7/1/2023 0 Comments Wii sports golf albatross![]() ![]() The ways Neo Turf Masters has been designed and optimized for the arcade experience are quite numerous. With a more accurate golfer (Technician is particularly good at this, since his Accuracy stat is the highest), it’s much easier to hit the one-pixel dead center of the High/Low gauge, so particularly skilled players may be capable of outrageous feats by using clubs far stronger than typically possible. If you accidentally stop the High/Low gauge in a red zone, your golfer swings and misses the ball entirely, requiring you to swing again, and (in a particularly nasty move) adds one stroke to your total. While you could theoretically try to hit your ball out of a sand trap using a 1 Wood, the High/Low gauge (the second part of the driving gauge) is almost entirely red. Of particular note is the way the game prevents you from using stronger clubs on bad lies. Putt Master’s high Putting stat makes his putting gauge much more precise than other golfers, due to the squares that make up his gauge being quite a bit smaller, but all of his other stats are the lowest in the game, so his driving gauge will move much faster than everybody else’s. For example, Shot Maker has a high Accuracy stat, which makes his driving and putting gauges move much slower, while Power Golfer has the highest Driving stat, enabling him to hit the ball far beyond the 100% line on the driving gauge. However, each character has a different set of stats that actually plays into how easy certain things are for the player. Really, these characters are merely swaps of shirt colors and facial features (they all seem to have the same basic head, just with different hairstyles, glasses, beards, etc), since there isn’t any defined personality or even interaction between them. In a move that seems to stem from SNK’s fighting game pedigree, Neo Turf Masters offers six playable characters. When putting, it’s even easier, since the swing meter has a helpful guideline on the gauge that indicates where precisely you need to press the button. The game also auto-selects your club based on the distance to the hole, and helpfully includes indicators on each club that tell you how far your shot will go at 100% swing (it is possible to swing higher than 100%, though, depending on your character, which we’ll get to in a bit). Unlike many PC golf games, the screen doesn’t need to be “redrawn” every time you adjust your aim, but rather pulls a strange parallaxing effect. For every shot, the game “auto-aims” your shot towards the flag, and you are able to adjust your aim left and right with the joystick. By default, the game gives you 3 holes before asking you to insert another coin.Īs far as the actual golfing goes, it’s actually quite a bit simplified compared to more contemporary golf titles like Links. ![]() If you get a Bogey or worse, however, you lose two holes from your stock, so bad golfers may find themselves facing the Continue screen quickly. If you finish with a Birdie or better, you get that hole back in your stock. If you finish a hole with a Par, one “hole” is taken from your stock. Of course, a game would be hard pressed to keep arcade players interested long enough to play all 18 holes in one session, so Nazca introduces a “lives” system. Neo Turf Masters (known in Japan as Big Tournament Golf) lets players choose from four different (fictional) courses in Japan, Germany, Australia and the United States, each of which have 18 unique holes. So Nazca, better known for Metal Slug, really had their work cut out for them. Arcade games only tend to give around 5 minutes of play time from a single quarter, after all, and more advanced games like Links wouldn’t make for very good quarter-munchers, either. One wouldn’t think that golf is the kind of fast-paced sport that would make an exciting arcade game. ![]() Of course, nowadays there are golf games for more casual players, like Mario Golf, Pangya / Albatross 18, and Hot Shots Golf / Everybody’s Golf, but before those had the chance to reach gamers, SNK and Nazca gave arcade golf a try. Going along with this, video game golf does end up being relegated to those who already understand real golf, with many golf simulations asking their players to spend minutes simply lining up a shot, or figure out the elevation of the green and how their next putt might get affected by it.Īs a result, many golf games may tend to get passed over as too “boring” for most video gamers. There are people who enjoy it, but those people are probably already familiar with the intricacies of the game, and could understand why the word “Albatross” would result in spectators going nuts. Golf is a sport that is very difficult to get people excited about.
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