Greg Norman's Golf Power

Thanks to the Defunct Games Golf Club, I'm learning to trust whenever Gremlin Interactive makes a golf game. They made the Saturn's best golf game, VR Golf '97, which I reviewed during the fist season. However, as it turns out, they started making golf games even earlier than that. They created Greg Norman's Golf Power on the Nintendo Entertainment System four years before that one, and never have I been more pleased and angered in equal measure by a golf game than with this one.

Step aside, Chip Shot and World Class Leader Board. We have a new champion in terms of 8-bit golf games with the most features. Hell, the feature set for Golf Power even puts many 16- and 32-bit golf games to shame! There are NINE courses on the cartridge! They may look rather similar despite being listed as USA, Japan, Australia, etc., but that's still impressive for the third generation. Even better, there is a tenth spot for creating your own course hole-by-hole! There are a decent number of building blocks to work with, and, unlike with Chip Shot, you can actually save your creation! Aside from the courses, there are customizable weather effects and up to eight different game modes. The controls are simple to figure out, and a game can even be saved to pick back up later on. The game even looks quite good for the time if you can forgive a rather limited color palette.

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With all of that, this should've been the easiest "A" I ever gave a golf game. Unfortunately, when I actually hit the links, the minute-to-minute gameplay got way too aggravating way too often. Nailing perfect accuracy on my shots never stopped being a crap-shoot. While the wind up for power goes at a decent speed on the meter, the swing back for accuracy blasts through at triple speed. That especially gets infuriating whenever a shot has to be made at partial power. Also, the game gets very inconsistent. The wind gauge could show thirty mile-per-hour gusts without the ball being affected at all. Hitting the exact same spot on the accuracy gauge could either shoot normally or flub at complete random. I know better than to expect the height of realism on an 8-bit Nintendo game, but these inconsistencies made the game very frustrating.

Greg Norman's Golf Power gives me a headache. I wanted to love it because of the insane amount of features it provided for the era, but the gameplay pissed me off too much. I still got some enjoyment from this one, but it was tempered by all the times I almost ripped my hair out. Greg narrowly saves par here.