Islands Mini-golf1.5

BUYER BEWARE: This game freezes on new MacBook Pros with nVidia Geforce 8600M GT graphics during the very first loading screens whenever "Edge Smoothing" is enabled. The developer appears to be ignoring my bug report, which I have submitted numerous times over the past month. As with any shareware application, try this game before you buy it.

A correction to the other comment about not being able to look around enough. The numeric keypad lets you change the view persepective and from one of the perspectives, you have full control of the current view by using the arrow keys. It is a little cumbersome, but it effectively lets you view and line up your shot. It looks to be very entertaining and the quality is nice, but there's no way I'm going to drop that much cash for a registration when i can only play three levels that hardly have anything to them. Release a new demo version with a full round (18 holes) of varying degree and I might be inclined to buy it. Also, the demo version won't allow you to do the training mode, which kind of sucks.

It has a lot of potential, but the player is unable to adjust the camera angle very much, or look around the course at all before taking a shot (in order to get some idea of what is around the corner). It would be nice if it would at least let you know which in direction to find the pin as the view will occasionally settle facing in the wrong direction. The multiple camera tracking of the ball is disorienting at best and the confusion is compounded as it continually breaks the plane. Perhaps setting a standard camera height could be of benefit too, as often you will go from a worms eye view to a birds eye view in one shot something which almost never happens when playing real mini golf. Overall it's playable and somewhat fun, but the camera movement is poor and it detracts from the "mini golf" experience. The course design is fun, but I was unable to play more than two holes without giving up out of frustration with poor visibility.

For as long as I can remember I've wanted a really nice mini golf game to play on my computer. It's just more fun and interesting than normal golf. Unfortunately mini golf games have always been hard to come by. I scour shareware sites looking for them. Every time I see one I download it, and every time I am disappointed by awful graphics, awkward gameplay and shoddy presentation. When I saw this I thought "Hmm... it's got a nice icon. That makes a change. I bet the rest of the game sucks, though. Oh well, I'll give it a go". Right from the start I was blown away by this. It is slick and colorful and definitely has a Nintendo feel to it. Maybe it reminds me of Mario Golf or Super Monkey Ball or something. The graphics are impressive, the presentation is bold, beautiful and instantly accessable, and the controls are intuitive and responsive. Of course, you would expect all this from a game that costs $25 I suppose, although I have seen a lot worse games than this released commercially on consoles for $50. I paid for this game within 10 minutes of playing the demo, and I expect to have a lot of fun with it for a long time. The only problems I have come accross with it are a dodgy camera view occasionally which can make some shots very very hard, (but all games like this experience that). The learning curve is a bit up and down I think. Some holes are very easy and some are extremely frustratingly difficult, and these holes are not necessarily in any order. I have also experienced a very occassional graphical glitch where textures do not display properly, and I think on one occasion my high score submitted to the wrong course page. Overall though, I love this game. It is commercial quality and a lot of fun, and well worth $25.