Classic of the Month - Neo Turf Masters

Manufacturer:	SNK
Developer:	Nazca
Genre:	Sports
Board:	NeoGeo MVS
Year:	1996

Here on Arcade Throwback, I talk a lot about blowing things up in shoot 'em ups or knocking street punks about in beat 'em ups, but rarely do I talk about the more sedate side of arcade gaming, like golf game Neo Turf Masters on the SNK Neo Geo system.

I first played it with a couple of college friends in an arcade in my home town. In was one of the games on a Neo Geo MVS that also contained Art of Fighting and Metal Slug. The arcade in question was very much focussed on fruit machines; the only other game cabinet I can remember was Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting, although I feel sure there must have been others. Whatever is the case, there was not a lot of choice. I can't remember who suggested playing Neo Turf Masters (I'm trying to recall a singular event from nearly two decades ago), but I have a feeling it was the same friend who had introduced me to Microprose Golf on the Commodore Amiga five years earlier. Now I'm no sports fan, not football, not rugby, not cricket, not motorsports, not snooker and certainly not golf, but for a while in 1991 I was hooked on Microprose Golf; Neo Turf Masters not only looked a lot nicer than that earlier game, but being an arcade game, it was a whole lot more accessible too.

Obviously real golf is a very pedestrian game and Nazca didn't scrimp on content. The game features four fictional 18-hole courses, each in a different country (Germany, Japan, America and Australia). So, in order to make it work in the fast paced, 20p gobbling environment of an arcade, Nazca streamlined all the aiming and club selection and even added lives, which they called holes. Your hole count starts at three, if you finish the course on par you lose a hole and bogeys take two, so as you can imagine you could be facing the continue countdown pretty quickly. In order to progress you had to score Eagles or Albatrosses, which did not take away any lives. It was simple, but effective and meant skilled players could actually have a pretty full complete golf experience. Even though the game auto-aimed and auto-selected clubs, there was enough of an error margin with things like variable wind and slopes made it as tough as any other sports game.

Visually this is as good as it gets. As you rotate the view the links moves in several parallax layers, which meant everything moved in parallel, rather than panning a fixed bitmap. The golfer himself is digitised, with some very detailed animation. As I watched the YouTube video below, a full 17 years after I first played the game, I was as impressed as I was then. It's testament to to the power of the Neo Geo hardware.

MTW