I hope that everyone had an excellent holiday and continues to have them. To summarize things quickly I left for Chicago last week, spent Christmas with my parents and parents-in-law, and then drove back yesterday. I got and gave some really excellent gifts and good times were had overall.

Then, shortly after the holidays I did something I haven’t done since… well, since the N64: I bought a sports game. Granted, it was for the Wii and it is a fantasy themed Golf game (not a very serious and “real” sports game), but it is still the first time I have done this since someone duped me into buying Mario Golf for the N64. Super Swing Golf is the single player console version of PangYa! Golf: a Korean MMOGolfPG. Online multiplayer has been replaced with a sappy crappy story mode for single player, but all the obsessive compulsive aspects of an MMO should translate well over to a single player golf game, and considering the controller, you can’t really go wrong with the developer’s first attempt on a console.

I only got to play with the game for about an hour last night, but my impressions aren’t that high. Long load times combined with what appears to be crappy widescreen makes the poor implementation of the story very irritating and nearly painful to watch. But, seriously, it’s Golf. Do we care about the story at all? I don’t.

Anyways, the game is a mixed bag. The controls don’t feel very natural because I don’t seem to get any feedback on what I’m doing wrong. The only indicator for if you’re hooking or slicing is the bar at the bottom of the swing screen, but you can’t really see it if you’re swinging the club right because it’s gone by the time you look at the screen. The camera movement feels pretty wedged into the game: it makes due with the controls but it’s highly imprecise. Reading the green is also very difficult because the game divides the green into blocks which show the slope of the ground, but the way they display it is just a dot on the grid showing the slant. The main problem with this is that if there is shade over the green then you can hardly see these indicators because they’re about the same color. Combine that with imprecise camera and you have mild frustration and irritation.

Swinging is great though. It feels much more like golf than on Wii sports. I would relate it to more how bowling feels like in Wii Sports: i.e. it judges things that you can’t really put your finger on which accurately reflects how you are playing. It’s also got nearly 1:1 movement for the swing arc. The only difference is that there’s a slight delay which I assume is the game judging/processing your swing.

As far as difficulty goes, well I either suck at golf or the game is a fair bit more difficult than I would expect for a fantasy themed golf game. Both of these are likely possible. I got my butt kicked on the first round of the “story mode” and two times in a row on the second match. I only got about an hour in with the game, but it feels like it may demand more knowledge of golf than a non-golfer may have.

All the other things are here: purchasing clubs, balls, clothes, caddies, and apparel. They do it through Pang points which you earn for many different things all related to playing golf. You get the most by completing challenges in the story mode, so spending time there will net you much more Pang more quickly. While the game started as an MMO golf game in Korea, this sort of customization and obsessive compulsive attitude works really well with a single player story based game as well. Though… I do kind of wish there wasn’t a story and you could play online.

The big problem: there is only one save game at a time. So you can’t have two players playing the game on different save customizing their characters using their money. It would have to be a pot of money which you would have to share with other housemates which will/could/probably will result in stealing and aggravation. The addition of more than one save per console would have been a huge benefit for this style of game with such a level of personalization.

Ok, that went on way too long, sorry. I also got the 360 Sonic the Hedgehog game which… almost scares the hell out of me. But I really think that I will like it even though it’s terrible. I mean, I like Sonic Heroes, and have yet to meet anyone else who does.

Oh! And I got my wife Viva Piñata for Xmas. She loves the hell out of Harvest Moon and it seemed like it was in a similar enough vein that she may like it. She got me the first volume of the Absolute Sandman… which I can’t thank her enough for. It’s gorgeous and I can’t wait to read it.