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Green the putt. Ball the club. Falcom the Nihon. Meme the name.
Before Nintendo & HAL Laboratory codified the bare basics of home golf games—graphical aiming, multi-step power bar, you know the drill—experiments like this obscure Falcom release were the norm. They weren't alone: everyone from Atari to T&E Soft tried their hand at making either casual putt romps or hardcore simulations. Both consoles & micro-computers of the era were hard-pressed to make golf feel fun, even if they could simplify or complexify it. As a regular cassette game coded in BASIC, Computer the Golf always had humble aims, uninterested in changing trends.
I still managed to have a good time despite the archaic mechanics & presentation, however. Each hole's sensibly designed & placed to reflect growing expectations for player skill. Your club variety & multi-step power bar (yes, these existed before Nintendo's Golf!) also make precision shots easier to achieve. For 3500 yen, players would have gotten decent value, especially if you wanted something from Falcom with more of a puzzle feel. There's also the requisite scorecard feature, plus cursor key controls at a time when most PC-88 & FM-7 releases stuck with numpad keys.
The game's code credits Norihiko Yaku as programmer, and very likely the only creator involved. It's hard to remember a time when just one person could make a fully-featured home game, let alone at Falcom prior to their massive '80s successes. I appreciate the quaintness & low stakes of this pre-Xanadu, pre-Ys software you'd just find on the shelf in a bag, sitting next to all those Apple II imports that started the company. Soon you'd have naught but xRPGs & graphic adventures from the studio, all requiring more and more talented people to create. Sorcerian & Legacy of the Wizard make no mention of bourgeois sports; that's for the rest of bubble-era Japan to covet!
Maybe this will remain a footnote, but it's an inoffensive one. It's ultimately one of the best J-PC sports games for its era, right alongside T&E Soft's fully 3D efforts. Paradigm shifts would come with No. 1 Golf on Sharp X1, then Nintendo's Golf and competing pro golf series from Enix & Telenet. The times were a-changin'.
Before Nintendo & HAL Laboratory codified the bare basics of home golf games—graphical aiming, multi-step power bar, you know the drill—experiments like this obscure Falcom release were the norm. They weren't alone: everyone from Atari to T&E Soft tried their hand at making either casual putt romps or hardcore simulations. Both consoles & micro-computers of the era were hard-pressed to make golf feel fun, even if they could simplify or complexify it. As a regular cassette game coded in BASIC, Computer the Golf always had humble aims, uninterested in changing trends.
I still managed to have a good time despite the archaic mechanics & presentation, however. Each hole's sensibly designed & placed to reflect growing expectations for player skill. Your club variety & multi-step power bar (yes, these existed before Nintendo's Golf!) also make precision shots easier to achieve. For 3500 yen, players would have gotten decent value, especially if you wanted something from Falcom with more of a puzzle feel. There's also the requisite scorecard feature, plus cursor key controls at a time when most PC-88 & FM-7 releases stuck with numpad keys.
The game's code credits Norihiko Yaku as programmer, and very likely the only creator involved. It's hard to remember a time when just one person could make a fully-featured home game, let alone at Falcom prior to their massive '80s successes. I appreciate the quaintness & low stakes of this pre-Xanadu, pre-Ys software you'd just find on the shelf in a bag, sitting next to all those Apple II imports that started the company. Soon you'd have naught but xRPGs & graphic adventures from the studio, all requiring more and more talented people to create. Sorcerian & Legacy of the Wizard make no mention of bourgeois sports; that's for the rest of bubble-era Japan to covet!
Maybe this will remain a footnote, but it's an inoffensive one. It's ultimately one of the best J-PC sports games for its era, right alongside T&E Soft's fully 3D efforts. Paradigm shifts would come with No. 1 Golf on Sharp X1, then Nintendo's Golf and competing pro golf series from Enix & Telenet. The times were a-changin'.