There was once a time when kart racers were all the rage. While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario Kart remains unstoppably popular, that era of gaming is seemingly at an end. We had a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Team Racing remake, and Sonic and Garfield have both jumped in karts recently (why Sonic needs one is anyone's guess), but gone are the days of Shrek, South Park, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mortal Kombat, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars, or the M&Ms getting kart racing adventures. It was a nice trend while it lasted, but it raises a very important question - why didn't we have more golf games?

Can I just shock you for a second? I was a bit of a nerd as a kid. Every holiday we went on, we would scout out a nearby mini golf course - one year there was one under the hotel, and what a year that was. I would play golf, sure, but that wasn't the main draw. The reason I sought these out was inspiration. Even as a little kid, I had content on my mind.

Maybe The Real Treasure Was The Kart Racers Along The Way

I would sit and design golf courses, with various (and often logistically impossible) hazards for golfers to fall foul of. And being, as I mentioned earlier, a nerd, this meant a lot of these golf courses were gaming themed. There will be boxes in my parents' attic with notebooks full of mini golf course ideas for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Bandicoot, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spyro the Dragon, Pokemon, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jak and Daxter - ideas that, presumably♏, would be worth millions today.

I'm getting married in the summer, and this requires a lot of planning not just for the day itself, but for the various celebrations and get-togethers beforehand. This has led to a lot of searching of mini golf courses at potential destinations, which in turn rekindled my memories of designing a golf course with twin pistols where the ball shot out at random, leaving you either right next to the hole, or miles away. That's just one of the million dollar ideas I had.

In a way, a golf game is not much different than a kart racer. Both take simplified versions of easy to grasp rules and strip out the complications of a full simulation for an arcade interpretation. Both are easy to pick up and play, and both saw great suc🧸cess via Mario. And yet, golf games have been overlooked almost entirely.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario Golf was successful enough to get seven versions, the most recent of which was in 2021, while unlicensed arcade golf games like Everybody's Golf or Wii Sports have thrived. The only true examples of a licensed golf game that isn't Mario (or a hardcore sim like Tiger Woods) are 2002's Disney Golf and 1998’s Beavis & Butt-Head golf game. I had also remembered losing time to a Rugrats game, but it turns out this was only a minigame in Rugrats: Search for Reptar. This is how starved I am for golf, my only non-Mario memory is an optional activity in a Rugrats platformer.

I know no game is actually 'easy' to make, but this just seems so easy. I don't want to live in a world where cheap and rubbish games are pumped out without care, but after so many studios tried their hands at 'what if we did Mario Kart', I'm surprised no one has decided 'what if we did Mario Golf'. It's not hard to come up with ideas for them, I had a notebook full when I was nine!

One of the Crash courses featured an actual tornado, mimicking the bandicoot's spinning motion - a terrible idea in real life but a great one for a game, no?

If 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the live-service bubble is bursting (and it seems to be, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:at least for newcoming interlopers), maybe we'll see more of these smaller scale games in the future. We might get 1.5 games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Miles Morales, or studios making series specifically designed to act as smaller, cheaper fillers between the biggest launches. More likely, we should buckle up for more remakes and remasters heading our way. I don't know exactly where gaming's future is heading as its current existence becomes less sustainable, but wouldn't it be great if it could be fixed by a golf game or fore?