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🕹 Game Wot I Have Played: Links 2004

I love a bit of golf. Not the outdoor variety, that’s far too much like hard work, but digital? Yeah. I’ll happily while away a hungover Sunday morning with a seven iron.

I’ve always been partial, ever since Leaderboard on the 8bits. I don’t know why, exactly, there’s just something relaxing about it, sans walking; a satisfying play-loop of club selection and swing, cinematic, and the polite, psychologically re-enforcing, ripple of applause when you're done.

The design peaked, for me, with Everybody’s Golf on Sony’s handhelds. A delightful mix of the right game, on the right format, but there’s another that I’d put up there: Microsoft’s Links 2004, which popped up on my socials this week. It's a criminally underrated masterpiece that landed early in the life of the Xbox OG, and to this day I think it’s the best “serious” golf game I’ve ever played.

It suffers a little by aping the graphic design of TV — something that ages it horribly, and has no place in a videogame — but it’s remarkably restrained when compared to say, EA’s stuff. The menus are clean, simple and do what they need to. The replays are low on wank. There’s a languid, relaxed style to the whole thing, that carries through to the slightly hushed tones of the commentary. But you’re unlikely to hear much of that as the Xbox OG has a killer feature: the custom music playlist.

Rip a CD and play games with your own music? Can you imagine it?! What a time to be alive!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GzUB0GhoDNE

That’s Global Underground: 025, Deep Dish, Afterclub (Dubfire Mix). My driver of choice. Smokey, after-hours prog, for my smokey, Sunday morning hangover.

Links took full advantage of this feature, and consequently it's a game that respects your vibe. I love it for that.

Thinking about it now, it may well have been the first game I played that used the analogue sticks for swing and spin. If not, it’s the first to leave its feel in my muscle memory, as it was calibrated precisely. The perfect swing had a rhythm, a pace, that pressured you just so. The hooks and slices of early play could be mastered. The controls become reliable. You could curve long drives, left or right, wherever you wanted them, earning those slow golf claps. Played for, and got. Etc.

And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Give the player a skill with some nuance, and the space to display it with flair, even if they’re half-comatose, horizontal on an oversized sofa, with spliff ash all over their chest…

I can’t tell you anything about the courses, which holes were especially challenging… Nadda. All that is long gone. What’s left are fond memories of lazy hours, sometimes playing randos online, and listening to music. Golf without exercise, or dress code.

Like so many Microsoft IPs, Links is no more. I heard that it was killed as part of the deal to get EA’s sports games onto Xbox, which seems likely. For me, it was superior to PGA Tour in nearly every respect and I’ve occasionally wondered what golf, as an eSport, would be like if the Sunday morning hangover demographic had been better supported.

And then I remember; we’d still be playing for hats and skirts in Everybody’s Golf. <3