A handheld trip to the links.

Golf is a damn boring game.  There, I said it and as thousands of Japanese raise their fists in anger at my blasphemous utterance I will further say that Greg Norman is a little girl and Tiger Woods doesn't really exist.  He is no more than a digitized projection coming from a supercomputer owned by a comic book style villain bent on controlling the world by turning it upside down.  Of course these are my viewpoints and may stem from the fact that I can't play the game worth a damn - even if my life depended on it. 

I can stand sixty and a half feet (that's regulation, I looked it up) from a guy who will throw a ball at me at ninety some odd miles an hour and swing a piece of wood at that burner and connect.  I may not knock it out of the park, but I can hit the thing.  That golf ball, on the other hand, is just sitting there and I will miss it entirely three out of four times.  I'll swing my driver with everything I've got and whiff right past it as it sits there, taunting me.  As a result the only courses I play on anymore have windmills and dragons.

Golf in video game form, however, well I love that.  Ever since EA was making their PGA tour titles for the Genesis, I have been a console golfer.  I can't touch the ball in real life but I have aced the 17th hole at Sawgrass more than once.  I also like the arcade-ish games like Hot Shots and I even got a kick out of Ribbit King for the PS2.

Because of this I thought I would somewhat enjoy Pro Stroke Golf for the PSP.  Touted as a game with incredible realism on the consoles, I expected something really special on Sony's handheld system.  What I found was a convoluted mess that has the makings of a decent golf game but falls short somewhere between concept and finalization.