Top 10 Golf Games

04. Lee Trevinos Fighting Golf

If you do not count the NES as a formative game console in your personal gamer history, chances are pretty good that you are not going to quickly understand why this one made the list. That being so, all that we ask is that you bear with us for a moment while we explain why this was not simply a 'seemed like a good idea at the time' game.

The NES - Nintendo Entertainment System - was a cutting edge game console in its day. What that means in simple terms is that it offered gamers the best game play experiences that they could find at least in terms of gaming at home. Arcade cabinet based games were still superior at the time, that is true, but then again you had to constantly feed those quarters so...

When Lee Travinos Fighting Golf arrived on the scene in 1988 it was not simply just another four-player sports title for the NES created by SNK, it was seriously advanced for its era.

Sure, it featured the sort of things you expect to find in an arcade golf game - sand and water traps, trees, the roughs, and complex shots, it also sported a graduated set of four characters that each player could choose, each of which had different skill levels and abilities, which meant that relative challenges were well within the player's control.

The four playable characters consisted of Super Mex Lee Trevino (average range and shot power with average control difficulty), Big Jumbo (very good range and shot power but much harder to control), Miracle Chosuke (average range and shot power with average control difficulty), and Pretty Amy (limited range but easier to control).

While the name of the game may at first make it sound like it is a battle-golf experience like Cybertiger, in fact that is not the case at all. If there is any battling to be found here, it is between the player and their character - and making good golf - not between each of the opposing players. Just saying.

The thing about Fighting Golf is that despite its really crude appearance and game play mechanics compared to today's games, at the time this was actually a very good game and one that, in the interest of full transparency, we have to admit ate up hundreds of hours of game play.

It offered multiple courses in North America and a course in Japan, and a very 8-bit graphical and sound play experience that is exactly the sort of thing we remember when we think about games of that era. As in nostalgically think about games of that era.

What Fighting Golf brought to the table was a challenging golf game at a time when challenging usually meant flawed. It was certainly not flawed; but it did have tight requirements.

Picking the correct club and paying attention to the distances to the hole, your lie, the wind direction and speed, and your swing power were at least as important in FG as they are in modern games.

Learning the course, the wind physics, and the capability of your clubs was the starting point for most players. Clearing a hole at par was often a major accomplishment - while making it under par? Yeah, that was cool if rare.