Original Release: Simon & Schuster, 2002, Xbox / Gamecube
Other Releases: PS2 / PC (2003)
A budget attempt at a millennium “bro humor” golf game by the dev team behind Deer Avenger and Who Wants To Beat Up A Millionaire
Outlaw Golf (Gamecube, Simon & Schuster, 2002)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Outlaw Golf is a time capsule from a society you just don’t see anymore, save perhaps in reruns of Whacked Out Sports on the weekend. It takes an old-school “shock jock” approach with a bunch of crass humor, filling its roster out with strippers and white rappers and assorted other trashy stereotypes. Just to give you an idea of the pedigree, it comes from shovelware developer Hypnotix whose library also includes the Deer Avenger series, Panty Raider and Who Wants To Beat Up a Millionaire.
It doesn’t have nudity or anything too extreme, though, even though the advertising at the time intimated it was going to be something like BMX XXX. I don’t think it even has cussing. Mostly it just gives you a wacky selection of players and Steve Carrell constantly insulting you over any small imperfection in your game.
I guess it’s a technically decent enough golf game, but hampered by a couple of big things. One is in requiring you to press up to both swing your club and aim as you swing; as you can image, you’ll be unintentionally off-target quite a bit due to very small deviations in the sensitive analog positioning. And then you’ll get Steve Carrell crowing in your ear about what a sucky slice that was. Viewing the course pre-shot is also annoying and non-intuitive.
The other big thing is that it contains only three 18-hole courses. There are a bunch of optional characters to unlock, and nearly a dozen different game modes and rule sets, but it all comes back to the same greens over and over again.
It also has a unique “tilt meter” that is often criticized, but I found that aiming was so generally bad anyway that it didn’t really make things worse. The idea was that if your character muffs a shot, it adds to their stress level and makes aiming harder … but in practice if you’re anything off of what the game considers to be perfect play for the course, you usually get stress added anyway.
For me it all comes down to the swing-and-aim system wrecking the gameplay, but Steve Carrell at his most obnoxious (a few years before he would hit it big with Anchorman and The Office) also doesn’t help. And the humor overall is basically “GTA lite” and less funny while being more crude and heavy-handed. A budget title that attempted to make a splash with shock value in the early 00s, and apparently actually did well enough to merit one sequel, but it’s not at all worth going back to now. If you want a more simple and arcadey golf game from this period it’s best to stick with Toadstool Tour or the Hot Shots games.
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