Awesome Golf (Lynx)

Hand Made Software and the Atari Lynx have a special relationship, the development company not only getting their start on the handheld but besides Kasumi Ninja on the Jaguar, it seems their entire history as a company was tied to the little handheld. The Lynx is a bit of a cautionary tale about how having the best technical specs won’t necessarily make you the most successful product on the market, the Lynx only releasing two months after Nintendo’s Game Boy but doing much worse despite having a backlit screen with a wide range of colors for the display and the surprising but underused ability to link together up to 16 systems for multiplayer. While it would take Hand Made Software two years to develop for the system, they did come in with a portable golf game that was a step above its handheld competitors and even some of the options on home consoles, and while the success that came from it lead to Hand Made Software developing many more Lynx titles after, Awesome Golf feels more like a breakthrough in its time rather than something that is particularly captivating today.

There are some aspects of it though that are still pretty impressive. There are three distinct golf courses with 18 unique holes each, and when your golfer takes a swing it is a remarkably fluid motion that gives a decent illusion of three-dimensionality to a pixelated character. Being able to zoom into the golf course while doing a hole overview and seeing it scale properly nails in how advanced it was in 1991 when even the Super Nintendo wasn’t capable of true sprite scaling. The digitized voice featured sporadically throughout is definitely not the cleanest though and it is pitched up to possibly account for it, the speaker apparently being the game’s rarely seen mascot character Chipper the squirrel. You can disable Chipper’s few moments of commentary, but the squirrel only makes small announcements and the game can otherwise feel rather quiet since the music is practically absent outside of menus and hole introductions.

Regardless of what seems dated and what still remains a little impressive, Awesome Golf’s heart is always going to be in how it executes the golfing gameplay. When you start a hole the game will automatically aim your ball in a direction when it gives the overview, and while it is usually somewhat reliable, you’ll soon have to learn that if you want to succeed, especially at putting, you’re going to have to adjust your direction. However, while you are looking over the full hole from above, pressing any directions will move the camera that way. While the manual wasn’t forthcoming with it, you have to hold down a button to actually change the direction you’ll take your shot in, and once you’ve lined it up how you like it, you can then move to club selection.

Awesome Golf’s manual may have let me down before, but it helped plenty when it came to choosing which clubs to use on the course. The game won’t automatically suggest a club for you while you’re playing or tell you much about them beyond the basics. For an experienced golfer this wouldn’t be a problem, but the manual actually tells you the expected range of a shot with that club and when to use it. While I had some general ideas about which clubs worked where, I was eventually able to get down club choice on my own thanks to that little bit of help from the instruction booklet, but Chipper can also pick a club for you a few times per play session if you’re stumped.

Now that you have your club and you’re pointed in your desired direction, it’s time to hit the ball, and Awesome Golf has a pretty sound idea for how you handle this. Once you first press the button to swing, an indicator moves down a power bar, the player pressing the button again when they’ve reached their desired strength. After that, the indicator moves back up the bar and out of the power meter, reaching a point where certain symbols will tell you how your ball will fly. The curved arrow symbols will cause your ball to head more to the left or right appropriately while the golf ball symbol is what you want to hit if you want it to fly straight, and with courses that contain water hazards, sand traps, and trees placed sometimes in abundant amounts or close together, timing it right to curve or fly true can be the difference between a hole below par or deep into extra points. A question mark symbol exists too that if you hit you’ll get a random result, but if you hit the exclamation point you’ll only hit the dirt and rack up an extra stroke.

This system works pretty well once you start to get used to it. The power meter is a bit strange to use for putting and it feels like it takes much more time to feel out how much power the game expects from you when you’re that close to the hole. A driving range exists so you can get used to the power meter for your main clubs, but putting is certainly one of the less clean areas of the experience. Like pretty much any 2D golf game, the method used to communicate the slope of the green is going to be pivotal to the experience. Awesome Golf’s approach is definitely not the worst I’ve seen, but it’s still an unusual one that doesn’t gel too well with the act of putting. To note the slope of the green, the game has a black line drawn out from the golf ball to indicate the influence the terrain will have on your shot. The length and direction are the important details but it’s an unusual abstraction to apply to what looks like flat plain green grass, and with the resolution impacting things as well, it can sometimes be difficult to determine if the ball will go into the hole when it grazes up against the edges of it.

Awesome Golf is a golf experience you’ll have to adjust to, the putting the only place that never feels like it’s ever going to be as reliable as you like. Awesome Golf does put a lot of attention into other aspects of the experience though, not enough to redeem a slightly off yet pivotal part of the play but something that certainly makes it a more well-rounded experience. There is no play against computer opponents so you’re most likely to end up “playing against the course” so to speak as you try to score within par. You can play with other human players if they have a Lynx and Awesome Golf, but it’ll probably just be the golfer you select from a decent selection of presets to tackle the holes alone. When you do sink a shot, the game gets a little cute with how it represents how well you did. Par is actually just the word with a regular voice saying it aloud, but if you hit below par, you can see a little cartoon bird or eagle as appropriate. I was a little surprised when I got my first bogey though and the image representing it was a mysterious figure in a trenchcoat and fedora, but it’s still a little bit of personality added to a golf game that might have been a little dry otherwise.

The hole names get in on the fun a little too, mostly in the American course though. The first hole is literally named Bunker Hell which is an odd intro since America is the default choice and probably your intro to the game, but it does fit with the sillier names given to its other holes that aren’t actually too off-the-wall in their designs. The British course’s names seem more about conjuring up images of classy golf, but the Japanese course almost seems like the developers threw in the Japanese words they knew as names, evidenced most strongly by ones called Karaoke and Atari. The 54 holes on offer can only be played in run throughs of their country courses, although you can play a 9 hole game instead of all 18, but there is a good bit of diversity to be found in their designs. The distance to the hole can vary in length with some possible to reach even without your driver while others might have you hit across little islands or work your way around the patches of forested rough that add implied curves to its design.

You’re not going to find any hills or elevation featured outside of the odd way it handles the green, but up until you struggle to parse the important details of putting you’ll find the trip there changing in interesting yet believable ways. Wind can be added to the experience but only as a flat factor, the option enabled before you ever even hit the course and only coming in None, Breeze, and Strong options. The wind does add to the hook of your shot when it is active though, but trying to hit the power bar sweet spot to avoid a curved shot feels like a fine enough reflex challenge so wind isn’t necessary to inject difficulty into the experience. Timing things just right requires the right mix of figuring out what’s required and having the reaction time to set the meter properly for it.

THE VERDICT: Despite the many small things going for it, Awesome Golf might be better known as Alright Golf. Little aesthetic touches like the impressive swing animation and being able to scale the hole map to view it better are nice, but its putting system is unintuitive even once you’ve figured out the rest of the game. Three full courses of 18 holes is a great way to ensure some longevity and they are varied enough that it doesn’t feel like Hand Made Games cut corners in designing them, but while picking your clubs and getting to the hole makes for a very solid handheld golf game, the small frustrations of the putting green keeps it from excelling.

And so, I give Awesome Golf for the Atari Lynx…

An OKAY rating. Awesome Golf did have the potential to be pretty good, and if they had nailed the putting I would have given it a full stamp of recommendation. The game may leave you flying on your own when it comes to picking your clubs most of the time but that leads to a more textured experience in approaching the hole, the player needing to understand their tools, the shape of the fairway and its obstacles, and pulling off the power meter timing right. The meter is easy to understand even without the manual on hand to explain it, but the black bar extending off your ball when on the putting green doesn’t feel like it gives you the best clue on how the unseeable slopes will impact your shot. With it already pixelated from the zoom in as well it can be a little hard to determine if that ball will go in the hole, but it’s not really an unreliable system so much as it is one that’s hard to accurately interpret. The actual course design, the cute little touches like seeing tiny pictures based on how above or below par you are, and the well-designed basics means it’s still probably one of the better picks for a golf game on the go prior to portable systems actually being able to render 3D graphics, just know sometimes you’ll get a few strokes in the green that you don’t feel you deserve.

At the time of its release, Awesome Golf probably was truly awesome, its mild putting problems easier to sweep aside when its competition wasn’t handling it much better. It’s interesting Hand Made Games’s first foray into game development was a golf game, especially since their output after includes titles spanning many genres. It was a foot in the door with Atari though and wowed enough players to let them explore those other concepts in their following games, and having some rough putting problems is probably not worth dismissing the game over. Hand Made Games has a fascinating little story with the Lynx, even Awesome Golf showing off their approach to quality with things like squeezing in more hole designs and that impressive swinging animation, so while it might not draw in players much with its merits anymore, the fact it kicks off a story about a plucky new developer on an underloved machine at least makes this game a little bit awesome.