Golf Resort Tycoon II

Reviewed by: Michael Gallo, send e-mail Published by: ActiVision, go to the web site Requires: Pentium III 450Mhz, 64MB RAM, 3D graphics card, 8x CD-ROM, 500MB of available hard disk space, DirectX 8.1 MSRP: $19.99 For any golfer who has ever cursed at the design of a course, Golf Resort Tycoon II (GRT2) is your chance to become a golf god and make your own course. In the spirit of other simulation games such as Sim City and Roller Coaster Tycoon, GRT2 gives you the opportunity to design, build and ultimately play your own golf course and resort. It's a fairly detailed simulation. While you're busy playing golf god, you'll be doing one of three major tasks: building golf course holes, building resort embellishments and building the resort infrastructure. The golf course tools allow construction of 3, 4, or 5 par holes. Customization of holes can include sand traps and water traps, and modifying landscape features such as slope, paving, and planting. Resort improvements range from rental and golf instruction to lodging, to resort activities such as tennis and racquetball. When you get enough money, you can build a world class dining facility called Chez Crappe! Infrastructure includes groundskeepers, pest control, first aid station and other amenities. And for the true control freaks out there, you can order each individual Sim worker or Sim player to do your wishes. Sim player playing too slow? Pluck him up and drop him off in the hotel for while.

What's the ultimate goal of the game? Well I would say there are multiple objectives. The first is to get a decent 18 hole golf course built. Then there's the challenge of improving your resort enough to ultimately earn it a five-star rating. That rating appears to be based on the amount of improvements you have made to your resort. Finally, you might want to see how much money you can amass once you reach the 5-star rating. In fact, these are some of the challenges that are included in the game. In addition to challenges, you can also play in free play mode or in tutored mode.

Of course all these improvements cost money. And there's the trick - you don't start out with a huge bankroll of dough and there's no way to borrow. So you'll either have to play very carefully and meticulously or you can do what I did by starting the game, getting the basic stuff built so that you are cash positive, then eating dinner and playing with the kids while the game continues to run. When you come back, you'll have plenty of money to buy all the goodies to finish your resort. I had about $350,000 bucks to spend after leaving the game alone for about 1 hour!

Yes, believe it or not, you can actually play your golf course once you have built it. The game also comes with several pre-defined course for those who want to play first and build a resort later. The golf playing system uses a simple two keystroke sequence to set power and swing. The graphics on the course (and overall in the game) are not photo realistic quality. I'd say they are more cartoonish which is fine for a game like this. But I'm a little disappointed in the stability of the game, which took longer than usual to review because of the significant number of crashes I experienced. The crashes appears to have been caused by the graphics engine because I managed to finally get the game to stabilize when I bumped down the resolution to 800x600 and also knocked out most of the frame-rate hogging extras. This is a shame because I refuse to believe that my Pentium IV GeForce2 machine lacks the proper muscle to run a golf simulation!

As in real life with golf, this game will be a hit or miss for you depending on how it behaves on your system. Assuming it does behave, I think you'll find it to be an enjoyable gaming experience.

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