Friday, July 23, 2010

The Horror of Zoo Disc Golf

During the summer we see the release of a lot of big sports games, and then there are the smaller games ... the game that are more obscure and off the beaten path, games like WiiWare’s Zoo Disc Golf.
Disc Golf has been very popular on the Nintendo Wii. Games like Wii Sports Resort and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 have nearly perfected it. So, it was only a matter of time that we saw a game dedicated to the sport and that’s what we got in Zoo Disc Golf.

This game was released on the Nintendo Wii’s shop channel in its WiiWare section for $10, which is $10 too much.


The game is ugly and offers little to no fun. Also, why would they choose zoo animals as its characters? That makes no sense at all.

The whole experience will have you asking, “who put this game together and why are they charging us $10?”

If you do ever get the opportunity to play this game, chances are you will want to throw the controller because it’s so hard to play. I’m not talking about the overall difficulty of the game but rather the gameplay, which is simply a piece of garbage. If you can get past the broken gameplay you are still stuck playing the same course, which is even more punishment. Yet, you don’t have to suffer alone, because the game does offer a four player option, so you can torture your friends and family with this sorry excuse of a game.

Then the game has the nerve to keep your scores, but for what? There is no online leaderboards and every time you look at your score you are reminded of the time you lost playing a virtual zoo animal in a disc golf game.

My biggest question is who the heck thought this was a good idea? Yeah, let’s make a disc golf game and have the players play as a kangaroo, a kangaroo that will now haunt me.

The other question I have is why would you release it? Did somebody actually sit down and play this and think it was good?

I feel like they’re laughing at everyone who pays $10 for this game. They should be ashamed, why couldn’t they at least tried to make something passable, I’m not even asking for award-winning, I’m just asking for passable. If they made something passable then I wouldn’t mind so much, but to put something out that is so blatantly bad, well there is no excuse for that.

With all the bad out of the way let’s try to find some good in this game.

Well … it’s set in a zoo that makes their animals play disc golf … that’s kind of funny, but I don’t want to play a game based around that idea.

It’s hard to find anything good in this game. It’s weird, broken and repetitive, which is a shame. If Nintendo is going to have a service where you download exclusive games then it should really put as much attention into those game as it does its other games. Because, when you get a bad game like this it does reflect on Nintendo and Nintendo knows that it can do so much more with its WiiWare games.

Look at the Xbox 360; it just released a game called Limbo on Xbox Live arcade and it’s getting a lot of positive attention, because time was put into that game to make it different and enjoyable. That’s what we should see in WiiWare game. If you want to play a good disc golf game spend the money and pick up either Wii Sports Resort or Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10.

There was another sports game that was released on WiiWare recently by the name of Reel Fishing Challenge II. I haven’t played this one yet, but looking online, I can tell it’s bad. Yet, I just might get it to see how bad it can possibly be.

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