Pebble Beach Golf Links (Saturn)

While many sports games will use the name of a recognizable athlete or sports personality to draw attention to their title, if you take a look at Pebble Beach Golf Links for the Sega Saturn, it seems to be instead relying on the renown of the well-regarded Pebble Beach golf course. However, while the title and front cover of the game hide it, there is an athlete attached to the title, and the methods by which they incorporate golfing pro Craig Stadler into the experience ends up being one of the most fascinating elements of Pebble Beach Golf Links.

Released during an era where incorporating live action footage into video games was in vogue despite compression leading to heavy visual artifacts and it generally being an eye-catching gimmick rather than something that improved play, Pebble Beach Golf Links takes footage of Craig Stadler and slaps him in the corner during the course of playing through Pebble Beach’s 18 holes. Every new hole will start with a flyover of the layout with footage of the real life Pebble Beach Golf Links playing as Craig Stadler appears and gives his tips for how to play the hole. Depending on the hole, Stadler can either be surprisingly helpful with the suggestions on which clubs to use during your approach or might just drowsily suggest to avoid sand traps, and especially with the smaller ones he seems to struggle to do anything beyond recommending the common sense approach. His insight isn’t particularly interesting, but when you do begin to play against him, his face can pop up in the corner again to comment on the course of the game. He has a surprising amount of energy when he praises you for excellent play, and it can actually be a bit rewarding to see him appear again if a poor stretch of luck leads to him going oddly quiet. Mostly he tends to appear when you do a particularly excellent drive or manage to score below par on a hole, but he may sometimes pop up to critique his own play or even taunt you to try and make the golfing a little less sterile.

Craig Stadler’s sparse pop-up commentary is certainly the most memorable aspect of Pebble Beach Golf Links and gives it more identity than a straightforward golfing simulator, but he’s not the only integration of real world footage. Besides Mr. Stadler, the game digitized other actors to play the role of generic golfers, and while they’ll remain quiet, they at least have some lively menu animations and can be seen taking their swings so as to match Stadler as he plays alongside them. The game makes an unusual choice to have caddies present with the same live action footage turned digital sprites, this mostly slowing down play and disabling caddies actually has the benefit of leading to a map display of the hole you’re on so it’s essentially a full improvement to remove them. The game also enjoys incorporating live action footage during intermissions, victory screens, and other moments where direct gameplay isn’t involved. The actual courses are an adequately textured green 3D space with some rather choppy but serviceable sprites representing trees and other background details, but along with a relaxing soundtrack full of energetic bossa nova to match the calm of golf while still feeling peppy, the game does a decent job of setting up an inviting and decently effective space to golf in.

When your digitized golfer steps up to hit the ball, you have some fairly intuitive systems for determining how far it will go. First you need to pick your club, the game helpfully indicating the expected maximum distance the club can hit the ball. It can be a bit difficult to get the hang of something like the chipping wedge that is more about how the ball is hit than a pure distance calculation and putting takes some time to acclimate too due to the need to gauge how much power you need to cover short distances when near to the hole, but they do their expected jobs and you grow accustomed to their usage over time. The game will usually point you towards the best direction to aim as you approach the hole but you’re free to adjust it, and even after committing to a direction you can further adjust by changing your golfer’s stance or where you’ll hit the ball to further have control of your swing.

Once everything is in order, you press a button to pull back your club and determine how hard you’ll hit the ball, the bar automatically filling and the player needing to press the same button to stop it at the desired strength. After the power is locked in, the meter comes back down and you need to try and hit a sweet spot to ensure it flies straight, but you can press the button a little earlier or later to add a hook to the swing to potentially add even more of a curve to your ball. An odd issue I encountered was the game not always reading my input for the second part of the swing, and even after swapping the button used for it, this issue persists. You can enable Easy Shot where the second part is removed to avoid such issues, and besides that small extra degree of control you thankfully don’t seem to be missing out on much for enabling it.

Besides learning the power needed when you are putting on the green, putting is a fairly straightforward process. Once you’re in range it will give you detailed info on the slope and a grid appears briefly to help visualize the slant of the course, and while you have wind to worry about during your regular drives, accurately accommodating for the ground’s shape is key to sinking the shot once you’re this close. There’s even a secondary ball camera that appears in the top left to show your approach from a different angle, a surprisingly helpful feature in telling if you’ll sink the putt because of the somewhat hazy graphics making it hard to tell if the small white ball will actually go in the hole.

The controls are pretty much up to snuff for a golfing title, and the Pebble Beach Golf Links are a good host for the game. While it is a shame there are only 18 holes total to play, there is a good amount of variety to the holes. Some are surprisingly small and can conceivably be completed in two good hits while others have a rather long approach with things like trees in the way, a curved shape where cutting corners can be risky, or hazards that punish you if you overshoot your approach. There’s nothing too gimmicky since it is all grounded in the layout of a real course, but it’s a fine batch of holes for players eager to embrace the realism in its design. What’s a bit unfortunate though is how skilled your opposition is. While the pars usually range from 3 to 5 hits to sink your ball, the competition to get the lowest score possible is fierce as Craig Stadler and any computer players along to compete will not hold back. In the major modes, Stadler will always be there to compete against you, and while the extra computer player may fumble, the game perhaps tries too hard to make Stadler look good. He routinely gets 1 or 2 below par, and unless you’re sinking Birdies and Eagles yourself, he can be hard to keep up with. He will sometimes hit par or even take an extra stroke for a Bogey, but he does not often make huge mistakes and proves to be a foe that practically demands some degree of perfection from the player to overcome. While his often pointless interjections make him endearing, the difficulty experienced when going up against Stadler and computer opponents makes anything outside of practice and multiplayer likely to end with even a good performance coming up short compared to the game’s own players.

The two major modes of play in Pebble Beach Golf Links are the Pebble Beach Open and Tournament play. Tournament play involves going through each of the eighteen holes and trying to score lower in total than not only Craig Stadler and a tag-along computer player, but a group of unseen players who all usually do worse than Stadler anyway. Pebble Beach Open is essentially Tournament play but with the extra step of two qualifying rounds before the main tournament begins, and while this is more true to real life, it adds an unneeded layer of difficulty to a contest where it’s already hard to keep up with the competition. While training up to Stadler’s level can be satisfying when it pays off, there are thankfully other modes where he won’t always be present to trounce you.

Practice Play will let you feel out holes individually and without the competitive angle, while Stroke Play, Skins Play, and Match Play all allow you to compete with human or computer players in a few different ways. Stroke Play does have a single player option for setting best scores, but the main objective in it is the usual scoring method of golf where getting the fewest strokes across the 18 hole course will make you the winner. Skins Play lets the player set a bet for each hole of the golf course, players competing to come out with the biggest cash purse in the end and the customization allowing play to become more interesting as outperforming others on key holes can make up for weak performances elsewhere. Match Play turns each hole into a one on one competition where you simply try to outperform the other player on a hole by hole basis. The winner in Match Play isn’t the player to get the least strokes overall but instead the golfer who won the most holes total, again allowing for a player to make a comeback even if they make the kind of mistake that would kill a normal stroke-focused run.

You might be wondering where Craig Stadler went during these modes where you compete with humans or generic computer players, but he is still present in the form of a Pinch Hitting system where you can call in Craig to take your turn for you. He will only help if you’re teeing off at the start of a hole or putting at the end, but you can almost always count on him to drive the ball as far as he can or sink the putt. After giving you some reassuring words on his skill, he’ll hit the ball with remarkable consistency, and both players are allowed to use Stadler in these multiplayer contests. In some of the smaller courses it is even possible to have him both tee off and then putt for an easy hole without the player even actually taking a swing, but the game does limit your uses of this incredibly effective ringer. By default you’ll get the surprisingly generous amount of 18 uses of Stadler, but you can adjust it to be lower to prevent players from overrelying on him. You can set other options like whether you want to tee off from a point closer to the hole or set handicaps for players, so while you can’t adjust tournament play to be more lenient, you can adjust some settings to lessen the skill gap in these side modes.

THE VERDICT: While the unusual approach to including digitized footage of Craig Stadler is what gives Pebble Beach Golf Links much of its charm and distinct identity, the game’s efforts to sell him as a golfing expert undermine its competitive modes. Stadler’s excellent performance in tournaments requires phenomenal play to match, and in modes he isn’t automatically your opponent he can instead be called in to do essentially the best tee off or putt available. The mechanics at play for determining your swing are mostly a good fit for the golfing at least and the Pebble Beach golf course has a good amount of variety to its 18 holes even though it would certainly benefit from more courses to ensure greater variety. If you compete in multiplayer or simply accept Stadler’s tournament dominance you can still find a pretty decent golf game in Pebble Beach Golf Links, and while his skill level makes it hard to compete with him, his interjections and insight are what make this more amusing than a cut and dry golf sim.

And so, I give Pebble Beach Golf Links for Sega Saturn…

An OKAY rating. While I did say that managing to match or even beat Craig Stadler is certainly a satisfying payoff to learning the course and mastering the golfing mechanics, Pebble Beach Golf Links doesn’t exactly inspire that level of investment. It has a good set of holes and the different play modes can help you escape the tournament mode’s unforgiving play, but it is for the most part just a solidly executed sports title that doesn’t stand out from the pack until you add in the digitized actors. The live action elements interposed onto the game world give the game a distinct style, but it’s truly the rather jazzy backing music and Craig Stadler’s strange inclusion that give this game life. Stadler’s appearances are perhaps not as common as you’d like but still an unusually amusing aspect of playing through Pebble Beach Golf Links, a good performance on a hole made all the better when he pops up in the lower right to briefly congratulate you. It’s a touch that gives the game a bit of character and gives it a leg to stand on besides adapting a famous real world golf course into game form, but the appeal of the game’s strange method of incorporating Craig Stadler’s recorded footage doesn’t make up for how he and other computer players dominate the competition modes. Against another human player or just in one of the side modes after you’ve tinkered with the settings you can get a decent game of golf going, but at that point it’s just a serviceable adaptation of the sport and one that has a few quirks like the strange issue with reading the second swing input.

A lot of sports games can blend together if they don’t have some gimmick, and while Pebble Beach Golf Links thought its digitized actors and Stadler’s advice would make it look impressive, the game ends up memorable primarily because of how odd Craig Stadler’s integration was handled. Hidden away from the game’s cover but cropping up with surprising regularity during the gameplay, Craig Stadler might actually be more involved in the moment to moment play than most athletes are in the games they have their names attached to. Some sports commentators certainly have Stadler beat when they both get title billing and speak over the action, but Stadler’s strange appearances, pinch hitting prowess, and dominance of the tournament modes means he’s an inescapable part of the experience for good or for ill. Still, Stadler makes Pebble Beach Golf Links strangely endearing despite being a fairly straightforward golfing game otherwise.