Hot Shots Golf is one of those rare kinds of games that transcends its genre. While many golf fans appreciate the deceptively realistic and strategic gameplay, non-fans enjoy the laid-back, silly atmosphere (compared to the stereotype of golfers being stuffy beings) and the simple to understand mechanics have driven this game to the top as one of Sony's best-known franchises. Hot on the heels of the outstanding Hot Shots Golf Fore for the PlayStation 2, SCEA and developer Clap Hanz have moved the series to Sony's new baby, the PlayStation Portable, in the form of Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee. The PSP is the perfect home for the latest entry into HSG lore; fast action and fairly minimal loading make Open Tee perfect for a 'quick 18' on the bus or subway or maybe even your mid-afternoon bathroom break at work. It's not quite as robust as the latest PS2 version, or even its only competitor on PSP,
Tiger Woods PGA Tour but it still offers a solid golfing experience for either yourself or up to 8 friends. It's not a killer app, but Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee is a worthy addition to your PSP library if golf on the go sounds like a good time.
Character customization is a major focus of Open Tee. Instead of the silly, quirky characters that past HSG games have had, you get a handful of PCs who are fairly standard, but can be customized by winning items in the various Career mode events, which can then be used to make your favorite character look completely different than the original developer vision. You can change their clothes, hair, accessories, and actual important things like the clubs they use (which you can 'level up' by winning stronger versions). It might be a little too 'Barbie' for some, but it gives you something to fool with. It would have been much more useful if Sony had managed to put true online play into Open Tee, one of the few Sony published PSP games to lack actual infrastructure play (the other notable being Wipeout Pure), since then you could have a unique character that's truly yours. Instead you can play up to 8 player wireless LAN, as long as they're nearby you. It's disappointing, because the 60+ player possibilities in HSGF would have been great in handheld form.
Thankfully Open Tee does have a good set of features. There's only 6 courses this time around, which is both good and bad – good because it cuts the fluff and presents more difficult courses earlier for a sharper learning curve (there were far too many simplistic courses in Fore), but bad because with the depth of the Career mode, it takes quite a while to earn the 5 locked courses. The Career mode is split up into classes, similar to HSGF but not quite. Each class requires you to win a certain number of 'stars' to reach the next rank – and not every event has a star to earn, as many only give you a new item (which becomes addictive since there's a big fat percentage rank listed in every class which is like toying a dog with a steak just out of its range). All told you could probably get 20-30 hours out of every class if you take the time to win every item and beat every character you come across. Taking its portable form into account, Open Tee's Career consists of a great deal of 'abbreviated' events for faster play. Many of the tournaments you can participate in are of the match play variety, complete with a new slaughter rule that ends a round when either character goes up by 3 holes. Logically a 9 hole match event can be done after 3 if you can stick it to the CPU in that way. Actual tournaments are also usually 9 holes and can be either in (holes 10-18), out (holes 1-9), or, as you progress, in mirrored, long tee format. There's some 18 hole events, more as you get into the higher ranks, but 9 hole tourneys are the most plentiful. If you want to play 18 holes, there's a stroke play option where you can, and you might just as well do it since it does have affect on the various ranking/leveling systems the game uses. Finally, a great many classes have a 'Vs.' match where victory unlocks the character you beat, which should be familiar to HSG fans.
HSG:OT employs many of the ranking systems from the console games, though there's new twists at play. Like HSGF you earn a special rank as you play, to identify your skill level (it would work better if the game was online since in Fore you could use these ranks to set up tournaments), though surely having 'HSG Almighty' next to your name is good enough offline. The loyalty concept is a little different, given there's no outfits to unlock this time around. Instead raising your character loyalty allows for a couple different shots as well as increase the amount of 'power' shots you get per round. There's no caddy loyalty this time around...hell you almost forget the caddies exist, except when they blurt out their 2 or 3 lines given to them. The largest new wrinkle is the leveling system that increases your skills. Not individual characters, mind you, but you personally. As time goes on, you earn more power, spin, accuracy, etc. that helps you tackle the quite difficult later courses. This can even be leveled in basic 18 hole stroke play which is why I'd encourage spending some time there to increase your skills. It also comes into play during multiplayer which could give you an edge to beat your friends.
Fans of past Hot Shots games can jump right into its tried-and-true gameplay system. For new players though, HSG:OT uses an old-school 3 click swing system, unlike a lot of modern golf games that use analog swinging. The use of the 3 click system could be considered archaic, but one of the big flaws of analog swinging is eventually you can fire perfect shots all the time without much risk of screwups. With Hot Shots, the click system brings in the risk that even veteran HSG players can and will screw up shots occasionally and have them end up in places not intended. It also allows for better accuracy since you can pinpoint the exact spot on the power bar instead of guessing how fast you bring your backswing forward with the analog stick. It's all a matter of taste though, but the 3 click system of starting the shot, selecting the distance, and the accuracy of the shot can be very effective. It may be old, but it was never abandoned, so it must work still somehow. Open Tee brings back the concept of power shots that let you put some extra mustard on the ball – you start with a few but as you increase your character loyalty, you can get up to 12 power shots per 18 holes or 6 per 9 holes. Upgrading your loyalty also unlocks a couple extra shots, which allow you to put even more power into a shot or take a little off as well for better accuracy or avoiding trouble. This isn't even mentioning the forespin, backspin, sidespin, and all kinds of other spins on your shots before even hitting them.
You'll need them all too if you wish to conquer the difficult courses Open Tee presents. The first course you unlock is a beginner's course, that lets you screw around and learn the basics of the game, and is a great place for newcomers to practice. Once you unlock the next course though, the traps are more abundant, the holes are harder to reach, and the greens are equally fast and challenging to read accurately at times. The putting system is pretty much the same as the console versions but the wider yet smaller PSP screen wreaked havoc on me adjusting to the greens – many of the PS2 tricks just didn't work as well. Though many courses can be very difficult, the Career mode progress allows for a great deal of error without much penalty, at least when playing tournaments, though in match play events the CPU players have a tendency to make a ton of mistakes. Open Tee does have a gentle learning curve but to topple the highest classes that have punishing weather conditions and hole locations, mastery of the various shots is almost required to win unless you're a putting genius and can make anything thrown at you. And although it's challenging at many points, it's never frustrating, since the laid back, easygoing approach tends to rub off, and it's helped by the far less frequent load times than many other PSP games. Aside from the 20-30 seconds to load a course, it's instantaneous to go from hole to hole for the most part, which is leagues better than dealing with 30 second loads between holes in Tiger Woods. That's why HSG Open Tee is a perfect portable game; once the game loads up your course, it's 20 minutes or so of golf fun without the hassle of waiting for loads. You can save after every hole to boot, which isn't quite as good as TW's ability to save before every shot, but considering you can play a hole in roughly a minute, it's nothing to worry about.
The thing about Hot Shots that's always been a marvel is how well they've kept realistic play in a game that's cartoony and lighthearted, which in many ways it barely makes sense, you'd almost expect an arcadey golf game considering. But no, and Open Tee continues this pattern of realistic play in a cartoon world. While balls skipping across water isn't really all that real, the physics of a green are accurate, hitting out of sand traps is a pain and feels much different than hitting off a fairway, and hitting a tree will send your ball careening all over the place and usually winds up in crazy places. This is the kind of game, like Links or Tiger Woods, where actual players will fare very well because they know what to look for and compensate for. If a hole has a higher elevation than the location of the ball, you find a club with the power to get over the hill. In the opposite circumstance, you take a little off your swing to deal with the actual distance to the cup. When it's windy, it works the same way, aiming and maneuvering your shot to fight the conditions. There's a lot of strategy and once you realize you have to spend time taking conditions and course quirks into account before every shot, you play a lot better. If you've never played Hot Shots before in your life, you might be stunned by the realism and attention to details they put into the actual golfing action.
Visually Clap Hanz has used the same graphic style as they've used for years with this series – cartoony yet colorful. The characters are typical goofy anime style with big heads and feet, but with Open Tee they actually didn't 'Americanize' the characters so they all have a Japanese flavor this time around. There was some minor downsizing of the game compared to the console versions, as the caddies don't actually appear on the screen anymore, just their voices make an appearance. Each of the 6 courses are uniquely themed each with their own special look, each of them though are colorful and fit the attempted theme extremely well. It's the perfect game to demonstrate the colors of the PSP and how damn good it looks on that amazing screen. The audio is kinda blah though – there's not a lot of voices from players or caddies, and what they do say is repeated constantly. The music is typical HSG whimsy, and all fit the course at hand, but they managed to make the music turned off by default, making you hunt for it in the menus, though likely it was done this way to help the battery life, though as is Open Tee weans battery power pretty well due to its efficient design that will hopefully be the rule, not the exception, as the PSP goes into its 2nd generation of software.
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Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee is another fine entry into the series and brings its golf charm to the PSP in near-perfect form. It could use more courses to match the depth of the feature set, but the 6 they give you are some of the best they've designed yet. As always, the deceptively realistic gameplay is tuned for maximum quality and the minimal loading times allow for a much faster game of golf on the go than its closest competitor. No true online play is disappointing, but the 8 player LAN is something that could spark riots in offices around the world, playing PSP instead of doing their jobs. Games such as this give the PSP hope and promises for the future, as well demonstrating the potential of what can become of the system if developers take advantage of the powerful hardware at their disposal. Sony has shown off some really good 1st party stuff in the short life of the PlayStation Portable, and Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee just might be the best of them all thus far.
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