Kevin's Watch

I only just found out that there will apparently be no more versions of what I thought was the best golf sim out there. The company was bought by another company that went bust.

I gained a great deal of enjoyment from watching real-life golfers playing courses that I knew intimately from playing them on Links (Tiger's shot out of the rough in poor light conditions on the 18th at Firestone in 2000 springs to mind). It was also much more fun watching the British Open at St Andrews when I had played "The Road Hole" and been through the "Valley of Sin" myself.

Since moving all my files and downloaded courses to my new hard-drive a couple of years ago I haven't been able to play the game. When I try to launch it I'm told that the file "linkslauncher.exe" is not found.

Does anybody know a site where I can download that file or an amazon.com type site where I can purchase a copy of Links2003?

Failing that, does anyone have any recommendations about other Golf games?

I always played the Tiger Woods golf, the EA one, and really liked it. I never played Links, so I can't compare. But when I worked at EB, Tiger was easily the best selling golf game.

The Mario Golf games by Camelot are my picks. The ones on the portable systems--Game Boy Color and Advance--are usually considered better than their console counterparts (Nintendo 64 and GameCube, respectively).

Haven't played the Advance version, but I hear it has some nice RPG elements, in addition to twitch skills/sports stuff.

I have a passion for golf games, but I never warmed to the Links series. My limited experience with it was more exasperating than fun.

My all-time favorite golf sim was the Jack Nicklaus series -- unfortunately, it became defunct as well. Which is sad, since I played JN from the 8-bit Nintendo days right through to its last incarnation on PC.

On the PC, I preferred Jack Nicklaus over Links because: I thought JN had a cleaner, more intuitive user interface; it had more gorgeous, more "3D"-looking foliage; and it had "better" golf physics. All of this is, of course, very subjective.

And, of course, nowadays the Tiger Woods games have spoiled all of us with their 3D-accelerated razzle-dazzle. I do enjoy the Tiger Woods series, but I need to seriously upgrade my system to get the most out them.

Oh, and I'm very fond of the Mario golf games. Hey, Lord Foul, don't diss the N64 version if you haven't tried it. It's a pretty deep golf game, in my opinion.

I've always found golf games to be hugely frustrating, even Mario Golf as it would so often pit you against a player who could hit way further than you could and never made any mistakes. I like the idea of the Tiger Woods games using the analog stick to decide power, draw and fade as opposed to the timing-based systems in other games, I've still never gotten the chance to play it though.

I do have a favourite golf game, but it's Sid Meier's SimGolf. You get to design your own course which you can play on (after a fashion) and host tournaments that you can also enter. It's a lot of fun!

Has anyone played the version of golf on Wii sports? Its great fun.

Warmark wrote:Has anyone played the version of golf on Wii sports? Its great fun.

Yes!!

Everything on Wii is great fun.

Ahh, sweet Blessed Wii....

Thanks for the tips everybody.

Sounds like Tiger Woods might be the way to go. Just been reading about it, and while it seemingly only has 15 courses (I had about 50 or so on Links) it has The Old Course, Pebble Beach, Doral (which I haven't played since the 2D (totally flat courses) golf games 15+ years ago) and my old nemesis Cog Hill.

I've recently upgraded somewhat (Dual Core 2.61 GHz, 1Gb RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT Graphics Card) so hopefully it'll run OK on my system.

I've heard the Wii game is great too, it'd be interesting to know if it actually helps your real-life swing by encouraging good rhythm (I'm assuming from my limited knowledge of Wii that you stand up and swish it in a golf-stroke-like manner).

Matrixman wrote:
Oh, and I'm very fond of the Mario golf games. Hey, Lord Foul, don't diss the N64 version if you haven't tried it. It's a pretty deep golf game, in my opinion.

I'm sure all their golf games are fine. There just seems to be a trend of Camelot making Mario Golf/Tennis for the console and then refining the formula on the portable. And to me it seems that golf is more suited for a casual/pick-up-and-play style, such as a GBA or DS.

But nah, not dissing. I've played Camelot's Golden Sun RPGs, and I know they're a quality developer.