Nice On

I'm getting a real sense of deja vu here. Last year, I covered Pocket Golf, an imported Japanese golf game for the Game Boy. It was in black-and-white, featured cute chibi characters, had only one course, and was so easy to play that it took actual effort to screw up a hole. I saw all of that all over again when I played Nice On on the Bandai WonderSwan. While there are some differences, I wouldn't be at all surprised if Aisystem Tokyo borrowed Bottom Up's design notes from the prior game.

Despite being monochrome as well, the WonderSwan was a more powerful portable than the basic Game Boy, and Nice On does show that off. The characters are much better detailed, and the animation is extremely smooth. The course has a lot of detail, and I like the little pictographs used for the results of certain shots. The one used for hitting a tree actually made me chuckle a little. I was pleasantly reminded of Awesome Golf on the Lynx which also useds pictographs that way. I do, however, feel that this is a game that should've been set to play with the system in the vertical orientation. Since most of the holes are more vertical than horizontal, it would've made scrolling to see the rest of the hole less of an issue.

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The gameplay for Nice On is both easier and more irritating than it was for Pocket Golf. For some strange reason, you can't see the distance to the hole or the wind conditions until you're about to take the shot. Uh, why? That's the kind of information you need while you're aiming, not afterward. Setting spin is a cinch, and there is absolutely no impact point to worry about hitting on the stroke meter. It is completely impossible to shank a shot. Unfortunately, what ruins the on-course experience are glaring inconsistencies that pop up constantly. Sometimes the wind affects the shot wildly when the gauge isn't showing any wind. I've seen shots where, using the sand wedge on approach from the fairway, hits with less power on the shot meter traveled much farther than shots with more juice in them. I know that there's always an element of randomness in golf, but Nice On goes way overboard on that. There is stroke play and a CPU challenge mode, but don't plan on playing with a friend unless they have their own system.

Nice On is basically a nicer-looking copy of Pocket Golf, with most of its benefits and pitfalls intact. It's not a bad game of golf, but it's very average and not something to justify buying a WonderSwan. It seems appropriate that, since it has given me a constant stream of deja vu feelings, it should share Pocket Golf's score.