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Crazy Golf: crazy as in idiotic

When looking back at the 8-bit consoles, there is a natural tendency to think of them as home to many stone-cold classics, games that stand the test of time and are replayable even now, after countless refinements to gameplay have been developed.  What we don't tend to remember is the dross that got pumped out.  Dross like Crazy Golf. Golf is a precision sport, and it's important that you can easily judge angles and distances.  But this is crazy golf, so let's stick it in Mode 0 where the pixels are rectangles, not squares, and even better let's make it so you can only hit the ball at twelve predetermined angles.  Oh, but let's make sure the angle the ball travels at isn't actually the same as the indicator used to aim. This is the second hole.  It took me ages to get here, mainly because of an inability to work out the controls.  It turns out that despite pressing space on the title screen, in-game the only keys which do anything are the cursor keys for aiming and power, Q for quitting to the title screen, and space skips to the next hole.  On WinAPE, the emulator I used, you need to enable a virtual joystick, turning Num Lock off on the PC keyboard, and use the 5 on the keypad as a fire button.

Having finally worked this out, the first hole was cleared using a sort of 'maximum power and hope' strategy.  It was a number of straight vertical walls, and the ball bounced around like a mad thing before finally entering the hole, just one over par.

So, the second hole.  No matter what angle I hit the ball at, it kept going back to the start (which was just below the aiming indicator top-left). I had to reduce power a lot and inch the ball down bit by bit.  It took a while to work out that the power works on the number of pixels, and so you need twice as much power to go down the screen as you do to go across it.

I finally got around the bottom, and over to the right of the screen.  Amazing I was able to bounce straight through the pink wall at the bottom, but ended up along the top. Now, what do you think would happen if I fired off a shot now?  Oh, note that the indicator is showing the direction the club comes from, not the way the ball goes.  I know, that got me as well.  You'd expect it to bounce off the lower green wall, up to the upper green wall, and then back.  But, oh no.  Angled walls don't affect the ball.  It bounces straight back along the same path.  It's basically reacting to the pixel it hits, not the slope of the wall. That doesn't matter on this stage so much because obviously (almost) all the 45-degree angles come in pairs.  But ... This stage is begging you to start off by bouncing the ball straight down and off that angled wall at the bottom left.  If you do that, the ball goes straight back up!  You actually have to bounce the ball off the left wall yourself, then slowly along the bottom until you get to the bottom-right corner.  And then it's just a case of hitting it up the passageway, bouncing it off the flat wall, and up to the flag.

Oh, no.  The angle of the passageway does not correspond to an angle that you can set the ball at - neither in terms of the indicator at the top right, or the path which the ball goes along (did I mention that they're not the same?)  That wouldn't be a problem if the ball could bounce off the walls on the way up, but remember that the angle it bounces off is due to the pixel sides, not the overall wall, so you are likely to see the ball bouncing backwards down the path.

But look at the screenshot again.  Not only have I managed to get the ball to bounce backwards off one wall, it's gone straight through another into an area with no gap to escape.  I had to fire off random shots for five minutes until the ball glitched through a different wall; which of course was the bottom side of the triangle, meaning I had to work my way up around the path again.

But all that effort was worthwhile. Because I was tired of being able to see colours and was looking for a solution to make me blind.  I mean, what is this meant to be?  It's actually a far easier hole than the last one, because all the angles are straight, but of course it's still a nightmare due to the use of Mode 0. And then you come to this.  Again, the angle of the walls isn't matched by a shot angle, so you have the pain of getting the ball down to the bottom and then through that tiny gap where the green and red walls join.  Remember that the top-right angled wall won't bounce your ball towards the flag as you go up.  After dealing with the horrendous comb at the bottom and the tiny gap, you have to make it through a set of pixels which are pretty much random, and of ocurse affect your ball in random ways, until you get to the flag.

There are more, but they don't get any better.  The entire game is an exercise in frustration, mostly caused by the limited number of angles your ball can travel at.  This is all the more frustrating because the Amstrad is capable of so much more; even in BASIC I wrote a program a few years ago which drew a ball moving at a defined angle, and then bouncing off walls and even being affected by gravity spots on the screen.  Had it even just been in Mode 1, everything would have been much better defined, easier to calculate, and probably less garish.

And let's not forget, back in 1984 this would have taken you 5 minutes to load.
Posted by Tim Miller at 11:56 am Labels: CPC, PC
in Fitzrovia
 Gryzor said...

Heheh great review, thanks for making me laugh even before my morning coffee :D


Saturday, August 22, 2015 8:14:00 am Other gaming diaries