Super Swing Golf [Wii]

Golf and Wii were made for each other. If you're going to flail around and look silly in your living room, golf is the perfect sport to pretend to be doing. Wii Sports makes its own modest contribution to the cause. But the golf consists of just nine rather bland holes and you're only going to get so much mileage out of leveling up your Mii. Fortunately, there's Super Swing Golf to fill the golf-shaped hole in your Wii library.

This is a fantasy golf game very much in the tradition of Hot Shots Golf or the Mario Golf series. As with those games, don't be fooled by the candy colors and anime characters. Although it looks like kid's play, beneath the saccharine visuals you'll find surprisingly deep games.

Most of what drives Super Swing Golf is the customization. As you play the various single-player modes, you earn Pang, which is the cutesy term for what you might normally call experience points (the actual game isn't called golf here; it's referred to ingame as Pangya, which it will remind you with a chipper call and big colorful letters every time you nail a perfect shot). You earn Pang by simply doing well, with bonus Pang for fancy tricks and extenuating circumstances. Between games, you spend Pang to improve your golfer, customize him or her, and upgrade equipment. You can even buy "potions" which you can use during matches for a temporary bonus.

Unlike many analog swing interfaces that encourage a fluid back-and-forth sweep, Super Swing Golf cares only about the downswing. You pull the Wiimote back to set your shot power. When you've got your arm at the angle you want, you press a button. From here, the sensor bar registers the angle of your swing to determine the accuracy of the shot. It seems primarily a matter of tracing the Wiimote through the air in an arc perfectly perpendicular to the sensor bar on top of your television.

You can use good golf form, with straight elbows, head down, and whatnot. Or you can "game" the interface by just swinging the Wiimote with one hand. Either way, it's difficult at first. It's not always going to be clear why you hooked or sliced a shot. You can take practice swings, which will help you figure out what the game wants. But it's going to take patience to use this interface effectively.

However, by changing a setting in the options screen, you can play Super Swing Golf with a traditional "three-button" swing. Golf videogame aficionados will have no problems with this traditional timing interface. Press a button to start the bar moving on the meter, press it a second time to set the power of your shot, and press it a third time to set the accuracy.

In fact, your score will invariably be much better if you use the three-button swing, particularly early on when you're getting accustomed to the vagaries of swinging the Wiimote. This begs the question 'Why bother playing with the swing interface when you'll do much better using the "three-button" interface?'