Ace Wow Crazy Golf

[davidn]

Posting that last entry made me come to realize that I'm really also a child of the Playstation era, rather than the SNES/Genesis one like most people my age seem to be. It's something that I'd been hesitant to call nostalgia for me because it's an admission that something that I used to consider as new and amazing is now so far back in the past, but that's the way time goes - the console was released in 1995. I was eleven at the time, according to the laws of mathematics, even though I'm disinclined to believe them at this point. What really decided it was this video I just rediscovered - because if this was from a time that wasn't nostalgic for me, this would be dumbing-down blasphemy. Instead, I find it utterly hilarious.

It's the Tiger Woods 99 intro - witness EA's horribly misguided attempt to make golf exciting! And it works about as well as Matt Smith on Go 4 It. Decide the best bit for yourself - for me I think it's a draw between the shotgun noises overlaid on the swings, and the guitar track that sounds more suited to Formula 1. Making me even older, I also remember when the series started on the PC, and looked considerably more reserved.

Interestingly, when I played the 2010 version down at the Best Buy, it also inspired some nostalgia - the only game to have done that for somewhere I used to live. I was playing on the St Andrews Old Course, paying more attention to the surrounding scenery than the actual game - there's ex-Hamilton Hall, there's the path we had to walk across with our heads covered to protect ourselves from stray golf balls, there's the stream that Donald fell in on the way back from the Union. It was wonderful.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Truly, the only thing more heart-pounding than golf is voting (be sure to watch until about 2:30 to see both videos, since the second is even better!)

I remember the older PC version--we used to have it, and it had copy protection where it flashed a picture of the overhead view of a certain hole on a certain course and asked you to type in which hole it was (which was listed in the manual, of course.) For some reason, we didn't have the manual, so we usually didn't get to play--we'd just launch the game, get three guesses (each with a re-randomized hole to guess so you can't just brute force the same one,) and then it kicked you out after the third failure. Except that one day, I actually was correct on a wild guess (1 in 18 chance, right?) and broke into the game. I immediately alerted my dad, who proceeded to play through all the courses with a clipboard and scratch paper and make sketches of every single hole so that we could identify them next time the game asked. We had that clipboard next to the computer for pretty much as long as we had that computer. This is pretty much videogame_tales territory, except that that's really all I had to say about that game, so it might be a bit short just to transcribe that one paragraph over there.

[davidn]

If presentation like that would result in 40% no longer being considered a high turnout then I'm all for it :)

I do have similar memories of copy protection awkwardness in the early PGA game, although I'm pretty sure that the one I had was just a standard "Word X from page Y of the manual" idea - showing a remarkable synchronicity between the game and its documentation that doesn't really exist today! Your dad's way of defeating that alternative showed excellent forward thinking, and I have a lot of similar stories about getting around game copy protection that could easily fuel a discussion on videogame_tales if the post were kicked off - do it!