If you’ve been in any bar, or sports-oriented restaurant, you have seen a Golden Tee machine. Usually, it’s tucked away in some corner between the claw machine and some sort of deer hunting video game. I’d also be willing to bet that some of you have played each of the first three holes and then refused to sink more dollar bills into the game, while others have probably played for money.
Incredible Technologies is still making these games, and even released an Arcade 1up home version, trackball included. They’ve teamed up with Digital Eclipse and Atari to reproduce home versions for consoles, with no trackball in sight for the PlayStation 5, which seems like par for the course. Read on, digital golfer. Welcome to Golden Tee Arcade Classics.
The game knows that you want that sweet, sweet track ball, and fortunately for you, they have a solution. Right out the gate, there’s a 20-step tutorial on how to use the virtual hand and the onscreen trackball. I want to point out that this is not a hands-on tutorial, so everything you learn here will be tested on the fairway.
The tutorial guides you from back and forward swings, to aim assists. It even tells you that pushing different buttons lets you change your aim using the bumpers, and changing your clubs using the directional pad. Your slices, fades, draws and hooks are still done using the trackball. They know. They get it.
If you forget any of this, you can click the right trigger and an overlay will pop up to show you how to do all your shots. Nothing fancy here, just a little something to keep you moving. If you’re a pro Golden Tee player, this will help you transfer from trackball to gamepad. If you’re a filthy casual, like myself, you will probably toggle this often. This is not Hot Shots Golf. This is 1995 arcade golf, baby. Get your virtual clubs, hop in that cart with your caddie, and get out there.
You immediately have six titles to choose from. Golden Tee 3D Golf is the first. This is no remake. This is a faithful reproduction of those arcade games. The graphics are the same. The sound is the same. There are no enhancements. This isn’t in HD. The pixels aren’t smoothed out. You’re not going to overheat anything playing this. This is literally Golden Tee 3D Golf from 1995. The announcer, and the crowd noise are nostalgic, for lack of a better term. This is not a knock by any means. It’s more so a nod to the magic that is Digital Eclipse. You can use a CRT filter, and even a filter to have a “curved monitor,” if you so choose.
Let’s talk more about this non-trackball situation. There is a virtual hand that floats over the trackball. Once you push the circle button, the hand lights up, giving you full control of it. While holding the circle button, you bring the left control stick down for your back swing, and up for your forward swing. When you’re driving, it’s fine to just go down and then back up for the longest drive. The trackball actually makes trackball sound effects when you have your hand on it, which is kind of fun.
Your approach to the green while using these controls gets a little tricky. You don’t want to pull the stick back and let it go, as it gets you next to nothing. You don’t want to hit the ball like a driver, because then you’ll be six over par on hole six. The silver lining is that the putts go in most of the time no matter how hard you putt.
You can change the controls for each platform. For PlayStation users, you get to use the virtual hand at default. You can change this to use the touchpad on the PlayStation 4 or 5 controller, which will require even more practice. The easiest version I found is the oddly explained aim assist option.
You use the control stick to make a directional arrow appear. Once you hit your confirm button, that will set your back swing. You can then push the control stick up however you want to aim it and hit confirm again. This also takes a lot more practice, and probably won’t make you play any better, as I just missed a putt from 10 feet using this control scheme. I don’t know how anyone played this game with a trackball, so if you’re fortunate to have one, good luck. I would like to point out that you can control the sensitivity of the control stick, but I don’t know what that entails, as I’m still knocking balls out of bounds. Maybe I’m just bad at this. I turned it down from 127 to 100.
There are five other Golden Tee games represented here. Golden Tee 97, 98, 99, 2K, and Classic. The major differences between them are the courses, and it’s 18 holes per course. You’ll get a few different voices and screens in the later games, but they’re practically the same. The golf games allow up to four-player couch co-op, or if you want to, use a game share program on PlayStation or Steam. No word if the Nintendo Switch 2’s share play or mouse control features will be utilized at the time of this review. But that’s not all that’s here.
Digital Eclipse has also added World Class Bowling and Shuffle Shot to break up some of the driving and putting—and that could be the biggest selling point. The trackball works the same here. How you aim is where the ball is going. You can move from side to side and hook your ball to either side from where you’re standing. Again, the quicker you move the control stick, the quicker that ball shoots down the lane. This is literally a time passer, and something extra to play. The game moves very fast, so you could probably finish one in five minutes. You can play up to four players here, too. If you changed the controls for golf, they carry over to bowling. That aim assist could be easier here.
There are two modes with World Class Bowling. Regulation is standard bowling. Flash allows you to up your score based on a flashing scoreboard. Whatever score is flashing when your ball hits the pins is the score you get if you get a strike. You get half of those points on a spare. If you hit the pins on “Flash,” you get a big fat zero on a strike or spare. Do not expect any high-profile physics here. This game came out in 1995, a whole year before Ten Pin Alley came out for PlayStation One.
Shuffleshot is one to four players and has four different games within: Bocce, Bullseye, Shuffleboard and ShuffleAlley. I don’t know much about Shuffleboard, but again, your controls carry over here, too. They do pair you up with a CPU player if you have no one to play with, and you can just watch them obliterate you. Basically, you slide your puck down a lane, and wherever it lands will be your score. You can also knock your opponents’ pucks off a scoring area, and you get extra points if the puck is hanging off the edge. You get no points if your puck doesn’t make it to the scoring area, or falls off the side, like all of my pucks did in every single mode. The pro challenge gives you one round a piece in all four modes, with no CPU player. Just you, sliding your pucks into oblivion.
The overall presentation is your Digital Eclipse layout. You can view the flyers for the games that were once found in these things called “magazines.” You have load and save states, which are needed once you’re 14 over par on hole 7 now. You can access a tutorial on any game. The player settings can be set to each player, up to four. You can change the hand type, and the trackball, and even remap controls. Screen modes are simple, as they come in original and full. You can also change the timer, the rounds per game in Shuffleshot, and even change the CPU skill level if you’re getting beaten so badly they’re going to kick you out of the country club. Last but not least, you can quit at any time and go back to the main menu, which you’ll probably do a lot.
I suppose if you played these games and want to bring them home without having to assemble an Arcade1Up cabinet, then this is a good game to grab. The lack of online play with these games kind of bugs me. The new feature is that you can take a Mulligan, which just makes you feel worse when you’re playing digital golf. There is a practice suite available with different shot types, but only for golf. I guess I’d rather suffer through the main game.
I suppose if you have a console that lets you share the game online, then this is ok. I don’t know if I’m gathering the crew to play some Golden Tee, but I’m sure someone out there is, and that’s all that is wanted here. I don’t want to call it bare bones, but this isn’t the golf game to get this year. Unless you’re a diehard fan. I know a few.
* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.
