Day 55: Tee Off

Tee Off is the most blatant rip-off of Hot Shots Golf you're likely to see, specially formulated to either make players forget they bought a Dreamcast instead of a Playstation or heighten their inferiority complex.

The game plays fine, but never quite removes itself from the shadow of Hot Shots. The characters and courses are fairly generic. The two male characters I used sounded like they were voiced by the same actor, which would've been fine if he'd at least altered his voice a little for one of them. And maybe come up with more than four things for each of them to say. And just possibly put some feeling into it.


While Tee Off may lack interesting characters, imaginative courses, challenging AI (my computer controlled opponent pretty robotically parred almost every hole) and almost everything else we expect from Hot Shots (except the big heads, it does have those), it does have one thing the other game doesn't. Virtual croquet. Called Gate Ball or G-Ball, it resembles croquet played on a holodeck, and is at least as boring, if not more so, than you are currently imagining.


Tee Off adequately, if blandly, serves its purpose, joining Alex Kidd and Sonic Shuffle in the pantheon of Sega games that aren't quite the competition.