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.

Day 30: Shenmue

Day 4: Pen Pen Tri-Icelon

And sometimes the games designed for little kids are better than the games made for grown-ups. Pen Pen Tri-Icelon is the first Dreamcast purchase I've made since Crazy Taxi that didn't end up being a complete waste of money.


A tri-icelon is a triathlon on ice. Instead of humans competing in running, biking and swimming, aquatic aliens compete in ice-walking, belly-surfing and swimming. Gameplay consists mostly of pressing and releasing the A button for each stroke of your flippers and steering around obstacles. The B button attacks other racers, but seems to only work during the walking sections.


There are 7 characters and 4 courses available at the start. As with Mario Kart, using the main character, in this case Sparky the Penguin, does not guarantee success and I gravitated to Sneak the Octopus. Each race I won netted me a new item to dress Sneak up with. Thankfully, any item won can be used with any character, so I don't have to go back and win every race with every character. I'd do it though. I'm that obsessive.

That's a small cosmetic complaint though. My other complaint is the lack of depth. I seriously doubt there's enough game here to keep my going until the new Mario Kart is released next month. Even with multiple levels unlocked for each course, I'm still playing the same four courses over and over. Bright colors and funny animals might be enough to create replay value for the 6-year-old target audience, but I'm gonna need more. This is ageism dammit!


Pen Pen Tri-Icelon is going in the "guilty pleasure" folder. I expect you to keep this just between us. I don't want any of my cool friends finding this is how I will be spending Friday night.