![Segaiden #049: Kung Fu Kid & Great Golf [UPDATED]](https://img5.nokimo.com/storage/9/vv/kd/fb3178-019e8a33-ea0b-71fc-beae-56d373788494.jpg)
Segaiden #049: Kung Fu Kid & Great Golf [UPDATED]
Added 2023-05-03 11:49:10 +0000 UTCYet another strong Master System release this week—but not the lead title. Kung Fu Kid is fine, if a bit uneven and needlessly tedious upon replay. And I really like turning lobsters into missiles. It doesn't make any sense, but I like it. But no. That's not the banger this time around.
Nope, this week's standout release is Great Golf, a devastatingly good take on the genre. As neat as the Mark III Great Golf was, with its mini-golf isometric viewpoint, this one (called Masters Golf in Japan to minimize confusion with that other Great Golf) really advances the format a step or two ahead... a missing link between Nintendo's Golf and T&E's Waialae Country Club. Or should that be "missing links"? Get it? Ah, we do have fun.
Update: I've reuploaded a corrected version of this video. Seems that somewhere between my final production review and outputting the video, Premiere inexplicably decided to mute the gameplay channels. Great stuff! Well done as always, Adobe.
Comments
Yeah, command decision to hold it until the Famicom book is ready to go.
Jeremy Parish
2023-05-04 20:42:25 +0000 UTCWas SG-1000 works bumped to next year?
Branwen Shoop
2023-05-04 15:26:55 +0000 UTCMatch Play Golf did the slow-rendering dynamic viewpoint (albeit less effectively) in 1984, as you should be able to see in this video.
Jeremy Parish
2023-05-03 20:52:07 +0000 UTCSince you're only talking consoles, I think there's a link (or maybe "Links") that's missed to understand Great Golf. Great Golf surely owes it's design to the 1986 C64 game, "Leader Board". I believe this is the first game to uses a slowly drawn rendered 3D view like the rendered view in Great Golf. Both games render the 3D mostly from the bottom, but Leader Board will draw in a few elements first while Great Golf will not. If they drew any more similarly I would guess the tech had been licensed from Access, and I still wouldn't be completely surprised if it was. Great Golf is not a complete clone, but it's not far off. The meter has a little more visible info in Leader Board, whether or not it actually works much different. It would be hard to imagine that the developers of Great Golf independently came up with the design for a game released over a year after Leader Board, even if the game was not released on one of the primary Japanese computers at the time. Leader Board was the first Golf Game by Access Software (very much later Indie Build). By the time "Waialae Country Club" was released, those developers were looking at Access' big boy in the golf game market, "Links: The Challenge of Golf", which had 10 releases from 1990 until the new owner Microsoft gave up on it in 2003.
Kyle Olson
2023-05-03 20:30:22 +0000 UTC
