Super Golf

You know the feeling you get when a perfectly aimed putt stops just an inch short of the cup? Isn't that one of the most frustrating experiences in existence? Well, I had a similar experience while playing Super Golf on the Game Gear, a great game that stopped just a bit short of must have.

Super Golf has a good number of options for a portable golf game. Four-player hotseat is available for stroke play along with two-player hotseat for match play. There are four cute anime-ish characters to choose from along with four caddies that provide varying perks like more accurate putting and stronger recovery shots. Each character has has stats that can be adjusted at the start of a round to suit just about any playing style. All those good options are in addition to a very well-done game of golf. The text doesn't overload the portable screen when it's used. Everything is bright, colorful, and cartoony, making the game a joy to look at. The mechanics are simple to get into. Everything from setting where the ball is struck for spin to setting power is easy to pick up yet provides the perfect amount of depth for pros. You don't even have to worry about getting perfect impact on the swing gauge! Almost every moment of this game was a great time, and it also plays very fast. I finished a round in about fifteen minutes.

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I wish I could give this game an "A", but the issues just stop me. First, the caddie perks are rather arbitrary. I didn't notice that much of a difference among them. Some of the decisions are weird. You have to pause the game just to see the basic info on a given hole like the distance and par. Why don't they show that stuff at the start of the hole automatically? The camera can also be a bit problematic. It's zoomed in so much that it can be a bit easy to lose track of where you're going on the more complicated holes. However, the biggest thing that denies this game the "A" it deserves is the fact that it has only one course. The course itself is very well-built outside of a couple of cheap holes that seem to drag balls into the water unfairly. I wish I could let that go, but having one course on a cartridge was pretty much unacceptable by 1991.

Super Golf is a great golf game for the Game Gear, no question about it. It's easy to pick up, hard to put down, and a joy to look at. If it had just one more course and smoothed out a couple of the rough edges, it could have easily competed with Awesome Golf on the Lynx as the best portable golf game of the era. Though it blew the eagle putt attempt, it still sank the birdie.