Zany Golf was something I had on the amiga for sure. Difficult as balls, but it's the kind of game that grows with you. When you're a kid you hardly get anywhere, but the more you mellow out, the further you get until you can finally win it. The frame rate is unforgivably stodgy and the sound is pretty feeble. Granted the game was made in 1988 and never bettered within its genre on its system. In fact, unlike many, many more ambitious Amiga games, ZG has simultaneous sound effects and music!
My dad would play a lot of the PGA Tour games on the mig too, so whenever I'm in a quiet place with occasional birdsong, I'll almost always think I'm inside a golf game for real. And the phrases "GUNTHER IS UP." / "ONE MOMENT PLEASE" are never far from my mind.
When I went to my uncle's house as a kid and saw a PC for the first time, one of the first games I saw was Fuzzy's World of Miniature Space Golf, which is pretty much a successor to Zany in every respect, except it has absolutely nothing to do with it, and the camera angle has switched from isometric to oblique (from Rollercoaster Tycoon style to Theme Park style in other words). Playing through a full round of Fuzzy's is much harder than Zany due to hundreds and hundreds of often-deadly gimmicks lying around the field, but it has a practice mode so you can try any hole you like. And the frame rate is super flashy and the graphics are super graphical and the music is super musical. Showing somebody Fuzzy's is absolute proof the Amiga was dead dead dead and never coming back.
We had tons of Links and PGA games on the PC and Win 3.1 but I don't think I knew anyone who was into them.
I liked Mario Golf on the N64, but damn was that difficult too. Reading the greens was near impossible, and the special modes like Ring Shot rely on you being perfectly familiar with the arc generated by each of your clubs. It had a mini golf mode too, but whenever I tried it I was overcome by horrific nausea, the colours were really vibrant, and I could swear that one of the courses emblems was Mario's face except he was STARING AT YOU the whole game (like how James Pond stares at you in Robocod) and it was really unpleasant.
Mario Golf on the GBC was super duper though. Golf with RPG stats that you could play anywhere. A kind of a story, too! Challenges! Greens you could read! I couldn't have been the only person who turned off the third-person stroke view and played it entirely top down so the game went faster and distances were easier to judge. I really liked how it saved replays of your last four birdies, eagles, albatrosses and holes in one. And many generations can now tell a cleek from a creek thanks to the Golf Dictionary. MG GBC was perhaps the first time I ever got 100% in, birdies on every hole, level 99 and max stats. And then I did it again only ever increasing my drive so I had phenomenal, par-5 beating, ridiculously curvy shots. After that I sold the game, but it was such a hit with our family that my bro who I thought hated it bought his own copy and maxed it out too.
I never got on with Advance Tour, I thought the graphics looked ugly.
It was only Tiger Woods on the 360 that really got our attention back - custom characters YAY, custom stats YAY, custom celebrations YAY! Later versions somehow lacked the shine, despite being the same game with the same engine. Maybe the interface had an ugly colour or something?
It sucks that these custom golfers are locked to the game in which you make them, I'd like to be able to share my custom golfers, custom skaters, custom violent madmen between different games. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to play Resident Evil 4 as your offensively milquetoast golfer self.
I have never played Everybody's Golf.
It seems, for now, Everybody isn't in fact Golf after all.
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