It’s the late 90s. You’re off work. You call up your best buds and you collectively decide to go to TGIFriday’s for some half-off appetizers and a pitcher of beer. When you get there, the waiter tells you that all the trivia game devices have been lent to customers. Playing games was part of the fun on the journey to TGIFriday’s. What are you going to do now with said friends?
Then you see it in the corner.
Waiting. Calling. Ready to pinch the sh*t out of your hands with its gorgeous round cueball controller.
Welcome to Golden Tee.
It defines what polo-wearing, ‘look at my new beamer’ type of gamers live to play at a TGIFriday’s on a Wednesday night.
Well, you can relive those glory days now because developer Digital Eclipse and publisher Atari have released Golden Tee Arcade Classics. It’s a collection of different games by the same folks, and those games include golfing (duh), a variety of shuffleboard games, and bowling. While the graphics have not been reworked, the core gameplay is still intact, and not having to put a gazillion quarters to keep playing is also there.
So, unpack that IZOD, call your bros over to your house, they should be retired by now, and prepare yourself for this review.
Arcade accurate
While I’m sure there are a bunch of Golden Tee purists out there, they are in luck with this release. Golden Tee Arcade Classics works, looks, and feels like what it was in the old days. You’re thrown into a golf game, pick a famous actual course (that was a big deal back in the day), and you’re off and swinging.
The good part of Golden Tee Arcade Classics is that the games are picture-perfect with their arcade counterpart. You get a lot of grainy late-90s graphics that perfectly emulate the graphic progression gaming was going through as it was just discovering 3D. The first game on the Golden Tee list is Golden Tee 3D. Developers were just discovering a non-3D world where you had to consider not only X and Y, but also Z. That learning curve meant depending on calculating distances, designing graphics to take that calculation into consideration when players, or golf balls, were in motion, and then trying not to blend said graphics with other graphics around it while moving them in a 3D environment. During the 90s, we didn’t notice this amount of effort, as 3D was evolving before our eyes, but now, it will look rather rough when you’re playing the game.
Now, you can take that entire rambling paragraph in two ways. You can accept that this collection is not a remake of arcade hits that people adored back in the day, and that the graphics accurately represent the time this game was born within, and you’re okay with revisiting that, even if it is rough to look at when playing. I’m a retro-reviewer, so the graphics didn’t bother me. I still play Pac-Man for crying out loud, so my taste in graphics is unrefined.
The second way of approaching this collection is that you can’t accept that graphical scheme and were hoping for something more updated. Well, you’re not going to get the latter, so you might as well enjoy the former. Graphically, it is tough to get used to the looks and style, as playing the game means you’re taking a step backward with expectations. But the game’s golfing is still quite fun, regardless of looks. Maybe that is the saving grace. Well, it must be.
While the graphics are rough, and you can apply your emotions with the above two directions previously mentioned, the games are still quite fun to play, especially on the controls side of the tracks. Accuracy of swing and distance are determined by your thumbstick skills, where moving just slightly to the left or right means that you’re going to hook or curve the ball after contact. While it’s not as fun as a cueball spin with the original arcade game, it’s equally challenging, which keeps the original gameplay fresh.
Staying with controls, I think I might be most impressed by this aspect of the gameplay. There are various ways to do swinging, bowling, or whatnot. One of the ways is to use the touchpad on the PlayStation 5 controller. For me, using that touch pad is such a way to go when it comes to emulating the cueball accuracy of the game. While deep down I do wish they had released a cueball controller with the game (Atari did it in the 80s with Centipede, why not now?), using the touch pad gives you a good translation to that old cueball method. Is it accurate? No, but neither was the cueball. The thumbsticks are not accurate either, but more accurate than the touchpad.
Anyway, the control scheme options, which vary depending on your comfort level, have something for every type of gaming need, so you can play the game with various controller schemes. That’s a huge plus in my book, as the devs did a great job of sorting out possible ways people would want to play this game. And whatever type of player you are with Golden Tee, that control scheme you choose in one game will follow you throughout other games in the collection. That’s a pretty neat side effect of controller scheme choice.
Now, about that collection…
The collection
The games that come packed with Golden Tee Arcade Classics are mostly golf, although there are a couple of surprises as well. The collection is as follows:
- Golden Tee 3D Golf
- Golden Tee ’97
- Golden Tee ’98
- Golden Tee ’99
- Golden Tee 2K
- Golden Tee Classic
- Shuffleshot
- World Class Bowling
So, how do I feel about these games? Well, besides course changes, I’m not sure anything dramatically changed as more Golden Tee games were released. The graphics are still the same in each one, the controls are the same, the physics are the same, and nothing about the gameplay takes a gigantic leap forward with improvement. Is that good or bad? Probably somewhere along the lines of ‘fine’ because that wasn’t the big focus when people were playing the arcade game.
The big difference between each game was the courses you could play on, which probably hyped up gamers at the time. Honestly, that aspect of the game was gold, as other golfing series were doing the same type of push with their offerings. For example, if you were someone who loved PGA Tour games back in the day, you would understand the fascination with this one construct difference because you probably bought expansion packs for the PGA Tour with different courses. Yes, they did that back in the 90s. Want to play Valhalla? Buy it separately! Want to play Augusta? Buy it separately! Again, the biggest difference between the Golden Tees in this collection was the courses. It mattered back in the day, and it’s still the difference in the collection between the packed games.
Now, beyond golf, the other two games are not as completely…golden. Starting with Shuffleshot, it’s a game with various shuffleboard modes you can play. While I enjoy in-person shuffleboard, because I’m old and simple, the controls in this game feel off. It’s tough to get a good gauge on pushing accuracy, as the controls don’t feel as assured when pushing a shuffle puck down its board, and the computer is vicious as hell, so making any mistakes means that you lose. And you will lose a lot in this game. Anyway, Shufffleshot never felt 100% comfortable playing and created more frustration than enjoyment. I’m sure someone will enjoy it, as it is a departure from golf, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. It’s like the Darak Souls of shuffleboard games.
The other game included in the collection is World Class Bowling, and I enjoyed the hell out of this one. It’s a simple game of bowling where you can control the ball’s curve, power, and every other aspect that bowlers must worry about when playing the actual game. It felt good, fun, and it was something I revisited more than the Golden Tee games. The ease of use with the controllers and the quick gameplay never created frustration, just a nice, pleasant game of bowling.
I’m a sucker for bowling. I owned a Wii.
Anyway, the collection is solid with more Golden Tee games than not, and each is just as entertaining as the next. While there isn’t a terrible difference between the golf games, and you’ll find that out quickly, the additional shuffleboard and bowling games break the monotony caused by the lack of differences in golfing gameplay.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap this review.
Conclusion
Golden Tee Arcade Classics, from developer Digital Eclipse and publisher Atari, is a great trip down memory lane, but it feels and acts like it’s still in the 90s. The collection does enough to bring simple fun with uncomplicated physics and frustrating elements that modern golfing games bring to the table nowadays. The additional games included help to make the collection a bit more fun, as well as feel like it offers more than just golf.
