#9: Hal's Hole In One Golf

Is this the bar arcade game?

I think this may be the first game in this series which I hadn't played before. I'm not really sure since it plays pretty similar to most golf video games.

Do I really need a sand wedge?

Growing up golf games were actually pretty popular in my family. I can remember playing different golf courses on the Commodore 64 as a family outing. But I don't remember doing so on the SNES. I'd think we would have rented an early golf game for sure if it was available at any rental place but maybe it just wasn't in my area.

Laggy to generate, but impressive!

The game lets you analyze all the holes in detail as far as slopes and whatnot. What the game doesn't do is tell you where a given club is likely to land. It tells you distance to hole, and distance your club will go, but on longer holes it doesn't give you any way to know where the ball is going to go. You have to guess. Probably this is reasonable if you play the game over and over so you get a feel for avoiding the bunkers and water hazards on each hole. Playing it once? Meant I spent a lot of time in the water on some of the holes.

15 over par makes the cut, right?

Putting was pretty easy once I got a feel for it as you can see in my scorecard above. I even managed to get a couple of birdies near the end which was nice.

As far as golf games go this was decent but not spectacular. It wasn't much of a chore to finish out my round to have a final score to post but I had no desire at all to play again. I doubt it would have been a popular play back in the day, either. I feel like it had fewer features than the C64 game and almost as much lag when generating the maps but that could just be rose coloured glasses remembering the C64. At any rate, this game is playable even now but not a ton of fun.

Rating: C-