dagware
01-01-07, 03:00 PM
I've had Super Swing Golf for a week or so, and I thought I'd post some thoughts on the game. These are just some ramblings -- I haven't sat down and thought real hard about this.
Bottom line is that it's an OK rental, but I'm glad I didn't buy it.
The game was a lot of fun at the start, but it's wearing thin for me after a week. The way in which the game uses the Wii controller was fun at the start, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to master it in this game. For instance, by now I should be able to hit "Pangya" shots much more frequently than I do, and this is a necessity on some of the courses that require perfectly-executed power shots to play well. Maybe it's just me. But one of the problems is that it's not clear at all how the game decides what's a perfect swing vs a good swing. They should really have given more information on this, so you know what to work on.
I've played the game a little using "button mode," but that just takes the Wii-natured fun out of the game, at least for me. Might as well be playing my PSP or DS then.
The courses were kind of cool initially, but as you progress, you get a lot of trumped-up courses that have holes that are just plain ridiculous. Some of them are darn-near impossible to play well consistently, and they have the feel of miniature golf.
There's a lot of annoyances, like background music that was OK at the start but now is like nails on a chalkboard. You can turn it off, but even then I find other annoyances, like on one course there's a clock-tower-type bell that rings all the time. Some people might not even notice it, but it drives me crazy. Shut the f#%@ up! Other annoyances include having to wade through inane cut scenes when playing Panga Festa, especially when you play a match more than once. There should be some way to skip them.
And don't even get me started on the ways to build up your rating points. I'm still not completely sure how upgrading them works, even though I've upgraded them quite a bit! There's packages and individual items, and they're just confusing to me and still don't seem to offer a lot of value.
There's also frame-rate issues. There's a type of ball you can get that displays fireworks when you use it. While watching the ball sail through the air spewing fireworks, if there's enough moving stuff in the background, the framerate will drop. I quit playing with this ball, but some of the COM players use it and you can't get them to change. I just don't understand why the game developers didn't realize this problem and just cut down on some moving background items during ball flight, or just have it produce fewer sparkles.
The COM players are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes they play great, and sometimes they insist on trying to hit some perfect shot that they keep hitting OB. Over and over again. WTF? Do they think they're Roy McAvoy? And if the COM player gets stuck behind a large object, where the only real choice is to hit it sideways or backwards, it takes forever to decide to do that. Like 30 or 60 seconds. And everything on the screen slows down to a crawl while the computer tries to figure out what to do. And the real problem with some of these is that the COM player will hit it into these places every time it plays these holes.
I hit a ball once between two rocks and the ball just kept bouncing back and forth between them really quickly, and never stopped. I finally had to quit the game and start over. These kinds of things happen occasionally on other games, but since I'm complaining, I thought I'd throw this in also.
Wow, I guess I had more to say than I thought. I'm glad I got that off my chest. :p So as I said earlier, rent but don't buy this.
All of this is my opinion, of course. YMMV.
-Dan
Bottom line is that it's an OK rental, but I'm glad I didn't buy it.
The game was a lot of fun at the start, but it's wearing thin for me after a week. The way in which the game uses the Wii controller was fun at the start, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to master it in this game. For instance, by now I should be able to hit "Pangya" shots much more frequently than I do, and this is a necessity on some of the courses that require perfectly-executed power shots to play well. Maybe it's just me. But one of the problems is that it's not clear at all how the game decides what's a perfect swing vs a good swing. They should really have given more information on this, so you know what to work on.
I've played the game a little using "button mode," but that just takes the Wii-natured fun out of the game, at least for me. Might as well be playing my PSP or DS then.
The courses were kind of cool initially, but as you progress, you get a lot of trumped-up courses that have holes that are just plain ridiculous. Some of them are darn-near impossible to play well consistently, and they have the feel of miniature golf.
There's a lot of annoyances, like background music that was OK at the start but now is like nails on a chalkboard. You can turn it off, but even then I find other annoyances, like on one course there's a clock-tower-type bell that rings all the time. Some people might not even notice it, but it drives me crazy. Shut the f#%@ up! Other annoyances include having to wade through inane cut scenes when playing Panga Festa, especially when you play a match more than once. There should be some way to skip them.
And don't even get me started on the ways to build up your rating points. I'm still not completely sure how upgrading them works, even though I've upgraded them quite a bit! There's packages and individual items, and they're just confusing to me and still don't seem to offer a lot of value.
There's also frame-rate issues. There's a type of ball you can get that displays fireworks when you use it. While watching the ball sail through the air spewing fireworks, if there's enough moving stuff in the background, the framerate will drop. I quit playing with this ball, but some of the COM players use it and you can't get them to change. I just don't understand why the game developers didn't realize this problem and just cut down on some moving background items during ball flight, or just have it produce fewer sparkles.
The COM players are wildly inconsistent. Sometimes they play great, and sometimes they insist on trying to hit some perfect shot that they keep hitting OB. Over and over again. WTF? Do they think they're Roy McAvoy? And if the COM player gets stuck behind a large object, where the only real choice is to hit it sideways or backwards, it takes forever to decide to do that. Like 30 or 60 seconds. And everything on the screen slows down to a crawl while the computer tries to figure out what to do. And the real problem with some of these is that the COM player will hit it into these places every time it plays these holes.
I hit a ball once between two rocks and the ball just kept bouncing back and forth between them really quickly, and never stopped. I finally had to quit the game and start over. These kinds of things happen occasionally on other games, but since I'm complaining, I thought I'd throw this in also.
Wow, I guess I had more to say than I thought. I'm glad I got that off my chest. :p So as I said earlier, rent but don't buy this.
All of this is my opinion, of course. YMMV.
-Dan