It's new to me: Big Tournament Golf

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

If you know Nazca, it’s likely due to Metal Slug. Most of the games that Nazca Corporation produced were Metal Slug titles, and all of these games — before and after the studio’s acquisition by them — were published by SNK. Which made an easy kind of sense: the Neo Geo was SNK’s arcade platform and also their home console brand, and Nazca was made up of a bunch of ex-Irem developers. Getting members of the team that worked on games like the arcade classic R-Type together to make titles for SNK’s own system was a no-brainer, in terms of making sure there was something guaranteed to be worth playing available.

While Metal Slug ended up being most of what Nazca was up to prior to SNK’s 2001 bankruptcy and the scattering of its employees to the winds, the first game released by Nazca didn’t feature adorable tanks with the ability to jump that were at the center of an impressively violent arcade romp. In fact, it wasn’t even an action game: it was Neo Turf Masters, which was not about a turf war, but instead, golf. Yes, the makers of submarine warfare game In The Hunt, who would go on to form Nazca Corporation and make Metal Slug, decided to develop a golf game in between these very obviously connected-by-theme titles.

It still makes sense, however, just like the In The Hunt-to-Metal Slug pipeline: Irem had made their own golf games that these same developers had worked on in their time there. Major Title, released in 1990, and its sequel, Major Title 2: Tournament Leader (known in Japan as The Irem Skins Game), were simple golf games, in terms of how you went about customizing your shot and actually taking it. The courses themselves were difficult, however, and the way you made it through an entire course wasn’t by shoving in enough quarters to cover all 18 holes, a la Golden Tee, but by performing well enough that you earned bonus time to keep at it. Neo Turf Masters retained these design elements. You had six characters to choose from, each with their own specific pros and cons through various statistics, and four courses to choose from.

Neo Turf Masters is available in the present, too, through Arcade Archives on the Nintendo Switch and Playstation 4, but you won’t find it under that name. Instead, it’s referred to as Big Tournament Golf. The reason for that is twofold: one, it was always called Big Tournament Golf in Japan, but second, Augusta National took issue with modern releases of Neo Turf Masters, and it ended up temporarily delisted from a few shops in 2019 — Augusta is both the course and the host of the PGA Tour’s Masters Tournament, and as such are protective of the word “Masters.” Seems a bit of a stretch, that there would be market confusion over the meaning of Masters in a game called Neo Turf Masters, but companies protect any possible attack on their copyrights to avoid having them weaken, so there we are. Hamster and SNK switched the name of the game to its Japanese original, and scrubbed references to Neo Turf Masters from their websites to placate Augusta and get the game relisted.

Neo Turf Masters was not just released on the Neo Geo arcade platform, but for the home Neo Geo Advanced Entertainment System (AES), and Neo Geo CD, as well, all in 1996. (The Neo Geo CD release included a hidden fifth course, giving you 90 holes to play instead of 72.) SNK was fully committed to this golf game, clearly, and also commissioned a portable version for the Neo Geo Pocket Color in 1999. This edition, also known as Big Tournament Golf in Japan but Neo Turf Masters abroad, would not be developed by Nazca (which by this point was part of SNK) but instead by Saurus, whose role was often porting existing SNK games to platforms besides the Neo Geo arcade/home ones.

It’s practically the same as the arcade and home releases of Neo Turf Masters, except there are just three courses, no skins mode — that’s when each hole is its own game played for money, rather than part of a larger stroke count — and also everyone is cartoony and cute now. For example, here’s what it looks like when a golfer celebrates a birdie in the original Neo Turf Masters…

…compared to how it looks in what is now called Big Tournament Golf everywhere, on the Neo Geo Pocket Color:

Despite the change in visual approach, Big Tournament Golf still hits the same beats as its arcade and console cousin. The actual act of customizing your shot is meant to be simple, as you can easily switch to focusing on a shot that slices or hooks with the directional pad before choosing the power of it via a timed-meter button press — contemporary games often baked hooks or slices into their own meter, rather than just a choice of how you wanted things to go — but it’s the courses themselves that present the challenge. Wind conditions can change from shot to shot and be powerful, and in a hurry. Greens are often full of visible hills and slants, and while the game will very generously suggest a power level for you to hit with your putter on each shot, it doesn’t necessarily account for the changes in height that might slow a shot down or speed it up, and you still have to figure out how to much to adjust the curve of the shot, left or right, in order to sink your putt. This might also take some getting used to, if your brain is anything like my own, as there is a ton of information on display during a putt: an overhead of the green itself and the angle of your shot, locked in viewpoint-wise, and then a first-person view of the shot, which might not be facing the same direction as the overhead since you can be behind or in front of or to the side of the hole, depending on your location on each shot.

Outside of that multi-viewpoint situation that sometimes locks my brain up, it’s simple, yes, but very satisfying, and Big Tournament Golf will challenge you more than its visuals and simplistic inputs imply. One bit that never gets old is when you crank the power and nail the timing for where to hit the ball — high or low — with your driver, as a “Nice Shot!” interstitial appears on screen in between the ball being struck and you getting a chance to see where you’ve driven it to.

You have three courses to choose from — Japan, the United States, and Germany. In Japan, you’ll see mountains and waterfalls in the background pretty regularly — the scenery is beautiful, and translates well from its more realistic origins to this cartoon design — while in America, you’ll be playing in the Grand Canyon course. Expect some out-of-bounds areas that are waiting for your ball to fail to Evel Knievel its way over a canyon. There are also three game modes: a standard 18-hole run, a vs. mode, and a two-day tournament of 18 holes each, with a qualifying round and then a final, should you qualify for it. There’s also a vs. mode, so you can play Big Tournament Golf with a friend.

The six characters and their various stats came over from the original Neo Turf Masters, as well — they’re drawn differently, but everything plays out the same in this regard. Basically every player has some kind of strength or weakness that helps them in one area of the game, but makes life difficult in others. “Basically,” because the “Young Hero” character from America has no weaknesses, but no strengths, either — a perfectly average golfer in every facet of his game. When selecting a character, you need to consider how far they can hit it, which is their “Drive” — with the German “Shot Maker” wielding a driver that’s expected to send a ball 270 yards, while the British “Technician” has one that caps at 250 yards.

There’s their Accuracy, which is represented by the speed of the power and height meters — a higher accuracy means these will go more slowly, making it easier for you to achieve the desired shot. Skill increases the size of said height meter, which means you have more control over how the shot’s movement can be manipulated, while Recovery determines how much of the height meter you even have access to in sand traps and the like — basically, how rough of a time you’re going to have off of the fairway. Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Last is their Putting skill, which is also meter-based: the higher the putting skill, the more power segments appear on the meter, meaning you have more control over just how hard or soft your putt will be. That little bit of extra touch you can employ without overshooting could be the difference between a birdie and a disaster.

Of course, you don’t have to putt at all if you’re able to chip a shot in. It’s difficult in Big Tournament Golf, since the ball will absolutely ricochet off of the pin if it strikes it — and far enough to off the green entirely, if it hits hard — but with just the right roll and power behind it, you can sink a shot even from the rough, salvaging the hole. It’s worth it for the sake of your score, of course, but also for the little animation of the ball plinking into the hole.

If you don’t care about golf video games, then there’s nothing here for you, sure. If you do like golf video games — and even as someone whose in-real-life golf experience is limited to mini golf and driving ranges, whose knowledge of the ins and outs of the PGA Tour and LIV are lacking in a way he’s apologized for at his day job, I love a golf video game — then you’ll immediately get the appeal of Big Tournament Golf. It’s got a simple approach that makes it feel like the mistakes were yours, rather than something wrong with the game or its design, and while it’s plenty challenging due to its course design and aggressive wind conditions, this fact makes it all easier to want to give it another go.

Getting your hands on a Neo Geo Pocket Color and a copy of Big Tournament Golf isn’t exactly a simple or inexpensive task, but you don’t have to do that in the present. You can pick up the game pretty cheap on the Switch or Windows, as of 2021, thanks to the Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection series. Big Tournament Golf — permanently renamed that from the start given the 2021 release date — is one of the 11 games included in Vol. 1., which also comes with some quality of life features like rewind and the ability to duck out of a game without turning it off and losing progress.

While the collection as a whole goes for $40, divided by 11, that’s pretty good — and it’s also regularly discounted, too. If that’s still too much for you, and you don’t mind missing out on the cartoony aspects, well, Big Tournament Golf — née Neo Turf Masters — is right there on the Switch and PS4 for Arcade Archives’ standard $8. The Neo Geo Pocket Color collections are certainly worth it, however, even if fighting games aren’t your jam. There are plenty of gems on them — like Big Tournament Golf — that showcase what else SNK was up to outside of fighters.

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