Happy Fun Golf

Posted 08/25/2005 at 3:53pm | by

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By Tom McDonald

As most golfers will tell you, golf isn’t a multiplayer-friendly game. A golfer competes against the course: The other golfer is just there for companionship. Comparison of scores is mostly used to determine who pays for the drinks at the 19th hole. So when I heard about a massively multiplayer golf game, my first thought was “Koreans.”

You see, massively multiplayer has long occupied an important niche in Korean computer gaming culture, with millions of gamers signing up for arcane games often played in “PC Baangs” (literally “PC rooms”) thick with cigarette smoke and keyboards sticky from spilled soda.

Without a role-playing hook, however, a game is unlikely to catch on in Korea. Thus, we get an unlikely collision of anime style, leveling-up, inventories, and golf in Shot-Online. In the game, you create a character, practice and play to gain experience, and then level up to increase stats such as driving power and endurance.

Along the way you earn money, compete in matches, and at some point, take on quests to obtain special gear. The game is, like many Korean MMO games, extremely rough around the edges, with plenty of Korenglish (“Please look for character who has mark of interrogation above head!”), a pathetically small library of sound effects encoded at approximately 8Kb/s (combined), and a putting grid lifted from Tron.

Yet for all its homemade qualities (or perhaps because of them), the game is strangely compelling. Because of the deliberate hobbling of level 1 characters (a perfect hit with a 1-wood should go further than 150 yards), the bizarre role-playing stat-twiddling item-gathering elements become a quest to squeeze out a little more yardage, a little more accuracy. The “massively” part of the MMO equation is of dubious merit, but it does provide a leaderboard and a server full of live golf competitors, which in turn helps increase the amount of money you can win and thus the goodies you can buy.

And like every good RPG, it’s all about the goodies, whether it’s a +15 Sword of Healing or a +2 pitching wedge.