Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour
April 19th, 2010
The game uses the Jack Nicklaus 4 engine (which I personally prefer to the JN5 engine), but it’s been enhanced specifically for online play. The initial download can be a monster – if you’re starting from scratch it’s something along the lines of a 38MB file – but the advantages it brings to online play are well worth the time. Jack Nicklaus Online Golf Tour has been designed so that you don’t have to play in “serial” fashion, with each golfer waiting in a cyberline to take his shot; instead, you take your shot at the same time everyone else is taking theirs, and the front-end software arranges the shots in proper sequence.
That might not sound all that impressive, but it makes for some pretty exciting action. The moment your shot has landed you immediately see how your partner or opponents fared, and in less than a minute or two you’re addressing the ball again. It also means that a foursome can finish 18 holes in an amazingly short period of time.
And speed is a very good thing if you’re in the mood to sample all the courses you can play here. Jack Nicklaus 4 enthusiasts have used that game’s excellent course designer to pump out scores of courses (most authentic, but a few fictional), and they’re all available for download and play on Online Golf Tour. Grabbing all these would take a long time for players connecting via modem, and naturally there’s an issue of disk space as well (I only have five courses on my hard drive and they still take up 37MB of disk space). But you’ll figure out which courses get the most play once you’ve hung out at the clubhouse for a while, and then just keep four or five of the most popular ones if you’re pressed for storage.
It’s great that all the Jack Nicklaus 4 courses can be played on Online Golf Tour, but it does mean that Jack Nicklaus 4 owners have a distinct advantage: They can practice off-line on all 18 holes of every course, while Online Golf Tour members who don’t have the retail version of the game are only able to play the first three holes of each course off-line. (Online Golf Tour is also limited to stroke play, while Jack Nicklaus 4 features standard variations like best ball, scramble, and bingo bango bongo.) It’s true you can use the gallery feature to watch someone else playing holes you couldn’t online, but that’s not much help when you step up to the tee box yourself on a hole you’ve never played.
The limitation is understandable: If GameStorm allowed non-JN4 owners to play all 18 holes off-line, they’d basically be giving the retail game away free. Still, it does mean that newcomers to the tour can wind up with poor stats because their practice rounds will go into the big Online Golf Tour data bank, which lists the 50 players with the lowest average score (minimum of ten rounds played).