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Rating: Average Despite its fast-paced and simple gameplay, Hot Shots Golf is no more fun than the PGA Tour series for the PlayStation. While Hot Shots Golf's complete lack of loading time is a breath of fresh air, the game itself is not. Rather than come up with an innovative new swinging interface, the designers simply copied the one in PGA Tour, which is an old interface that needs to be dramatically revamped for golf games to be fun again. Quite frankly, not much real skill is involved in pressing a button once, then pressing it again at just the right second for power, then pressing it again at just the right second for accuracy. A small amount of skill might be involved if the control were extremely good and responded the split second you pressed the button each time, but this is not the case in Hot Shots Golf. There is a small, but noticeable period between the time you press the button and it registers on the screen, which leaves the player struggling to press the button right BEFORE the cursor gets to the target area. That's not skill, that's guesswork. And what motivation do I have to keep playing if I know deep down that whether I do good or bad has nothing to do with whether I'm playing good or bad? Also, don't expect to see any real golfers in this game, only fictional (not to mention cutesy and big-headed) golfers. And whose sheer stupidity is responsible for the fact that when you first start the game, you only have two characters and one course to choose from? It's one thing to want to reward the player with new characters and courses to unlock, but it's another thing entirely to do it at the expense of the initially-playable game. The music in the game is nothing special, and the sound effects are annoying (from the never-ending bird chirping to the exclamations of "Nice shot!" every time you hit a good tee shot). Golf games are in need of a radical new swinging interface that gives the gamer more control than ever before and involves real skill to play. Things need to change in order for golf games to be fun again, and loading or no loading, Hot Shots Golf is still nothing more than another example of why things need to change.
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