DOS

Links: The Challenge of Golf

Description

Links: The Challenge of Golf is a golf simulation that tries to implement realistic aspects of golf in a video game format.

The game uses VGA 256-color graphics, with courses containing trees, water, sand traps, and the fairway. The addition of ball physics, mulligans, changing the lie of the ball, real digitized environmental sounds, and the ability to view a replay (from multiple angles) helps to emphasize the realistic aspect.

Links comes with one Championship Course, Torrey Pines, located in San Diego, California, USA.

Part of the Following Group

• Links series

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User Reviews

"Looks like I hit the tree, Jim"	Paul Varley (13)
Classic! The ancestor of all golf games.	justinstyles (5)

The Press Says

The One	Jan, 1991	89 out of 100	89
Power Play	Apr, 1991	87 out of 100	87

Forums

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Trivia

Covermount release

A complete version of Links: The Challenge of Golf is available on Classic Games Collection CD featured with the July 2000 issue of PC Gamer Magazine.

Development

According to the back of the manual, here's what it takes to design a Links course:

Play the course. Take over 500 aerial and landscape photos. Videotape the entire course. Obtain topographical and grading drawings. Gather information about prevailing winds and weather. Convert topographic maps into terrain data. Locate greens, tee boxes, bunkers, hazards, etc. Digitize actual vegetation found on the course and place appropriately along with other objects. Use a specially designed course editor to smooth and refine original terrain data. Digitize and install panorama. Install tee markers, ball washers, benches, clubhouse, etc. Playtest and refine for accurate course representation.

This process takes two men months to complete and generates approximately 700,000 bytes of course data--10 times more than other golf games!

Ducks

For no apparent reason, when pressing 'Q', the game will play a sound of a quacking duck and on rare occasions it will play the quack automatically after a particularly bad shot.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1991 (Issue #88) – Action Game of the Year
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #5 Most Innovative Computer Game
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #36 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• Power Play
  • Issue 02/1992 – Best Sports Game in 1991

Information also contributed by rstevenson and Servo.