By Hot Shots Golf Open Tee
First, the positives: HSGOT is a beautiful looking game on the PSP. The golf courses, while entirely fictional, are animated very realistically. They even seem to use paintings or photographs for the background. The golfers themselves are the typical “big-head” Japanese characters. By winning tournaments in the single player challenge mode, you can unlock new golfers, new caddies, and new accessories to customize your golfers. These unlockable features are what make HSGOT so compelling; it’s almost like a role playing game. The trick in leveling up your golfer to release new golf courses is to enter the challenges that have a solid gold star next to them; an empty star or no star just means you’ll unlock a small item. It took me a while to figure out why I never advanced to level 2 even though I had played thirty games. But once you do concentrate on the starred challenges, you’ll level up quickly. There are six golf courses, but HSGOT tries to divvy them up into 9-hole experiences that can be played in 10-15 minute chunks of time. There are other modes, like a putting challenge, which is a bit interesting, and multiplayer modes (that I haven’t tried) for the local wan, not the Internet.
On the negative side, HSGOT has only 6 courses, and I haven’t seen anything as interesting as the wilder courses (like the desert course) on the console version. The caddies are present but you can only hear them and not see them; I really miss that Jerry Lewis Nutty Professor guy following me on the greens. The golfers on HSGOT seem to be all new—I’ve never seen them, at least—and I’ve got half of them unlocked. I haven’t seen any of the usual suspects like Tiffany, the Hollywood guy, Granny Goodness, or the Samuel Jackson type from HSG3 or HSG4. The lack of courses, the missing caddies and golfers make this lose a star in my book; I hope that Clap Hanz will fix this in the next PSP version. They really need to add a multiplayer mode thru the Wi-Fi Internet connection as well. The unlockable items need some work as well; they change your appearance but don’t affect your game experience in the slightest.
All in all, this is the best golf game currently available for the PSP. While I love Tiger Woods’ on PS2 and Xbox, the TW PSP game had terrible load times and choppy graphics. Hot Shots Golf Open Tee has incredibly fast load times and almost no delay when going to the next hole. The graphics are HSGOT are very sweet and smooth. If you like golf games, this one’s for you. Even if you don’t like golf in real life, you should check it out. Nuff said.
