Party Game Sundays: King of Clubs

I promised that I'd eventually get around to writing about a god awful game, and today is that day. I have not been this distraught while playing a video game in a long time. I'm going to preface this by saying that Landers was advised that he could not return the game after he broke the shrink wrap. He purchased the miniature golf themed game King of Clubs at Gamestop for the incredible sum of $3. The employee on staff took it upon themselves to let him know that once the seal was broken he would no longer be able to get his $3 back. Much to my dismay the seal was broken, and I was forced to play King of Clubs.

This game has been in Landers' pile of games for many months now. Every Sunday when asked to choose a game I tried to put off King of Clubs. See, I don't find good golf games enjoyable, so playing an awful miniature golf game wasn't exactly on the top of my to do list. In an unsurprising turn of events the game upset me greatly.

If you ever see this cover, avoid it!

To start off there's a cinematic of these weirdos dressed in themed costumes. For some reason they're in a TV studio and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The characters all have golf themed names like King Putt, which might be the best part of the game. I guess the costumes are themed along with each of the golf courses, but I don't know for sure since you need to unlock courses by playing the game. Hopefully I never have to find out what the other course themes are, but I can tell you that the first is prehistoric. There's a whole bunch of lava and dinosaurs.

Prior to starting the course you need to pick a character and buy equipment. I opted out of buying equipment, because I didn't care. However, you do have the option to buy various types of balls and clubs. For some reason you can also buy sound packs, which come into play while your opponents are playing. If you mash the B button sounds will play in an attempt to distract them. The catch is that it's not distracting at all... Luckily the distraction doesn't matter, because of the controls.

Look at the beautiful graphics!

The controls themselves are bullshit. You're forced to use a nunchuck, which I assumed would be used to position your golf swing. Instead what it does is control the camera in a completely useless fashion! You need to use the d-pad in order to position your shot. A colored line will sometimes appear coming off your club to show you the trajectory of your ball. I say sometimes, because the shot line would disappear at random. We would be playing and then all of a sudden none of us would be able to aim properly anymore with absolutely no indication as to why. 

When putting a power bar will appear, which is supposed to be controlled by swinging the Wii-remote like an actual golf club. That doesn't work, so I had to twist the Wii-remote in various ways to make my power increase. I can't tell you exactly how, because it was different almost every time. Once you do have the desired power you hold A and swing. Once again the swinging doesn't work as intended. Sometimes it was fine, other times I could flail the Wii-remote violently and have absolutely nothing happen.

Unsurprisingly it's hard to find pictures of this terrible game.

What really bothered me though was the complete lack of physics King of Clubs had on display. Say you hit a ball up a hill and it stops halfway. You'd expect it to roll back down, but not in this game! Instead it gets caught in the middle and goes nowhere. The lack of physics continues with just about every collision in the game. For some reason hitting walls and obstacles would vary between making the ball stop completely, or sending it off in a direction that makes no sense. 

I can't even make this post funny! It was just an awful golf game. It controlled poorly and made me want to cry a little bit. The course was only 9 holes, and we didn't even finish it! At some point the four of us playing just decided that we'd had enough and I shut the Wii off in despair. At least most of the games we play on Sundays are funny, but this was not one of them. I don't want to play King of Clubs ever again. Thinking about it makes me sad and angry. 

I leave you with this 4 star amazon review of the game.

"this i a fun game once you figure out the controles the instruction book does not explane the controles but once you figure them out this game is a blast"

     -Manny