The Skins Game at Bighorn

NOT PAR FOR THE COURSE

A Review of The Skins Game at Bighorn

by Robert Coffey

You crouch down, squinting against the glare of the desert sun as you try to
read the break of yet another unforgiving green. To your left, right by that
nasty bunker you narrowly missed, stands your opponent. Noting the sweat
beading on his brow, you take a small measure of satisfaction at the
nervousness he’s trying to conceal. For the last several holes he’s been
matching you, birdie for birdie, par for par, and you got lucky and caught a
break when he bogeyed on the 14th just like you. But he just made par on
this, the last hole. And you? Well, you have got a chance to come in at one
under and snatch that $180,000 skin that’s been accumulating nicely all this
time. Of course, you’re going to have to make this putt, this wicked long
downhill putt that could easily land you off the green and in the poorhouse.
You stand and address the ball, settling into your stance. You take a breath
and swing, biting your lip as you watch the ball roll, breaking sharply left
to hesitate on the lip of the cup. Tension fills the air. “Not enough,” you
think and right then the ball falls in the cup, rattling home. The gallery
applauds wildly as you drop to your knees in exultation.

Sounds pretty good, huh? It is, making the annual Skins game consistently
the PGA’s most popular event. And yet, Interplay’s The Skins Game at Bighorn
fails to recreate this excitement by disappointing the gamer on almost every
level.
First, some background. Unlike other golf competitions, the Skins
game does not determine the winner by who has the lowest total score at the
end of play. Instead, the Skins game is a variation of match play, whereby
the lowest score on each hole decides who wins that hole, but with the added
twist of whoever wins the hole also wins the coveted “skin”. And what is a
skin? Money. Lots and lots of money. Each hole is worth a certain amount of
money (typically tens of thousands of the green stuff) with the amount
increasing on hole 7 and again on hole 13. When the players tie on a hole
the skin is carried over and added to the skin of the next hole and so on
until someone wins, so it’s not unusual for a single hole to be worth over
$100,000 in accumulated skins.

The Skins Game at Bighorn uses a fairly standard interface with a swing
meter appearing on the left side of the screen. Click once to start your
backswing, again to start your downswing, once more to determine accuracy.
The Skins Game at Bighorn does have one of the easier swing meters in golf
simulations, with its large size and somewhat slow, steady movement
(especially when compared to the light speed meters of other games like
Microsoft Golf) really levelling the learning curve. That’s the good news.
Like other swing meters, Bighorn’s meter is marked with a zero at the bottom
and a number at the top reflecting the maximum distance attainable with
whatever club is being used, with hash marks along the way to indicate 1/4,
1/2, and 3/4 of a swing and occasionally these marks are accompanied by
numbers indicating the distance of such a swing.
However, this setup is not
consistent. For instance, a player using a 9 iron could have a swing meter
running 0-90, with 5, 13, and 27 at the hashmarks – if you need to go 50
yds, good luck finding the right spot in that little space between 27 and
90. If this weren’t annoying enough, the same club may produce different
meters at different times. Take that 9 iron again – you could get that same
0-90 meter, or a 0-40, or something else so even if you do develop a touch
for a specific distance with a certain club (like in real golf) your touch
means nothing if the scale is always changing.

This swing deficiency infects the putting model as well. Again, the meters
can change drastically shot to shot, but the real trouble here is reading
the greens. It’s almost impossible to develop a feel for the break and slope
of the green with the way the information is given to you. A box on the
right tells you if you’re putting up- or downhill, how sharp the slope is,
and whether the green breaks right or left. Yet this information frequently
runs counter to how the green looks on your screen. Putting seems
haphazardly figured in this game at best, as your putts behave in ways not
seen on golf courses that don’t exist in some mystery vortex. Soft uphill
putts to the left race past the right of the hole, hard downhill putts stop
short. And when you sink a putt, it vanishes from the green about 2 feet
from the hole before you hear it rattle in the cup. Must be that mystery
vortex again.

Everything seems to conspire to keep you from getting into the game. Shot on
film instead of video, The Skins Game at Bighorn touts itself as the first
truly photo-realistic golf game, but the graphics are not all that great.
Some of the screens look nice, but many have that washed out look peculiar
to postcards displayed in a gift shop window for too long. You spend a lot
of time looking at the same thing in a golf game and the lush rendered
graphics of other golf sims are sorely lacking here. The players look pasted
on the backgrounds and God forbid you play with more than one golfer of the
same sex – play with 4 males and you’ll get the same purple-shirted,
shovelhead guy for each player. The club swinging video was smooth and
realistic but the ball, oh boy, the ball looks and moves like a refugee from
PONG. Is it too much to ask Interplay, the people that brought us the great
ball movement of Virtual Pool, to make a golf ball move differently than the
“follow the bouncing ball and sing along” white blot found in this game?

Maybe it is too much to ask considering the thought that didn’t go into this
game. Men players can hit farther than women, though the women are
supposedly more accurate. Sounds fair, but The Skins Game at Bighorn
punishes women players and rewards the men who will almost always reach the
green a shot ahead of the women. Why can’t women start from the women’s tees
to compensate for their lack of strength – like in life? Women are further
handicapped by the game’s automatic club selection which doesn’t consider
their lesser power. For example, on a long par 5 where you have to clear a
water hazard 200 yds away, both men and women players will get a 2 wood for
their second shot.
Men will blast their shots over the water hazard but
women will drive theirs into the water. Check the aiming map and you’ll see
the women’s targeting bullseye right in the center of the lake. This makes
for a particularly tedious game as women players will constantly have to
check the map to be sure they’re not hitting into sand, water, etc. And it’s
a Windows game so you know how fast those screen changes are coming.

The rest of the game isn’t any better. In what is becoming a standard in
golf sims, there are narrated flyovers of each hole, but the video is so
murky and indistinct it looks as if it were shot through a fish tank.
There’s bad TV type music for the flyovers and the start of the game, but
it’s thankfully absent during gameplay. In terms of sound, there’s little
of it. You hear the club hit the ball and stick in sand, yet balls on the
fairway or into the rocks out of bounds are strangely silent. Hit a ball
into a water hazard and you’ll hear what I swear is a recording of someone
dropping a potato into a toilet. There’s an annoying video caddy that will
give you advice on those occasions he isn’t insulting your ability (and who
doesn’t consider ridicule the best part of any gaming experience?). Putts
all travel in a straight line no matter how severe the break, and they don’t
slow down, lip out, or stop just on the edge of the cup. Should you prefer
the regulation play option, there’s no handicapping system for players.

One last thing – played on a 486/66 with 8MB RAM the game ran smoothly, but
on a 486/33 with 8MB The Skins Game at Bighorn was unplayable. All the video
was jerky and spotty and the audio popped.
A typical tee-off went like this:
the ball hopped off the tee and vanished at the start of the downswing, the
sound of the club hitting the ball followed, the club actually herked and
jerked itself to the tee, then the long painful process of redrawing the
screen began. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of games that are unplayable at
the minimum requirements listed on their boxes. Developers need to
understand that there’s a huge difference between being able to run a game
and actually being able to play it.

All in all, The Skins Game at Bighorn is tiresome and not much fun. With the
number of good, enjoyable golf sims on the market, you’d be much better off
exploring other options or, even better, getting some fresh air and hitting
the links yourself!

Gamer’s Zone Scorecard

Product:	The Skins Game at Bighorn
Company:	Interplay Productions 17922 Fitch Avenue Irvine, CA 92714 Phone: (714) 553-6655 Fax: (714) 252-2820 http://www.interplay.com

Cost:

Under $50

PC compatible 486/33 or better, Microsoft Windows 3.1,
6 MB RAM, 5MB free disk space (16MB recommended),
VGA (256 colors), SoundBlaster compatible audio
and 2X CD-ROM drive.