Mac golfers can now re-create their home courses with the same tools used by the Links development team. The included Arnold Palmer Course Designer provides users with the ability to accurately re-create courses in a real-time 3-D system. Players can adjust every inch of fairway and create tunnels and arches with full control over each point on the course. A library of trees, shrubs, and other vegetation allows players to sort for the climate and season that fit their home course, or they can import their own custom trees.
In Links Championship Edition, 14 new golfer animations are captured at the highest resolution possible. New tour players and a variety of other golfers are built with lifelike, preshot motions including waggle, aiming, and preshot fidgeting. Each new golfer has a unique personality and will comment on players' games as if you were out golfing with buddies.
The adding of courses via the CD's 1-4 can be spotty, sometimes not loading them to your hard drive, but insisting on loading them from directly from the cd. You should be able to place CRZ courses directly into the courses folder and have them show up from the course manager as available courses.
As for play, the graphics do not dazzle, but CE has changed significantly in ball physics, both in flight, and in putting. Also, hitting into the rough has huge penalties, just like it should. In links 2000, except for special rough on some courses, most of the time you just went down an Iron. The putting is much harder and the colored grids are nice for viewing gradient changes.
The CRX to CRZ course converter results in courses that look just like they did when you played them in LS 2000 but with the new physics in effect--much more fun.
THe games can be buggy in some cases when hitting the ball, but all in all, this games plays similar to the windows version, just does not look quite as nice.
The worst thing about this game is the inability to play Windows users online--I dont get that at all, it is senseless. Still, this is a great golf game!
Make sure you have plenty of RAM, and a g-5 dual would not hurt.
The second irritation of the software is you need the CDs to make it work. I'm all for protecting intellectual rights, but come on. CD Swapping? You need disk #1 to start the program and you need other disks to do other steps (like loading golf courses). In all a very clumsy way to handle what should be a great game.
Bottom line, it's graphically appealing, fun to play, but very clumsy and does not take full advantage of the IMac graphics capabilities.
