the power meter is at the appropriate
level. It's all about luck on almost all the holes with some inane traps and out of bounds
areas. You'll never be on a miniature golf course like this.
Take away the polygons, replace them with SNES style mode-7, and you've got this games graphics. Actually, a cart with the famous FX chip just might be able to handle this one. The sprite based rendered characters have little animation and not even a winning pose. The huge pixels and polygon break-up is the final cut. The grating elevator music that plays during each hole is ludicrous and there is no option to turn it off. That's the extent of the sound.
Not that one should expect and earth-shattering title from a bargain bin, there have been a lot of games that have surprised people late in this consoles life. This will not be one of them. I'm sure plenty of entertaining titles were released in Japan over the course of the systems life that could be brought over. Whether or not this was programmed from the ground up or translated (which it most obviously is) from Japan, this title should not cost someone $10.
