Ultimate golf
There are plenty of golf games available on the market and they can be put in two categories, the arcade games and the simulators. Ultimate golf is definately in the simulator category and you have to consider a whole lot of different variables like the club you use, wind, rain and all those kind of things. Actually the game claims to be the ultimate golf simulator and at the time of it’s release it might have been close to that but these days it has been superseeded by some excellent golf sims like the ‘links’ series.
In case you don’t know how golf is played here’s a small explanation. You can use several different clubs to hit a little ball as close as you can to the hole. Each ‘hole’ is on a grass course that varies in length and composition, some might contain water, trees and sandtraps. Your aim is to hit the ball in as few hits as possible into the hole. Each one has a set number which is deemed the average amount of hits you need to complete that course, this is called ‘par’. If you are able to hit it in less than that you are under par and obviously you’d be above par if you need more. At the end of 18 holes your total score for all the courses is calculated and whoever needed the least amount of hits to complete them all is the winner.
The game lets you pratice a single course or play the entire 18 hole course. It’s up to you or your caddy if you want to choose which club is best in a certain situation. After lining up the swing taking into account the weather you can hit the ball. The swing is done with a power bar on the left of the screen and you can press the button to select the amount of power to use. Then a indicator moves from left to right and you will have to press the button to determine how well you hit the ball, hit it dead center and your shot will go as planned but too much of the center and you might nog hit the ball at all.
The screen is built up one piece at a time and can be very slow at times, because of this you can see what kind of obstacles are in the way so it’s not neccerarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell where the end of the course is so I ended up just hitting the ball as hard as I could. There is a map screen that shows this but I didn’t want to constantly swap screens. As for sound there is none except for the obvious ball dropping and such.
This game might be a good simulation of golf but I can’t really say because I have never actually played the real thing. I can say that I didn’t really enjoy playing this particular game because it is too much of a simulation and for fans of the genre it might be interesting but for the casual game I doubt they would enjoy it much.
Overal rating: 5/10
This game was released for three different systems here are some notes:
| Amiga | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with winUAE v0.9.91. |
| C64 | Released in 1990. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. The ball does not have a shadow so it’s impossible to see where it’s going. |
| Others | This version is not available. Atari ST released in 1990. |
| Date added | Jan-03-2005 13:32 |
| Name | Ultimate golf |
| Developer | Gremlin |
| Publisher | Gremlin |
| First released | 1990 |
| Genre | Simulation |
