Ah yeah I was kinda shocked when I ran into up-zero in their other Japanese Saturn releases after getting spoiled by up-down in Saturn Devil’s Course. ; D
Don’t think I know about a special perfect shot power boost thing, is this just in the Japanese MD releases, or other platforms too?
That’s interesting about the ROM dates for the MD releases, so they had those all converted and then spaced out the releases as they thought best.
New 3D Golf Simulation: Pebble Beach no Hatou (Super Famicom 4/10/1992)
(ペブルビーチの波涛, which Google Translate says means “The Roaring Waves of Pebble Beach”)
(Came out for SNES in the US in the same month–and out in Europe the same year–as “True Golf Classics: Pebble Beach Golf Links.”)
There is now music during play (it does get a BIT repetitive eventually) and the space around the green isn’t as weird (except in those small turns near the hole where the hole follows your view for 1 pixel…) as in the previous, first T&E Soft Super Famicom golf outing (“New 3D Golf Simulation: Harukanaru Augusta”). The greens are still pretty steep but the holes now suck the ball right in if it gets close. The beach cliffs are scary and aside from maybe three or so long cliffside holes in a row around mid-course that all feel a bit similar (and scary), the hole variety is pretty remarkable.
While the previous game had kind of abstract, dithery shapes as foliage, here they switch to the heavily hand-drawn style that if memory serves is used for at least most of the rest of the series–which is too bad because I thought the abstracted trees looked a lot nicer.
Caddie Dawg: “Nice recovery.”
Me: “Thanks, Dawg.”
There are two different lies in sand, I think depending on how hard your ball plops in there:
Some Wile E. Coyote physics after I finally flubbed a tee shot:
I was going through my pics folder the other day and found a bunch of screens from when I played through the fanslated Psy-O-Blade MD, so yeah, here those are, for some different T&E goodness:
Honestly, wouldn’t really recommend this game unless you like that style of Japanese adventure game that usually involves just click on the same thing repeatedly to get all the messages before moving on. I mean, it’s a cool game for that, but that is a pretty big hurdle.
New 3D Golf Simulation: Waialae no Kiseki (Super Famicom)
Released 9/18/1992–it actually came out almost a year earlier in the States, as “True Golf Classics: Waialae Country Club.”
ワイアラエの奇蹟 (Sega Retro) - “The Miracle at Waialae” (Google Translate). In Hawaii. ‘Waiʻalae means “mudhen water”’ (Wikipedia):
'Wai’alae is a Hawaiian word for spring water of the mud hen, which comes from mud hen ('alae) and spring water (wai).[5][6][7][8][9][10][11]
In the 1830s and 1840s, the location of the artesian spring for the spring water (or wai) in Wai’alae was a closely guarded secret known only by an elderly couple. King Kamehameha III drank from this spring while visiting. During the twentieth century, the location of the spring became unknown.[12][13]
The wetlands in the Hawaiian Islands are a winter habitat for the American coot which is also known as “mud hen”.[14] The Hawaiian mud hen (or ‘alae), which is referred to in Wai’alae, is the endemic Gallinula sandvicensis and is a close relative of the coot.[5][15] Mud hens, moorhens, marsh hens, and swamp hens are closely related.’
Seems to play pretty much like the previous game, N3DGS Pebble Beach no Hatou.
There’s rain at one point (and a rainbow maybe after it–at any rate a rainbow shows up on some holes sometimes), not sure if it affects the play. The trees and backgrounds are a bit better drawn. There’s still some spacial funkiness when you get down to attempting fine aiming–and still some wild bounces off a green now and then.
No caddie names here.
New 3D Golf Simulation: Devil’s Course (Super Famicom)
Released 3/5/93–it came out in October of that year in the States as “True Golf Classics: Wicked 18”; it also came out on Mega Drive in Japan as just “Devil’s Course” (1/28/94); not to mention there were 3DO and PC98 versions–and there’s a Saturn “Devil’s Course” later.
The first hole is all right
but I don’t like the next bunch.
The last 3 are pretty fun. The weird frictionless surface you first encounter some time before that is kind of a hoot.
I might’ve just got lucky but the physics treated me a little better here (in Hell!) than they have in T&E Soft’s earlier Super Famicom golf games: I didn’t get any really odd bounces off the greens, and even that nutty ricochet shot I tried to get out of the cul-de-sac in that pharaoh canyon actually worked out like–well, like you would think a hard-driven golf ball might bounce off a cliff face. ^_ ^
If you make a “nice on” onto the green you get a little musical riff, which I don’t think happened in the previous games–but it also stops the background music for the rest of that hole, leaving you putting in sudden, weird silence. If you go into Options and toggle the BGM option off/on, the music will restart–on your next shot, not the current one. ‘pp’
Luckiest shots:
Cutting up a few levels on hole 2:
In the MD games power shot only on the Japanese versions. You need to get perfect power and perfect hit point, but it will only fire randomly something like 25% of the time. The screen flashes, there’s a different hit sound, and the ball goes slightly further, can’t remember the percentage increase.
The games have a weather system where the rainy holes are decided at game/course load using a random roll, and the holes directly preceding and following have overcast with a different palette. On MD in some games the final hole also has a different palette. Rain does affect play, the game has two different sets of physics values: one for dry one for rain.
On MD you can reset the game (it’s one of the menu options) and get different weather rolls.
T&E SOFT building/office/real-estate lore
https://x.com/JohnAndersen21/status/2101315379259703477
https://x.com/JohnAndersen21/status/2101315383122653464
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Older, with no bsky mirror
