Golf Message Board

Hoping that two wildly addictive tastes go great together, mobile developer Noodlecake Studios has debuted Flappy Golf, an iOS game that combines the deceptively simple Super Stickman Golf with mobile hit Flappy Bird.

Flappy Golf borrows physics, basic gameplay rules and courses from Super Stickman Golf 2, but instead of carefully aiming a shot, players control a flapping bird that must languidly wing its way toward the hole. The goal is to make it through the labyrinthine courses using as few flaps as possible. That may seem overly simplistic, but Flappy Golf features 30 courses of nine holes each, and like Super Stickman Golf, the courses grow increasingly complex and bizarre, offering new challenges with each round.

Best of all, Flappy Golf is available as a free download on the iTunes App Store. There are no microtransactions to be found in the mobile mashup, but players will occasionally see in-game advertisements. [Image: Noodlecake Studios]

There are some genre descriptions I see and my heart sinks. “A new twist on tower defence!” Sink. “Adding an F2P model to classic racing!” Siiiiiink. “An update to a Myst-style adventure” Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiink. “A dystopian steampunk golf game.” PERRRRRR-DOOIIIIIIIINNGGG! My heart’s back up where it belongs!

That is the superb explanation given by indie publisher Surprise Attack Games, just announced as publishing the superbly named Vertiginous Golf. Golf powered by “a mysterious Victorian-era virtual reality device.” I’ve had a play of it.

… [visit site to read more]

It seems to me as though golf games have always looked the same across the various hardware generations, even though they clearly haven’t. And not just in the sense of always featuring a man wearing bad trousers and standing on a lawn – I mean that these are the games where my eyes have most scaled and adapted to what the technology of the day offers, in the same way that my brain somehow knew to make me more attracted to 30-somethings once I became a 30-something and presumably/hopefully will do the same as I continue to age, right up until my prophesied death in 2742.(more…)

Ah golf — the sport of kings! There's nothing like a good day out on the golf course. That is, until all the wildlife and native peoples you've displaced start to reminding you that there's blood on your hands. That's where Envirogolf comes into play!Read more...

Since pro golfer Tiger Woods' name and likeness are no longer attached to EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour golf series, he is free to explore deals with another publisher. That is exactly what Woods' agent Mark Steinberg is doing, as he is currently "in negotiations with another company regarding Woods' video game rights," ESPN reported.

EA announced earlier this week that it was parting ways with Woods following a report in April that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 15 wasn't happening. The publisher will maintain a licensing partnership with the PGA Tour for future golf games.

The end of Tiger Woods as the face of video game golf was set in motion years ago, and it had nothing to do with Perkins waitresses or a nine-iron through the rear windshield. It had nothing to do with a two-year winless streak or a drought, now spanning five years, without a major championship.Read more...

I love open world games. But nine times out of ten, the things I love to do in them don't involve the main premise of the game. Read more...

Alongside fighting games, longtime dive bar staple Golden Tee is one of the last viable arcade cabinets. Arcade titles aren't rated by the ESRB, so if Golden Tee wants to put a big ol' telephone pole cigar in its players' mouths, it can without being called out for "tobacco use." And it will, because Golden Tee DGAF.Read more...

Crime is a constant feature of video games writing. Somewhere, someone is doing something illicit with them—sometimes comically stupid, sometimes tragic. Games and consoles are currency, objects of dispute, sometimes even weapons themselves. Kotaku's Police Blotter is here to round up the latest in games crime. Xbox 360 Tent Finishes 1-Under for the Tournament ARDMORE, Pa.—Phil Mickelson shot a 3-under 70 to lead the 2013 U.S. Open after one round and someone stole an Xbox 360 from a tent at Merion Golf Club. Police received the report at 9 a.m. on Friday, June 14, as players from a rain-delayed Thursday were finishing up their rounds. Police said the Xbox 360 was taken from a locked case inside the tent. Justin Rose of England made five birdies in his final round, and par on the last two holes, to capture his first major championship. No suspect has been named in the console's theft. [Main Line Times] Oh Yeahhhhh IOWA CITY—A woman is in jail after police found three stolen laptops and an Xbox in her possession, merch valued at $4,700. Madeline Lane Sliger, 23, has been charged with second degree theft. She told police that her fingerprints were on the items because she had purchased them the night before, for $30 or $40, from a gentleman named "Kool-Aid." [The Iowa City Press-Citizen] At Least He Didn't Use Microsoft Points MILWAUKEE—A 27-year-old man is looking at six years in prison after allegedly buying a used PlayStation 3 from someone with counterfeit money. The seller told police he met the accused, Jonathan Howard, and another man after listing his PlayStation 3 for $450 on Craigslist. He was paid in cash. The seller of the $450 PlayStation 3 said as he walked home, he felt the money, and noticed that it felt fake. Police tested the money and found it to be counterfeit; some of the bills had the same serial number on it. The person who owned the PlayStation 3 valued at $450 picked out the accused from a mugshot book, and Howard was arrested. He will make his first appearance in court on July 19. Currently, the most expensive retail bundle for the Playstation 3 is the PlayStation 3 320 GB PlayStation Move Party Pack, for $479.97 new at GameStop. All others are $349.99 or less. [Oak Creek Patch] Gambling on a Video Game Ends with Rapper Shot Dead WINNFIELD, TEXAS—Police are searching for a suspect after the fatal shooting on Thursday of Addarren Ross, a rising rap star better known as Lil 'Snupe. Police believe Ross and the suspect, Tony D. Holden, 36, of Winnfield, had been betting on a video game, and that Holden subsequently robbed Ross of money. Holden's long rap sheet includes several arrests for violent crimes, including forcible rape and second-degree kidnapping. [Shreveport (La.) Times] Life Sentence for Robbing a Game Store CONWAY, Ark.—Bryant Turner, 26, was sentenced to 55 years plus life in prison for the robbery of Game Point, a Conway, Ark. video game store, on Aug. 27, 2012. The steep sentence was handed down because of Turner's prior conviction on two counts of "terroristic acts." Game Point employees testified that Turner waited until everyone left the store, then came to their counter with three game cases and produced a gun from a plastic bag. He ordered the employees to the ground as he raided the cash registers for $1,200 and took several games. One said Turner told him to "remember me, because I let you live." A jury took 30 minutes to convict Turner, who also faces trial for a July 5 robbery of a gas station. [Log Cabin Democrat] Lots of strange things happen in the pages of your local newspaper or on the 6 o'clock news. If you see something, say something. To me, that is. I'd like to write it up. Remember: You need not reveal your identity. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

In no rec league could I ever throw a no-hitter. Alone on a basketball court I'd need half an hour to score 69 points—and a trampoline to dunk. But I can do all of those things in my living room. Video games give us the conceit of doing the impossible, but only now has one demonstrated how hard it really is. Thirteen years ago, Tiger Woods all but folded space and time in becoming the first man to finish a U.S. Open double digits under par. Casual fans may associate Woods' greatness more with events like The Masters, a modern-day birdiefest that he's won four times. Golfers understand Woods' 2000 U.S. Open is the most dominating performance in major tournament history. His worst round that year was even par (the third) and he won, by 15 strokes, an event that has since seen two champions at five-over. When it came time to build "Legends of the Majors," the showcase mode of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, the 2000 U.S. Open was atop its designers' list of more than 60 moments the game re-enacts from golf history spanning more than a century. The 2000 U.S. Open played out at Pebble Beach, a course that has been in the game for years. "Obviously, this is a big one," said Justin Patel, a designer on the series. "He won by 15 shots; it's the first leg of the 'Tiger Slam,' which is the closest anyone has gotten to winning any sort of 'Grand Slam' after the amateur championships were included." Four rounds at par or better and a 15-stroke victory is as taken for granted in golf's video games as four home runs or a hat trick is in baseball's and hockey's—especially if you're playing on the easiest difficulty. Instead, Patel and his cohort slimmed down the challenge to just five holes—Nos. 10 and 12 through 15 at Pebble, aiming at Sunday pin placements. From this, Woods emerged four under par in 2000. To pass the challenge, you only have to go three under, while hitting three greens with a chance to putt for birdie. I simply could not do it. "This challenge is definitely up there as one of the toughest in the mode," said Patel, a guy who parlayed his own skill at the game into a job designing it. I do not play golf in real life and my online game is self-taught, like a virtual Lee Trevino (whose presence in this game I adore). But even if I knew my own strength on a 5-iron versus a 6 or a 4, or could divine the influence of the impossible wind on the Monterey peninsula, there still is no way in hell I could aim at the flag on No. 12 at Pebble Beach and still hit its green, guarded by the second-most loathsome front-side bunker known to man. The most loathsome is on the par-5 No. 14 at the same course. On the rest, you may make the green in regulation, but it's rakishly tilted hard, toward the Pacific Ocean. You feel like you're putting inside a Batman hideout from the 1960s show. This is in a video game. Patel conceded that their pin placements are not 100 percent true to what Woods was shooting at in 2000. Still, instead of jumping up and down and throwing things and cursing the wind—cursing the wind in a video game!—I just put down my Xbox 360 controller, wondering how in the hell Tiger Woods did this in real life. Sports video games offer these kinds of challenges all the time. NBA 2K11 memorably asked you to recreate Michael Jordan's greatest feats as a player—a mode that, I argue, shows how Jordan's showstopping talent seems more video-game-like than natural. But dropping 63 points on the Celtics, or scoring six goals in football, or tossing a perfect game—more than 1,500 were thrown in MLB 2K13 last month—is not the same, even in a video game. Those performances, as they do in real life, often depend upon the quality of the opposition, and their ease scales as you dial down the difficulty. In real life, a straight-sets victory to win the last round of the U.S. Open of tennis, most recently seen in 2008, can be attributed to an overmatched lower seed or an opponent on a bad day. But a golf course commits no unforced errors. It presents a consistent and unrelenting demand. And in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, it is video gaming's ultimate boss battle. "Legends of the Majors" is rife with difficulty spikes—an historical mode necessarily is. If you're going chronologically through a sports's most impressive performances—and the challenges in "Legends of the Majors" unlock sequentially—the toughest cannot be saved for last. I asked Patel if game testers complained about particular episodes or recommended their difficulty be scaled down. "There were definitely a few challenges that we had to make easier," Patel said. "Most notably was the 'Shot Heard ‘Round the World' by Gene Sarazen [at the 1935 Masters]. This challenge initially called for you to hole out the double eagle as a pass condition. There were a few others that were made easier as well. Arnold Palmer in high winds [at the 1961 British Open] and one of the [Jack] Nicklaus challenges [probably at the '66 Masters] are a couple off the top of my head. The compromises still made sense from a historical point of view and made the mode more enjoyable for the casual user." But there was no compromising on the 2000 U.S. Open. These were the only holes Woods birdied in his final round. Shooting par is an achievement at any U.S. Open, where the grass grows longer and the fairways are pinched tighter, but par is not an interesting video game challenge. So it had to come down to these five holes. I finally beat the 2000 U.S. Open in Legends of the Majors on Friday. I don't liken the feat to any skill, learned or innate, but more to brute force calculation, like a Cray busting down an encrypted site. I just got lucky with the wind at my back on No. 15, which allowed me to pitch into the Riddler's hideout and ram a six foot putt downhill for birdie. Thank God. I will never do that again. Even if I tried. Fewer than 7,500 people, worldwide, have completed this challenge—three under par, three greens in regulation on this five-hole series—according to EA Sports' own telemetry. Fewer than 2,100 have done it on "Legend" difficulty, which means they bettered his performance on the same stretch of holes. Remember I was doing this on Amateur difficulty. I'm still honored to be one of the winners. I came away from it with a newfound respect for Tiger Woods, and for a sport often presented on television as so effortless, if not unathletic, or something disparaged as a casual pursuit of the wealthy. I don't know that I'd come to the same appreciation with my own set of clubs on a real course. I don't know that I have the same appreciation for any other sport—including the ones I've played. Stick Jockey is Kotaku's column on sports video games. It appears Sundays. To contact the author of this post, write to owen@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @owengood.

On seeing the news that there was to be a golf game made with the CryEngine3, my heart went a-pitter-pat. I’ve never been a golf game player, beyond the utterly wonderful Mario Advance Golf for the GBA (WHY NO SEQUEL, NINTENDO? WHYYYYYYYY?!), so it’s not like I’m craving playing this generation’s Links. It’s just, well, I’m craving looking at this generation’s Links, I think. Remember when that game came out, with its confusion of photographs and videoed humans made of seventeen pixels? It was like looking at real golf, if you squinted to the point of closing your eyes and imaging real life golf. And while the sport holds no interest for me, I still find it utterly calming, that expanse of green, the satisfaction of seeing the ball fall in the hole… Imagine it. And carry on imagining, because the enigmatically named Tour Golf Online (crappy Facebook page instead of real website, unfortunately) seems to think all the detail should be far, far in the distance.

(more…)

A portion of an ONM review...

So although Golf looks basic, it is very challenging and that makes every par and birdie immensely satisfying. It's hard work but if you've got the patience and are willing to put up with very dated visuals, it plays a good game of golf.

Full review here

#stickjockey This March will mark the third straight year in which Tiger Woods is not the sole star on the cover of a video game named Tiger Woods. But that shouldn't suggest that the golfer, winless since an embarrassing marital scandal broke two years ago, is being eased out by EA Sports. More »

#tigerwoods Golfers Rickie Fowler and Rory McIlroy prevailed in a three-week vote-off to determine the co-stars of the cover of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, which will be the second game in the series' 15-year run to feature a second golfer in addition to Woods. More »

#tigerwoods As it stages two fan-voted playoffs to choose the next cover in the series, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 has also revealed that the game's stable of 22 golf professionals will be joined by what sound like celebrity golfers. More »

A portion of a Nintendo Life review...

If you love golf games, you probably have something better to play already. And if you don't, this isn't the place the start.

Full review here

Golf gaming just keeps moving further and further back in time on the 3DS, as after the release of the modern excellence of Let's Golf 3D in July and last week's free shipment of the retro NES Open Tournament Golf to Ambassadors we're now getting an even more retro take on the sport Golf from the Game Boy. And it's really, really retro...