[Holiday Hare's "Carol of the Bells" plays]
[can hisses]
[sips] "Ahh!"
[typing]
Occasionally I forget just how mid-2000s the mid-2000s really were.
Especially in the realm of sports video games.
Following the success of “extreme-ified” sports games in the 1990s, developers and
publishers felt compelled to up ante for the new millennium.
Extreme Sports weren’t extreme enough anymore!
No, no.
They needed to be edgier, more irreverent, more marketable to older teens and young adults.
And the solution often meant taking a random sport and adding more violence, swearing,
sexuality, or some combination of all three.
So we got things like Blitz: The League, MLB Slugfest, Redcard, BMX XXX,
DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball, and today’s topic of conversation:
Outlaw Golf, published by Simon & Schuster
Interactive in 2002 for Xbox, GameCube, and PlayStation 2.
And apparently the PC?
Which I had no idea about til writing this very sentence.
Regardless of platform though,
Outlaw Golf is a game of links that offers “Great Golf, Bad Attitude!”
It ain’t your daddy’s golf game.
It’s golf with strippers, ex-cons, and wannabe rappers, yeah!
Rated T for Teen cuz it has boobies and bad words.
And entirely par for the course if you know anything about the developer.
It’s one of the many “classic” games developed by Hypnotix, the folks behind titles
like Deer Avenger 3D, Who Wants to Beat Up a Millionaire,
and Panty Raider: From Here to Immaturity.
And yeah it’s no surprise their Outlaw Sports series followed suit, teeing off with Outlaw
Golf 1 and 2, and succeeded by Outlaw Volleyball and Outlaw Tennis over the next couple years.
And in between there they found the time to release this episode’s focus: 9 Holes of
X-Mas, and 9 MORE Holes in 2002 and 2003, respectively.
Each of them acting as $5 standalone demos for the full Outlaw Golf experience, available
at Blockbuster video stores exclusively.
Kind of.
Before this, there was also Outlaw Golf: Holiday Golf,
which was another Christmassy demo disc sold at retail.
One that’s identical to 9 Holes of X-Mas, only without the Blockbuster connection and
fewer puns regarding holes.
So let’s take a look at each of the Blockbuster releases!
After all, it came with an awesome offer: rent one game, get another game free?!
How could I resist such a bargain.
[disc inserts, tray closes] [Xbox startup sound]
[Christmas music begins playing]
Well!
That’s quite the abrupt startup.
No logos, no intro animations.
Just a menu that’s ugly enough to be straight out of a Nero Burning ROM template circa 2002.
Brilliant.
From here you’re given the choice to play the Christmas demo, play the regular demo,
or watch a couple of highly-compressed video files.
One being an underwhelming trailer for the game SeaBlade,
and the other a segment from the G4TV show “Game On.”
-G4! The only 24/7 cable TV network
dedicated to video games and the people who play them.
Aw man, a low-res G4 clip on an Xbox disc sold exclusively through Blockbuster?
We may have achieved peak early 2000s.
-I think this is gonna be my team, this is Summer and this is Autumn.
And I need no other seasons, Matt.
-I’m gonna go with the dominatrix!
But yeah, after you do select a demo you get the expected logos and things.
And once you reach the menu you get to choose the number of players, with up to two in these
Christmas demos, controlled by either human or CPU.
And then it’s time to pick your golfer,
with two available in each of the separate “9 Holes” releases.
The first one contains the biker Harley and the ex-con Killer Miller,
each with their own respective caddies.
And the second demo contains the stripper Summer and wannabe rapper Ice Trey,
again paired with their own golfing groupie.
[Ice Trey] -Shut up! [caddie] -Aight.
Each has their own stats measured in four categories, which in the full game you level
up in career mode but here they’re the same middling performers forever.
You do at least get to choose tee difficulty,
and all the clubs and balls are unlocked from the start, unlike the full game.
These make a huge difference to how it plays so it’s nice you’re not locked into one
particular style in the demo.
And with that, let’s welcome our hosts: Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell!
[Colbert] -Hope you packed some long underwear and an icepick, ‘cuz this outrageous golf
course in the middle of a frozen tundra will give your balls a serious case of frostbite!
Welcome to Glacier Ridge.
[Carell] -Here we are at the first!
Harley is stepping up to smack a tee shot!
Yeah, so I wasn’t expecting those two!
I mean, I expected Carell since he’s the main commentator in the full Outlaw Golf,
but Colbert not so much.
They go back and forth narrating different sections of each course, with Carell handling
play-by-plays and Colbert summing up each golfer and course before the action begins.
The two comedians were well-known for their appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
at the time, among other things, so it’s fun to hear them together again here.
It also makes sense Colbert was involved since he also voiced the commentator for Outlaw
Volleyball, which the OG Holiday Golf demo was actively promoting.
Anyway, let’s hit some balls!
Turns out Outlaw Golf, and these Christmas demos by extension,
play a whole lot like golf. Imagine that.
[Colbert] -Par four, 390 yards.
It’s got an overhang you gotta get under, and that is why I call this hole The Limbo.
I once did the limbo down in Jamaica.
Didn’t end well.
Involved some chicken blood and a lotta screaming.
[upbeat outlawed golfing tunes]
[smacks ball, elf crowd cheers] [Carell] -That’s what I call a wicked slice!
One of the main features setting apart one golf game from the next is its control scheme,
in particular the swing mechanic.
And Outlaw Golf is one of those that uses the analog sticks instead of button presses,
combining power and accuracy into a single flick.
Pulling down the right stick increases your power level, and pushing it all the way up
both starts the swing and determines your accuracy.
You do have a little leeway in the power level, where if you center the stick again it slowly
decreases strength so you have a chance to adjust.
But yeah, hooking and slicing really is down to that upswing of the stick, and it can be
entirely unforgiving if you’re not dead on.
Without using the right combo of golfer, ball, and clubs,
you’re in for a deeply frustrating time.
This is exacerbated by one of Outlaw Golf’s more unique mechanics: composure.
Solid, accurate hits of the ball results in incrementally better composure, with the best
hits lighting the ball on fire and giving your player a big boost to morale.
Conversely, the worse you play and the crappier your shot,
the more frustrated your golfer becomes.
This translates to an increasingly higher likelihood of awful, less-powerful swings.
Resulting in less composure and even worse performance from your golfer, snowballing
until you’re controlling a person seething with rage.
To address this, Outlaw Golf lets you earn Beatdown Tokens, because of course it does.
Spending a token engages Beatdown Mode, pitting your golfer against their caddie to try and
regain composure through a timing-based minigame.
[gratuitous beatdown commences] [caddie groaning, elves cheering]
[Carell] -And I thought hockey was violent!
It’s gratuitous and dumb, but a simple fact of life,
at least in this particular golfing world.
The entire game is dripping with this same kind of tackiness, from the fights,
to the character designs, to the one-liners after each hole.
It’s like you’re playing golf with a bunch of sleazy guests from The Jerry Springer Show
and it kinda gets old fast.
Thankfully, the golfing gameplay itself is actually pretty decent, once you get used
to the quirks of the composure system.
And even if you don’t, then at least you can enable infinite mulligans, allowing do-overs
for each shot as long as you can stand the repetition.
Obviously wouldn’t be a fair way to play
if you were going through an actual campaign mode.
But 9 Holes of X-Mas doesn’t have a campaign mode,
or any kind of progression system at all, so who cares!
As with most golf games, most of my enjoyment is derived from the courses themselves.
The overall ambiance, the hazards on offer, the way they’re laid out and designed.
The more creative and novel the better in my view,
and each of these holiday demos certainly deliver in that regard.
These combined 18 holiday holes are delightfully absurd, going outta the way to break with
all conventions of real world course design.
In addition to the obvious change of playing in the snow surrounded by elves with Santa
and his reindeer flying overhead, each course is designed in such a way
that eschews all semblance of reality.
Massive inclines, floating islands, bottomless pits, mammoth caves, huge frozen lakes.
And all manner of unusual obstacles in the way, like towering rock bridges, elevated
train tracks, giant frozen pipes, and so on, it’s pretty great.
In my view, you should take one of two roads when designing a golf game: the uber realistic
road, with meticulous detailed dedication to real world locations.
Or just go off the rails with goofy courses, having maps that are dumb enough in their
design that it makes me feel better when I fail miserably at them.
Ridiculous course design kind of evens the playing field in how unfair they are, especially
when playing against a human opponent.
Not so much when playing against AI, unfortunately.
I prefer competing against myself and my own best scores in any golf game,
but especially this one.
The computer golfers don’t have to worry about accurately snapping forward an analog
stick, after all, and their skill level doesn’t feel noticeably adjusted to reflect that.
And even more irksome is the major slowdown as the console chugs along calculating their
next move and rendering that wild wintry world at the same time.
It makes the entire experience feel sluggish.
And yeah, that’s about it for the Outlaw Golf Blockbuster Christmas Editions!
Just about the worst thing a golf game can do is be boring,
and 9 Hole of X-Mas certainly isn’t that.
The course design and decent golfing mechanics alone ensure
that it rarely wades into the waters of becoming boring.
Now, being stupid and tasteless, that’s another story.
It’s filled with attempts at humor that are crass and juvenile at best,
and just cringey and gross at worst.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it jams its brand of comedy down your throat
so often that what little charm it had wears off quickly.
So in that way, the 9 Holes of X-Mas demos actually fare a bit better than the full game,
since a lot is either toned down or simply not available, due to the fact that there’s
less content and fewer golfers to choose from.
Plus, the holiday theme is well done in a way that not every Christmas game pulls off,
with nearly all aspects of the game having been customized with snow, lights,
santa hats, winter outfits, and Christmas music.
So if I’m judging it by that alone, I’d say Outlaw Golf X-Mas is pretty tee-rific.
The rest of it, well.
I’ll just say that it’s very much of its time, for better or worse,
and you be the judge of whether that’s a time worth revisiting.
[jazzy Christmas tunes]
And if you liked this episode then check out my other Christmas coverage of games and otherwise.
Or stick around for other things coming soon here on LGR.
And as always, thanks for watching!