Golf (Nintendo, 1989)

You've got to hand it to Nintendo, at the launch of the Game Boy they really put forth an effort to make their initial offering of first party titles enjoyable. While this may make sense, after all you'd hope they'd try and make their initial games in a new field worth playing, the truly remarkable thing is how enjoyable these games are nearly 30 years later.

Golf is simple, and uses the tried and true 1-2-3 method of swinging your club. You have a power meter at the bottom with a small arrow on its top. Press B once to send the arrow moving up and down the meter, press it again to determine the strength, and ideally you'll press it again at the marker that denotes you've made the ideal shot. Golf games really need to stick with this method, but more on that some other time.

Presentation wise, there's not really a whole lot to Golf, but thankfully that doesn't work to it's detriment. Using the Game Boy's propensity towards green to its fullest, it's easy to distinguish fairway from rough at a glance, and the contrast between the shades is enough that during long drives the action doesn't get lost due the Game Boy's tendency towards ghosting. When on the green, arrows denote the slope of the ground, with the stronger slopes represented by bold arrows. It all works pretty well, especially considering the limited means of expressing information on such a small screen. Your golfer has clearly been inspired by Mario, but doesn't look as much like Nintendo's favorite plumber the character in NES Golf. When you begin a round your golfer and caddy shout "Fight", which should really be assimilated into real world golf as soon as possible.

Most remarkable of all is Golf's music. One of the early draws of the Game Boy was it's stereo sound, and most of the initial first party games made good use of the capability. The stereo separation in Golf's soundtrack makes the game oddly immersive, with a constant 8 bit rhythm playing while you line up your shot and fading out once you're about to make your swing. The putting music is a personal favorite, but all the tracks are better than they have any right to be.

Golf is surprisingly enjoyable. It may not be filled to the brim with features, and it may not be too high on realism, but it makes for a solid if not simple portable golfing experience. Golf can be found on the 3DS' Virtual console, and can also be found pretty inexpensively as a cartridge for the og Game Boy itself. It's an excellent pick up and play title, so if you have the chance, add Golf to your collection.

Why?

"Why?" is a question I asked myself as a kid. My dad would watch golf on TV pretty often, and I just couldn't understand the appeal:

"Why do you watch this?"

"Why do people like this?"

"Why does this take so long?"

"Why can't we watch something else?"

"Why does anyone watch this?"

Thankfully, my dad was and is a pretty laid back guy, so he'd answer my questions without getting too annoyed, and then get back to watching golf.

When my mom bought my dad a Game Boy for Christmas in 1991, he got Nintendo's Golf (1990) with it. Whenever he got tired of Tetris, my dad would play Golf, and whenever I couldn't find where my dad had put the Tetris cartridge, I'd play Golf out of a voracious appetite for all things Game Boy. Eventually something clicked, and I began to play Golf even when I knew where the Tetris cartridge was. To this day, I don't know what the appeal was, but I quickly found myself playing Golf four hours on end - it remains an odd outlier of a childhood filled with Mario and Mega Man X.

Some years later, I got into collecting old games. Games I remembered from when I was a kid, games I never heard of, and games that existed well before my parents even met. Being a new collector, I went for quantity, not quality. I bought as many games as I could without accounting for if I'd ever actually play them all. Eventually I snapped out of this mindset and bought games worth playing, but not before making a startling realization:

I have a ton of golf games.

Upon realizing this, I again began to ask myself "Why?".

"Why are there so many golf games?"

"Why do people need so many interpretations of the same game?"

"Why are so many of these by Japanese developers?"

"Why does this game have a robot?"

"Why did I buy all of these?"

Yes, it seems that golf is one of the most well represented, but rarely talked about genres of video game in our time. There are hundreds of these games. Most are completely forgettable, some are terrible, and a few are completely insane. 8-Bit, 16-Bit, Home console, arcade, handheld, PC, 2D, 3D - I say we try them all, or at least as many we can before we go insane. Why, you ask?

Why not?