Like any good cell phone game, Venan's Super Putt Classic is capable of evoking a wide range of emotions in its user. I'm sure that many of our readers have fond memories of drunken Sunday afternoons spent mastering the vicissitudes of the windmill hole, or of the thrill of running the back 9 with a series of flawless putts. From its isometric graphics to its well-calibrated gameplay engine, SPC's realistic mini-golfing action recaptures the nuances of this sport of kings completely.
That's more a judgment on my tenuous emotional state than SPC's play. Venan's packed this game full of neat stuff: it's replete with 45 holes, isometric three-quarter-view graphics, a reasonably accurate physics engine, two-player mode, and a number of ugly shirt/pants ensembles for your golfers. There's even a couple of little ditties for end-of-hole celebrations, with the jauntier tunes held in reserve for better-than-par performances.
SPC is by no means an action-packed game. As in live mini-golf, you must carefully line up your shot angle (indicated by a nifty, animated trail of balls) and adjust the power of your swing before you let fly. Unfortunately, after you've totted up all of your trigonometry and pressed the menu button, SPC must display a disruptive "calculating" dialog bog before it'll show you the fruits (rotten though they may be!) of your labors.
This annoyance, combined with rather tardy course loading times and a less-than-rapid panning feature, means that SPC will be played at a very leisurely pace--at least on many older Sprint handsets; the latency times are significantly improved on newer phones. In any case, this is a good download for practicing your angles off and around the many impedances found on a typical mini-golf course--so that you might crush your friends when you next meet them on the "Carpet of Battle."
