Hot Shots Golf Fore! Hands-On Impressions

Sony brought Hot Shots Golf Fore!, its next Hot Shots golf game, along for the ride at GDC 2004 in San Jose. The next game will feature additional golfers, new caddies, and an even more exciting feature: online multiplayer play. Like other games in the series, Hot Shots Golf Fore! is a colorful 3D game that lets you choose to play as a "superdeformed" (a way of presenting characters with short, squat bodies and oversized heads, common in Japanese cartoons) golfer and play on either full courses or short ranges.

Hot Shots Golf Fore! features an expanded cast of characters, including a male caddy, a female caddy, and an excitable dog caddy (who celebrates a birdie by hopping up and down), plus a total of 34 playable golfers. While many of these golfers are locked away at the beginning of the game and must be unlocked, each of them is an over-the-top comical stereotype, like Sakura, a female ninja golfer, or Musashi, a male samurai golfer. Each golfer has three main statistics that affect their strokes--control, impact, and spin--and different golfers may also have specific strengths and weaknesses, such as exceptionally good recovery skills near a water trap or exceptionally poor recovery skills in a bunker. The game offers match play, stroke play, and short course options--the latter lets you play a quick three-hole game on either a standard course or a miniature golf course (where your object isn't to carefully sink the ball around traps but rather to ricochet the ball off of bumpers and scenery onto the green).

Hot Shots Golf Fore! features a streamlined swing system that lets you align your shot with your PS2 controller's D pad (you can press the start button to get an overhead view of the course and your position relative to the green, and you can also freely scroll around the course). You then use the "three-click method" popularized in PC golf games and used in previous Hot Shots golf games by pressing the X button once to begin your stroke meter, a second time to cap off the length of your stroke meter (the length determines the maximum power of each stroke), and then a third time to swing. If your timing is exceptionally good, you'll be greeted with a "Good shot!" message at the top of the screen. If your timing is off, the screen will briefly flash black and white, and your character will send the ball off in the wrong direction.

Though we were unable to try out the game's multiplayer mode, the game will reportedly support up to 20 players simultaneously on the same course. Hot Shots Golf Fore! will include about 15 courses (five of which appeared in Hot Shots Golf 3) and is scheduled to ship later this year.