Nintendo Open Golf NES ReviewGolf: a calm, relaxing game were you swing a metal or wooden club at a ball and try and get it into a hole. This game takes a lifetime to master. For some reason, Nintendo thought it would be a good idea to recreate the game of golf into an 8-bit game for the NES. And in 1991, they did. I'm not entirely sure why they wanted to make a sports game with just the head of Mario there, but after playing Excite Bike, I thought I should give it a go and see were it leads. How does it fair? Lets get some golf balls, a bag of clubs and one of those slow motor vehicles as we drive ourselves into this golf game.
The story is.....none. There is no story. None to be had. Just like Tetris. Golf doesn't have a story, so it makes sense that this doesn't either. You just jump right into the game. You have four options to choose from. A stroke game, a match game, a tournament and a....club house? Hmm, I'll look at that later. For now, lets play a stroke game. You get a choice of three courses: US course, Japan course, and UK course. I'll go with the Japan course. I don't know how many holes this has in, but I'm about to find out. As you play the first hole, you'll notice the wind speed and direction to help master your shot. You also get to choose weather you can have a slow, normal, or a fast speed drive. This effects how far you can hit the ball. With that, you have a barrage of clubs to choose ranging from the humble putter to the insensitive Wood 3. Then you can choose the spin you want to put on your ball. Either a low or high back spin, or a low or high top spin. Unless you don't want one, then you can have no spin, if you wish.
The way you hit the ball is quite interesting . You aim the ball accordingly and then you press A. You get put into a third person view of your golfer. Then you can, if you so wish, to aim the ball again to the green. This might be helpful if there is a tree in the way of your shot. Then your press A and then A again. The closer you are to the end of the bar is your strength in your shot, and the closer your second A button press is to the coloured bar (sometimes a pixel wide, sometimes a thick noticeable bar) determines your accuracy and overall power. At first, this is a really tricky thing to comprehend. But after a few failed swings, you'll have it learned to some degree. Then the life time of practicing can begin. Just like a real game of golf for beginners. I'm almost impressed with how life like it is, even for an 8-bit NES game.
You might find that you might have a +26 for the first few holes. I was so bored with this that when I got to the green area, I changed to the Wood 3 and shot it the other way. This is how I got a +60 for my first hole, with a +30 when I got there already. When I got to the fifth hole, I started to get serious. I took my shoots with aim, with precision, with luck that I would try and get a good score even with a +230 score already on my score card. So after about eight holes, I was able to get a birdie ^^ This didn't help my score much. So you have the full 18
hole course. Apparently you can win prize money which you can deposits to a relative of Donkey Kong for prizes. What are these glorious prizes?I hear you ask. I don't know. I'm not sure I can put myself to be good at this game, but it does interest me intensely to see what they are. The match game is just you playing a CPU. I'm certain you get the money from this type of game. The tournament is like several matchgames, but maybe with not all the holes in. I think you get money from this as well.
And the club house? Just a selection of options for you to choose. You can choose which clubs you want when you are playing golf, deposit money for prizes, erase data if you so wish, see your statics on how you play and even watch replays of your best holes. You can view holes-in-one, birdies, eagles and....albatrosses? What? I hear you ask. Well, it's an albatross, isn't it? Albatross! He he, albatross. A suppose an albatross is when you get a 5 par hole in two shots. Three would be considered an eagle, and four would be a birdie. In fact, albatrosses can only be obtained in par 5 holes to higher (if there are such existing holes). Well, I never thought a golfing game would teach me something new about golf =P
Overall, I give this game a 7.2/10 This game, to me, is boring. It's golf. A game that already exists and can be physically played. I only
find sport games interesting or fun if they had weird gimmicks in them. Like Mario Football, they had different moves that couldn't be preformed in real life. In this case, it might have been fun to add different types of golf balls to this game. Such as a rubber ball that bounces twice as far as the normal golf ball. Maybe the trees could transform the balls accordingly. There could be rocket balls to propel the golf ball further at great speed, or maybe a fire ball to cut through trees that are in it's way. Lots of things that could add depth to golf and many different ways of clearing the same course....but maybe that's beyond this games time. It's the original NES golf game that lets you play the original golf game and maybe shouldn't be tampered with, or at least not yet. And to be fair they simulate the game of golf really well. The relaxing way you can play this and the way how you always have room to practice really shows that they put work to make sure this acted like a real game of golf, and I think they were successful at the time of release, and I think that other future golf games are just copying the same formula that this game created. And of course you need membership to play golf on a proper golf field and you need to be a certain age before you can do that, so this game offers the joy of golf for all ages. Not my cup of tea, but they did do the job, and they did it well.
Graphics
7 Sound
6 Addictive
5 Depth
4 Difficulty
5
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