January 5
Game: Miniature Golf
Release Date: A bad day in 1978
Platform: Atari 2600
Genre: Sports
Anecdotes: “Hey, this looks fun!” “Let’s play.” “What’s that little dot?” “The ball.” “What is the big box that I can move?” “That’s supposed to be your club.” “What do I do?” “Well, you move the big box, then hit the shot button to ram it into the little box.” **does a shot** “Ha! That’s all it did?” “Yep. Try moving the box further out.” “What if I move the big box all the way across the screen?” **hits shot as hard as possible** “Look at that thing bounce around!” And then every shot became a chance to watch the “ball” rattle around for a minute or until it went into the hole.
Description: You play through nine holes of miniature golf that are so ugly and unrealistic that they didn’t even bother making the second half of the course. You play as a blue square trying to hit the yellow square into a blue rectangle across the screen while avoiding any red squares moving around.
Positives: This game can serve as good quick entertainment, especially after you reach the stage where you stop playing legitimately and start using power shots and ricocheting the ball all over the screen.
Negatives: Pardon me for ripping into the graphics of a game from 1978, but the color scheme is horrible and no object in the game is identifiable. Perhaps the latter was due to technological limits, but there’s no excuse for the former. The sound is grating. Cover your ears if you get stuck in a narrow chute. Also, once you discover that you can sink putts no matter how fast the ball rolls over the hole, you’ll want to hit the ball on an angle as hard as possible and let the ball bounce around like a pinball all over the hole. Other times, the ball will bounce off the hole like it’s a wall. After that, you likely won’t play the game as intended ever again, if you ever bother to play it again at all.
Grade: F
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