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Hot Shots Golf 3
  PS2SportsUC  
  opened by paleface at 22:36:17 01/19/04  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS2; cat=Sports; reg=NA]
           
From someone of my relative inexperience, this isn't going to be saying as much as I'd like, but this is by far the most intuitive and solid golf game I've ever played. Played a round with two other people yesterday and although we were just kind of goofing around at first, we soon became obsessed with making every shot, every yard of the course count, and the match became incredibly gripping and intense. Yes, I'm talking about a golf game.
 
The thing is, the game is so sensitive to skill and precise technique that even just a pixel or two of accuracy on the swing meter can make all the difference between winning and losing the match. One slightly loose swing and you've suddenly bogied, and how are you going to make that up? Well, fortunately the game is so responsive that you can really go for it and play aggressively, hitting power shots and trying for the narrow shortcuts available on many of the holes. The control is intuitive enough that you can pretty much pick up the basics immediately (although in all my years on this earth I've never managed to figure out the concepts of hooking and slicing), but demanding enough that an expert will make you look like the amateur you are almost immediately. The game rewards skill completely, but of course you can always hope for a lucky bounce too.
 
Oddly there was no music while we played our match. I don't seem to remember the absense of music in the single-player round I played when I first got the game over a year ago, so maybe it's just a multiplayer thing--still, it's kind of weird. Also, the course we played on was cold and brown. It couldn't have been reflecting the actual time of year on the system clock, could it? Doubtful, though that would be neat now that I think of it. But the course was rather ugly with all the brown, I hope there are nice green courses too.
 
The biggest downside though is that in porting Minna no Golf, or "Everybody's Golf," to the States, they replaced the engaging Japanese golfers with obnoxious, stereotyped Americans. Most of them are locked to start with, so we only had the bimbo, the nerdy yuppie and the fat balding slob to choose from. Not too cool. Hopefully they won't repeat that sort of thing when they release the sequel, "Hot Shots Golf Fore."
    
references:
· Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee (PSP)

 
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