Swingerz Golf

Remember when I reviewed CyberTiger for the Nintendo 64 during the first round of the Golf Club? Remember how that game tried to cater to both casual and serious golf fans while also introducing the analog swing mechanics? By the end of my playtime with that game, while I was pleased with how well the analog swing worked, I found myself wishing they chose one audience or the other. Apparently Telenet Japan got that memo as they took the analog swing and put it in a game purely for the casual market. The result is Swingerz Golf, and this is the closest we will ever see to a Hot Shots Golf game without the three-click mechanics.

While a lot of games with analog swings that came out during the sixth generation or later tended to have controls that were sensitive to the point of frustration, Swingerz Golf managed to keep things easy. The sweet spot on the swing is so large that I actually had to force shanks. In fact, the controls across the board are extremely simple, right down to just holding the microscopic d-pad in a direction while swinging to apply spin. Unfortunately, the courses and the career mode will provide the frustration that the controls won't. There are six full courses available and one small course. While the first course is simple, the difficulty in the subsequent courses ramps up way too fast. The number of O.B.s that I got just on the second course was absolutely ridiculous. Meanwhile, while the mechanics are clearly designed for the casual gamer, the career mode demands a hardcore level of devotion to complete it. While the first couple of tournaments were no big deal, it didn't take long for the various challenges for gear and characters to wear on my patience with their extremely tight victory requirements.

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The rest of the package on the disc is a mixed bag. The visuals are very pleasant with bright colors, smooth animations, plenty of flourishes for good shots, and cute characters. It actually looks nicer than the Hot Shots Golf games that showed up on the PlayStation 2. However, the audio got very annoying with the voices of the crowd constantly repeating the same canned phrases over and over again. Aside from the career and basic game modes, there are a few mini-games involving completing various challenges and playing holes back-to-back to see how long you can go without a bogey. The mini-games lack imagination and didn't hold my attention.

Swingerz Golf will never replace Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour in my GameCube rotation, but it is a decent game overall. It looks good and is very easy to pick up and play. While the annoyances during the career and on the course drove me more than a little crazy, it never really drove me to throw the game out the window like others have. If you've already done everything in Toadstool Tour, this one is a deserving runner-up on the Leaderboard.