Behold, the most realistic golf game ever – it took me 428 strokes to finish a hole. Normal Golf Game takes a tiresomely easy genre and makes it infernally difficult, which deserves a round of applause.
The Struggle of Real Golf
I have always struggled playing golf. I wish I didn’t. It’s a beautiful game in concept: a leisurely walk in the sunshine, slapping a ball around, sandwiches and beer consumed during and after play. Sure, you have to dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and getting membership of an actual club is more complex than joining the Freemasons (although many offer a two for one deal with this), but you don’t have to be fit, you don’t have to even run. It is the only outdoor sport where a fat dad can be the best in the world.
The premise couldn’t be simpler: get the ball in the hole. But there is nothing worse in sport than knowing what you have to do and not being able to do it. Just ask amateur parachutists. It is this gap between what I want to do and my inability to do it that makes me angry when I play. And you cannot play golf angry. The only times I have ever finished a round of golf in two under were when the number refers to golf clubs I have snapped or thrown into lakes.
The Evolution of Golf Video Games
That is exactly what made golf video games so beautiful. Because they were so easy I could finally do what was beyond my reach on a real course. Most of my generation cut their mashie niblicks on the Mega Drive’s PGA Golf. It had the simplest of controls imaginable. Tap the button to start your swing. Tap it again when the power bar gets to the point you need, then tap it a third time when it returns to what was always a fairly forgiving sweet spot. You could only mess it up if you miscalculated the distance. Or the wind. Or you were playing near a threshing machine that took your hand off.
Within a day you were birdying the bediddle out of PGA West and easing into eagles at TPC Sawgrass. Over time more challenging control methods emerged in golfing sims, with thumb pads used to replicate swing action and, in one particularly painful case, the motion sensor in the Wii allowing you to replicate your own physical swing, which resulted in me putting my back out one Christmas. Thank you, Tiger Woods! But even these control developments were pretty straightforward to master.
Normal Golf Game: A New Challenge
However, this always gave golf games limited replay value for me, because it was easy to gather more birdies than a discarded sandwich on a British beach. Now along comes a golf game that actually returns you to feeling like a duffer on a real course, the perfectly named Normal Golf Game which has a demo on Steam. It comes from Luke Muscat, the creator of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, two of the most delightfully simple, quick fun whoops of games I have ever spent time tackling on the toilet.
But this is the opposite of a quick, fun game that is easy to pick up. It deliberately sets out to be the toughest golf game ever. You have a ragdoll stickman graphic. You move your arms using the mouse, while two pairs of keys adjust your stance and angle of club face. The concentration required is intense, because you have to look at two things at once: your golfer limbs to make sure you fully connect with the ball and your club face which moves in and out of the correct angle phase as you are swinging. You only pull off the perfect shot 10% of the time. Just like real golf.
Why It Works
It’s even harder than playing Golden Tee in a pub. Sober. So why am I not tearing my bald patches out in frustration? Because this game is so logical in replicating the mechanics of the sport. It also helps that it is funny, the script is terrific, and extra money is made by destroying signs, striking hidden gongs and landing the ball in gigantic toilets. These bonus events can get annoying because you can literally be trying the same single shot for 20 minutes. At least on a normal course the worst shot will still move the ball closer to the pin, so progress is made, albeit slowly. It took me 428 strokes and nearly two hours to complete the demo, there is only one actual hole in it, alongside the surreally comic challenges, but you are encouraged to speed run it to your heart’s content after.
Applying this mechanic to a full round of golf will be the perfect recreation of what the game is like for your average punter, and this will be the greatest multiplayer golf game ever for a bunch of mates to play and rip into each other. I think that is what kept me going: the knowledge that this is an intelligent attempt to do something different with the golf genre and such attempts should be supported. And let’s face it, great art should always be difficult.
The Future of Challenging Games
With this and last year’s sleeper hit Baby Steps, we are at the dawn of a new era of games that make the control method ludicrously challenging in order to replicate the real life experiences. The future surely involves football games where you control the legs of the players using two joypads, platform games playable with a converted treadmill and someone standing there slapping you in the face for real while you are playing Tekken. Frankly, I won’t be going anywhere near Resident Evil.
