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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not addicting, but still entertaining, March 9, 2002
Links and other golf-realism fans look elsewhere. This is not about accurate golf. It's a money management and resource gathering sim along the lines of Theme Park or Sim-Coaster. Those expecting this to be as involved or detailed as Meier's Civilization or Alpha Centauri games will also be disappointed. It's not necessarily challenging, but still fun to play.Like most games of this type, you start out with a blank piece of land and a small sum of money and your job is to build up your course hole by hole until you raise enough money to err... go on to another blank piece of land. Detail is sacrificed for simplicity in this game. You can raise/lower terrain, add fairway, green and various traps rather intuitively but you can't make the sandtrap the exact shape you are looking for. You can win awards for a number of different achievements such as completing dog-leg holes or hitting the 9 and 18 hole marks. As your course becomes popular and the money starts pouring in, you can also sell prime real estate which celebrities such as "Curtis Weird" will move into. Once you get a hole or two built, you can open your course to the familiar Sims who travel the course, speaking their gibberish, and showing their enthusiasm (or disgust) at your creation. A well designed course is also necessary to impress the city officials who, after a pleasing round of golf, will allow you to buy additional parcels of land to expand your course. If your course is particularly well designed, a pair of sims will start an elaborate story you can follow along with as they play. A pair may fall in love, start a business together, or whatever. If the story reaches a conclusion, a bonus item (usually some kind of course decoration) will drop from the sky and on to the course. It's interesting to follow, but after about four or five stories, they'll start to repeat themselves. A weaker aspect of the game is the tournaments you play against fellow sims to build up your skills such as putting, driving, etc... It's *very* basic. You may make a mouse click or two on the initial drive, but the computer takes over from there right down to the final putt. You might as well be rolling dice. I wonder why it was ever incorporated into the game. It's a very easy game, so if you're looking for a challenge straight out of the box, skip the normal level and go straight to difficult. There's also a nice feature that allows you to import your face in the game; the readme.txt file details how to do it. It's tricky, but you can import three different faces (happy, normal, mad) using a program that edits .bmp files (such as Paint Shop or Microsoft's Photo Editor). Then your face will appear in the giant photo of yourself as you pull up your character's statistics (I was hoping my mug would appear in the game itself, but alas...) I killed an entire evening playing this game right out of the box. It sucks you in very quickly with its simplicity. However I don't find myself coming back to it that much the way I did playing The Sims. Perhaps it's because it's easy or maybe it's just because I'm sure I've probably seen everything already. So the next chunk of land is a wooded area instead of a tropical beach. What's the use of continuing if you're just going to create another course and listen to the same jabbering sims over and over again? Still, if you ever wished you create your own Pebble Beach or Mauna Kea resort, this game delivers.
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