First impressions of the Java based 3D Nine Hole Golf are seriously good, once you get past the splash screen and menu. Geek-friendly loading messages fly by: "loading skydome...initialising player.... camera setup..." and so on - it's here that you realise that there's a top 3D physics engine at work, despite the humble Java application environment.
And indeed, as the camera swoops down on your golfer in full real-time-rendered 3D, it's evident that this is more than your standard token-effort golf title. Take a swing (curiously by pressing and holding and then quickly releasing and pressing again to strike - let's charitably say that there's a 'knack' to it) and the camera follows the ball through the landscape at full speed, before deliberately fading away so that you get to see the ball's flight in context and then zooming in on the ball landing and rolling. So far so good then - this is almost console quality golf gameplay, with texture-mapped surfaces and colourful tree sprites.
Sadly, everything starts to slide downhill from this point on, which is a shame. With a little extra effort from the developers, this could evolve into something really quite special.
The first problem you'll notice is that you can't adjust the clubs up and down - you have to take the one offered every time. Actually, the help screens do note that the club can be changed - but then digging deeper into the help to find out how results in the game freezing and having to be restarted. The '7' key does let you choose between a 'wood' and an 'iron', while the '9' key lets you select from a surprisingly wide variety of 'advanced' shot types, but that's all the adjustment you get. There's no 5,6,7,8 iron choice, as you'd expect. This lack of club adjustment is tolerable when out on the fairway, but it makes things very tricky as you get close to the pin.
When putting, there's no indication at all as to how far a putt with a certain power will travel, so you have to 'feel' the gameplay as you go. Putting also isn't helped by the lack of any kind of contour grid in order to 'read' the greeen. Put the two factors together and putting becomes an intensely frustrating experience. At least the ball seems to find the hole if fired remotely near it - there's a very wide tolerance - annoying if you want accuracy to the real thing but a blessing because at least it means that it's possible to finish the hole and move on to the next one.
The holes are well designed and all three included courses are attractive. But you're playing strictly solo, since there's no multi-player option, not even against a computer AI, which is rather lazy programming. Also lazy is the lack of any kind of save game system - quit 3D Nine Hole Golf and you've got to start the round all over again.
Mind you, quitting isn't trivial, since this is the first Java game I've ever seen where the left and right function keys don't do anything. The basic menu is brought up by pressing the '1' key, rather strangely. The screenshots here are all from a S60 3rd Edition phone - when run on a touchscreen 5th Edition phone, you'll see it letterboxed above a virtual keypad, which is rather ugly.
It's clear that there's a great golf game at the heart of the title - but that it has been lifted from another platform with different characteristics - and that some of the game code may well not have survived the trip. OmniGSoft - take 3D Nine Hole Golf and retire to your coding room behind the nineteenth hole - give it another month of coding and playtesting and then (and only then) venture out on the course. As it stands, this becomes just yet another ropey Java title that will get deleted a day after installation - and that would be a crying shame.
Steve Litchfield, Ovi Gaming, 24 June 2010.
