I digress. Basically crazy golf has been an English seaside staple, alongside my spiritual home – the sweaty, smoky arcades featuring Track and Sports and Kung Fu Master – for as long as I can remember.
In fact a quick bit of research into crazy golf (or ‘minigolf’ to give it its proper name – according to the World Minigolf Sport Federation (WMF)) reveals that the game originated in Scotland in the 19th Century founded by some members of the notorious Royal & Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews. Women were becoming interested in golf but the conservative social norms of the era deemed it unacceptable for women to publicly perform such violent movements, hence an 18-hole course of short putting greens was constructed.
Fast forward a mere 140 years, and fast-growing British games company Oxygen Interactive has hit on the idea of taking the sport of mini/crazy golf, injecting it with some quirkily skewed and wackily warped 1950s Americana (Gene Vincent anybody?) and bringing the game to Nintendo’s motion-controlled Wii (in addition to PS2, PC and handheld PSP and DS versions) so that you can effectively enjoy a quality round of extremely-crazy golf in the comfort of your own lounge. There really is only one question – why didn’t anybody think of this before? Sure, there has been a handful of crazy golf-themed videogames in the past, but never anything to set the world alight (though the mini-golf mini-games in Super Monkey Ball came close….).
For the purposes of this preview I spent most of my time looking at the Wii version of King of Clubs purely because this is the format that the game makes most immediate sense on. Also, I feel that Wii Sports Golf was perhaps the weakest game† in Nintendo’s freely-bundled Wii Sports pack, particularly the tricksy putting, and I still have to have my desire for a fun golf game on Wii satiated.
King of Clubs is also a tad bigger than your bog-standard seaside or municipal crazy golf course, with a whopping 96 holes (95 standard holes and one MEGA hole at the end of the course) based across five different themes – Prehistoric, Egyptian, Medieval, Tropical and Future Golf).
The overall flavour is that is the is 1950s Americana - on some seriously strong Speed. This is made clear by the game’s biggest and brashest character: the fat-but-fun-Elvis-impersonator, Big Bubba King, owner of Big Bubba’s Burger Bar and Truck Stop, where King of Clubs is based.
The guys at Oxygen’s Croydon Studios have designed a whole host of equally nutty characters and an even more nutty back-story – involving Bubba coming into a load of money and building his visionary crazy golf theme park in the Nevada Desert. The development team is clearly happy with the gameplay and game world that its build around this hallucinatory future-golf dream. The team members delight in showing off the game to me and playing it among themselves, joshing about which character/course/club/ball combination works best for them.
The courses and their backgrounds are wonderfully colourful, with some really nice touches to keep the player grinning as they discover each new mini-world – with dinosaurs on poles, funny wobbly waves and in general that lovely feeling that you really are in a fully-realised cartoon imaginary world in which the creators have spared no thought to the smallest details.
† This is why reviews come from individuals, I thought the putting was a piss of cake. Ed.