Links 2000
MacPlay
Rating 4/5
Me? Playing golf online for several hours at a time with someone across the country? Never! Well, I have been doing just that over the past few weeks with this new version of the venerable Links golf-sim franchise.
Links 2000 is absolutely stunning to look at. Each course is lovingly detailed. Most striking for me was St Andrews, which is as beautiful here as in real life. If you play this game and then visit the course for the first time, you'll feel right at home in the home of golf... although you might wonder where the Microsoft billboards are along the sides of the fairway. I'm sure that blimps and balloons are rare sights in St Andrews as well, given the windy nature of the area, which is well accounted for in the gameplay. Some of the other courses included with Links 2000 seem to have lots of wind as well, but that fits, since they tend to be on islands, including Hawaii.
Another stunning aspect to this game is the animation for the individual golfers. The flowing motion looks as real as possible, and you quickly forget that the golfer is a computer character on the screen. Your doppelganger and your opponents display pleasure or pain when they make shots? everything from the fist in the air to dropping the head in shame. Even the spectators are beautifully detailed.
There are a few minor graphic glitches, however, when your player gets near the edge of the screen or next to a tree. Then again, this is not the object of the game, so if you are half-way decent you will never see this particular problem.
Links 2000 has all sorts of options to cater for everyone from the casual golf-sim player to the golf-sim nutcase. The gameplay is so easy that the Quick-play function literally takes two clicks till you are on the green and playing. The full interface can be a bit of pain to learn, though, so there is an in-depth lesson system in the game. If you like diving into the game right away, it will take you a bit of time to figure out what the icons on the side mean. It would have been nice to have some way to get the speed of the wind in m.p.h., rather than a frequently inaccurate little bar. Also, it is sometimes difficult to tell exactly the slope of the green even if you have the grid set up.
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