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INTRODUCTION
Happy Finnish Independence Day, everybody! Today, we have a truly special entry in the history of Finnish games, as it is a game that is effectively lost from wider public even currently. It was only ever reviewed in the Finnish computing and gaming magazine MikroBitti in May 1985, and even there, the review had no screenshots to see. I recently came by this game by an accident, when I bought a bundle of used Spectrum tapes from another collector, and Kimmo Mäkinen's "Golf" was included in the collection. After a long last I have now played it, so I can finally write a review of it. If nothing new is to be learned from this article, this review shall at least fix the hitherto lack of screenshots from public view, although of course I shall attempt to give proper attention to the game itself, as well. Enjoy!
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THE REVIEW IN ALL ITS GLORY
You can probably imagine the amount of excitement in the air, when I stumbled upon this game after 35 years of admittedly occasional imagining. Just seeing the program file name didn't really reveal anything, since there are, as you might well know, as many as 19 other games released for the Spectrum bearing the exact same title. However, when the loading screen was drawn on my TV, my mind was blown by the reveal!
After about 4 and a half minutes, the game started. I didn't know what to expect, apart from it being a golf game made two years before Leaderboard, but based on the history of golf games, I was expecting a simplistic top-down view with awkward controls. Well, I got part of it right - it is a top-down viewed game, but the graphics are more sophisticated than in many other golf games on the ZX Spectrum at the time, and the controls are surprisingly quick to get used to, even though the game manual has an overly complicated manner of saying such.
When the game has loaded, you are first given the game options at the top right corner of the screen: the number of players from 1 to 3, and if you prefer to have wind or not, with the Finnish equivalents to Y/N (yes/no) being K/E (kyllä/ei). Everything after that is controlled with Caps Shift, Space bar and Enter, with Enter being the selecting key and the other two used for controlling the cursor or selector left and right. According to the instructions leaflet, the keys can be replaced by a joystick compatible with Interface II. As I said, it's pretty easy to handle.
Golf is a simplistic golf game in many ways. Playing a turn happens in three parts: first, selecting a club from six possible ones, depicted by their lift-off angle (0-30 degrees) instead of the usual sets of iron and wood clubs, sand wedge and putter; second, choosing the direction you hit towards; and third, hitting the ball at a chosen velocity, which has to be timed with an automatically moving indicator. You get no precision moves like chipping or putting a spin on the ball. Once you get to putting, selecting the zero angle option for your club acts as the putter.
The game terrain is surprisingly varying and nice to look at, considering the viewpoint. You get large trees, bushes, various sizes of rocks, water hazards, bunkers and clearly defined grass areas and greens. The tee is marked with a blue flag, and the holes are marked with red flags. Only, sometimes you need to check the minimap to locate the proper hole, as there can be multiple red flags around the course. This is because the entire game takes place on the same map, which is rather surprising for a game of this age and size. But perhaps because of this, there are only 13 holes in the game, instead of the usual 18.
Choosing to have wind in the game doesn't affect it as much as you would expect. Then again, I can't say, how strong the wind can be at its worst, since I've only gotten a wind factor 5 out of possible 9, and at 5, it didn't seem to have too much of an effect. It's definitely there, but it's not as notable as in later, more sophisticated golf games. At least, the wind actually changes constantly, even as you're between turns, defining your swings. If you choose to have wind in the game, your turns will use a time limit, within which you must hit the ball, or else your turn will be disqualified. Before the end of a turn, the game will give you a sound signal twice, first 10 seconds before the turn's end, and the second 5 second before.
Although Golf feels surprisingly playable on the whole, the experience suffers from an insanely slow speed of the ball's flight, and the pauses the game makes between the ball landing and giving you the next opportunity to swing will make you think your Spectrum is somehow faulty. Unfortunately, going 2x speed on an emulator is not a particularly good idea, either, because getting the right velocity will be much more difficult at that speed. On a good run, one hole takes about two minutes to play, so if you're lucky, 13 holes would take 26-30 minutes. Another thing that really irks me is, that the main playing screen is push-scrolled at chunks instead of fluidly with the ball centered on the screen, and the scrolling happens only when you cross a certain unmarked barrier. Also, the flags on the minimap representing the holes are not necessary very exact in their location, so if you're inherently unlucky, it might take you ages to even find the hole because of these two matters. But once you get familiar with the map, all of that will not be that much of a problem.
Regarding the sand and water hazards, Kimmo Mäkinen's Golf isn't really as realistic as you might want it to be. The sand traps don't really slow your progress down as much as they should - the only really notable effect they have is, that the ball doesn't bounce off when hitting sand as much as it does on any green land. Hitting your ball in a water hazard doesn't sink the ball in the usual way and make you swing again from either the bank or the previous tee, but rather lets you swing from under the water, which at least requires you to use a lot more power to get out of there than any other hazard. The most annoying natural elements in the game, however, are the large rocks, which are surprisingly high, but the game doesn't actually show them in any three dimensional manner, as in giving them a shadow at least.
Soundwise, there isn't much to say. You only get a couple of sound effects, one of which is a "pip", which goes for all acknowledgements of an action made or the game giving you permission to do something; and the other one is a less notable "snap", which is a sound for any collision happening with the golf ball. Of course, you wouldn't really expect much of sounds in a golf game at any rate, but some simple music would have been nice to have in the main menu, at least. Well, it is what it is.
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OVERALL + VIDEO + AFTERWORDS
Looking at the MikroBitti review from 1985 (which I translated for all your reading pleasure in the History of Finnish Games Appendix entry), Kimmo Mäkinen's Golf was perhaps treated with an undue kindness over a bias of location, but considering the competition then, there were no good golf games around on home computers to speak of. Leaderboard was really the first golf game to be taken seriously, and anything that came out before that would have been reviewed with different standards. With those standards, this Golf ranks fairly high, but it's obviously seriously outdated. However, it is fairly playable, albeit infuriatingly slow, and it's an interesting artifact in not only the history of Finnish game development, but also the history of how golf games evolved, and well worth having a go at, if you ever have the chance.
GAMEPLAY 6
GRAPHICS 6
SOUNDS 2
REPLAY VALUE 5
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OVERALL 5
And here, also for the first time ever, anywhere, is a bit of video footage of the game in action. It's not very long, but enough to show you, what it is like in action, played on a real Spectrum and chopped up for viewing purposes. Also, translations are provided for the Finnish in-game texts.
So that's another old unknown Finnish game brought into the light, hope that was worth the bother. Happy Finnish Independence Day, and afterwards, happy holidays! There'll be another video coming up around Christmas time, but no comparisons until 2022. See you then!
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