Dangerous Golf: The Definitive Review

If I have a darkside and contrarian opinion that never fails to offend literally everyone I speak to, it’s that James Cameron’s Aliens was a facile, shallow disaster that doomed the entire franchise. That’s not to say it’s a bad dumb action film. It’s a great dumb action film - it’s just a terrible Alien sequel, and everything that followed Aliens couldn’t avoid being disastrous because of it. Cameron cemented the lore and series tropes that the subsequent fuck-ups had to follow, and he set those according to his dubious tastes over those of O’Bannon and Scott (who, of course, made the original Alien so stupendous and rich). It’s a painful position to adopt - you have to recognise that the movie is still a good movie, even if it fucks everything up for the future and it might come as some surprise that I have much the same opinion for one of videogaming’s great untouchables - Burnout 3. I’d come to that on the heels of Burnout 2, a genuinely fabulous reinvention of the boost-drift mechanics of Ridge Racer into a western sensibility, while taking huge advantage of procedural physics to radically ramp up the thrills. Where Burnout 3 is a whizz-bang explosion of speed and violence, it lurches between its primal stimuli with greater and greater severity, right up until you’re racing for pure speed in the single-seaters and one AI bump sends you to the back of the pack, with shamefully unfair rubber-banding rendering your exquisite racing and boosting skills utterly irrelevant. Burnout 2 was a much purer experience, where the violence was your fault for fucking up rather than the point of the game. You see, Burnout 2 was about nailing the perfect lap without hitting anything, which Burnout 3 couldn’t accept. Where the original Burnout was almost a simple proof-of-concept for driving like a lunatic as a gameplay virtue, Burnout 2 matured it into a near-perfect package for racers that wanted the risk, but also to thread the perfect route for avoiding it. Burnout 3 was the populist hyperboost of the whole thing, and in shooting for the stars it pissed all over the supremely rarefied flow-state that Burnout 2 could promote by practically forcing you into argy-bargy from the very first race. The entire vibe changed, even if it looked like a brighter and more exciting leap forward. It also managed to fuck up Burnout 2’s greatest innovation - the crash mode, and it’s here that we find the tenous link of relevancy to Dangerous Golf.

Dangerous Golf was the fruit of Alex Ward and Fiona Sperry’s departure from Criterion, and is the crash mode reimagined with remarkable fun and vivacity, yet it’s also brutally wounded by the fearsome spectre of gross overcomplication. Play it today and the game forces you to watch a three-minute unskippable, voiced by the infuriatingly tiresome Ted Stryker, purely to explain the game’s unnecessarily overwrought mechanics to you. And here is probably the reason why Dangerous Golf sits at a lowly 56 on Metacritic. It’s a stupendous idea, ruined. And that’s precisely what happened with crash mode in Burnout 3. Even though Burnout 2’s crash junctions were functionally perfect, Burnout 3 couldn’t resist adding on a videogamey layer that the mode simply did not need. Instead of the chaos and serendipity of launching cars into collisions that could unfold in wildly divergent ways, Burnout 3 simply had to sprinkle a load of collectible icons into the mix and by adding giant score multipliers as pickups, the game effectively stops being an experimental sandbox and becomes a series of targets to hit. As with the racing’s shift towards violence, the crash mode shifts towards score-chasing abstraction and the core delight, watching the crash play out, becomes entirely secondary to getting the highest number. It wasn’t as if the score multipliers were strategically placed to allow for the best crashes either - Burnout 2 had some wildcard shit where you could get insane scores by trying the genuinely mental or stupid, and the spectacular results that sometimes arose had the air of genuine serendipity. In Burnout 3, it was hit the multiplier, avoid the heartbreaker, get the high score. Every. Single. Junction. The Ballardian romance of crashing metal and physics in action was merely the sideshow.

It’s fascinating that Dangerous Golf made precisely the same mistakes. Its initial premise - launch golf balls at stuff to create as much carnage as possible - is beautifully pure. Its audiovisual representation is superb. Criterion’s foundational work in graphics engines and integrating procedural physics is just as present in Dangerous Golf as it was in any Burnout, and the carry-over of destructables from Black feels like a natural exploration from the same technical root. Dangerous Golf as a techdemo for the sheer computational grunt of the platforms it runs on is a fine reason to exist. And it’s absolutely splendid at it! A riot, in fact. In that sense, the idea of hemming the chaos into a wholly arbitrary and fussy ruleset feels like a colossal mistake. I’ve been playing the game recently and yet, I can’t fully describe the rules. You line up a shot and the ball must end in the hole, as with normal golf. However, you must smash things along the way. If you smash enough of the right things, the ball catches fire and can bounce, but then it stops burning and bouncing and then you must putt it into the hole. Without a decent free-roaming camera to assist you in that, by the way. And you get one initial shot per round in the normal mode. Just one. Then it has to reload the entire dataset and reset the scene to start again. I think it’s obvious what the two big mistakes are here, and these can be answered by asking one question - what is fun about Dangerous Golf? Likewise, we can ask the same about Burnout’s crash mode. In crash mode, the fun comes from the crashes, and it’s not from making the biggest number according to an abstracted scoring system. It’s about the carnage. In Burnout 2, the biggest number comes from the biggest crashes. In 3, the biggest crash means nothing if you don’t hit the multiplier, or accidentally hit the heartbreaker. In Dangerous Golf, the biggest mess means nothing if you don’t putt the ball. And there we have mistake number 1 - why bother with the hole at all?

Mistake number 2 is the single ball, single putt. Mistake 3 is the camera, but that’s nowhere near as damaging as the first two. In a game about causing carnage, the idea that you’d only get a single golf ball to do it feels downright mean. Surely the fun here - the ball smashing stuff - is the sauce, so why would you restrict it so much to make sure players make the putt? When the point is so obviously to smash things up and make a mess, why ruin it by sticking so closely to the rules of golf when you really don’t have to? This seems entirely off to me - a real wrong step in the fork between fun from the sim and fun from the numbers. Because of this, Dangerous Golf’s stages become more and more tortuously aligned with finding a singular, optimal path to the putt. In some cases, the stages actively suffer from reduced mayhem opportunities because the designers would rather you work out some godawful sequence of hops, skips and warps to unlock the true scoring potential of the level - which is, in fact, a full-on betrayal of the initial concept. Oddly, the Gas Station stage is inspired (apparently) by Clerks of all movies, which may go some way to explaining the oddness in thinking on display. Alex Ward does a great line in film referencing; Burnout’s inspiriations were Remy Julienne’s supreme car chase in Ronin and the French cult classic C’était un rendez-vous, both indicators of extraordinary taste, but I seriously struggle to think how Clerks, rooftop hockey etc etc etc, relates much to the core premise of Dangerous Golf. And maybe that’s the point.

In the early 2000s, Gary Penn’s often illuminating column in Edge would make use of the word ‘toy’ in relation to videogames. I call it the systome, but ‘toy’ works just as well, particularly with respect to Dangerous Golf. Gary would often mention how the toy aspect of a videogame is more fun to play with than the structure the toy’s options are embedded in. Here, we find that structure working to suffocate the toy and thereby compromise the play. That need to putt, the need to run a maximalist scoring method, the need to layer levels of achievement behind inscrutable bonus relationships gets in the way of simply letting the player have fun with the simulation. The toy is absolutely superb! The physics are wonderful, with not just destructible materials but splattering liquids. The possibilities are dizzying. There’s so much to play with. Because of that, the single ball, single putt mantra means you lose out on the fun of whacking another ball into the mess you’ve already created. Or finding a rubberising powerup that makes the ball bounce everywhere, or one that ludicrously increases its mass transfer to objects, or makes it teleport through some materials and not others and so on, and so on, and so on. The thinking is so limited into the sense of competition, the idea of numerical score, that it fails to really explore everything it could and should about a modern game of domestic destruction. Much like the crash mode of Burnout 3 failing to really expand on Burnout 2 because it relied on scoring mechanics instead of really exploring the playful possibilities of a new and more powerful engine. The scoring system isn’t just shit - it’s actively harmful.

Returning to Dangerous Golf today, by downloading it on PlayStation 5 and seeing old, old friends in my competitive scoring tables, is definitely bittersweet. The engine is still fantastic despite being a decade old, and in some ways its capacity for procedural destruction hasn’t really been surpassed. But at the same time, there’s the legacy tendrils of lost glory days - of design sensibilities as trapped in PlayStation 2 era as the menu text in faux masking tape strips, laid out in distressed Impact bold, and stunt combo reports as black-on-white Dymo labels. It might be a tribute, but really they betray a style of videogame thinking that was already a decade out of date when the game was released. It’s a great shame that the rest of Three Fields Entertainment’s output has been similarly outdated or lacking in true excellence. Wallowing perhaps in the goodwill of being ex-Burnout svengalis, the Metacritic score for the company’s entire output of car-smashing games, at a middling 68, tells the whole story. Abandoning the promise of increasingly more dangerous golfing, Alex Ward and co returned to automotive mayhem and, it seems, has utterly failed to capture the same magic that made Burnout 2 so wonderful and Burnout 3 a popular smash. I’d say it’s easy to see why. They forgot about the toys, and should have stuck to improving the Dangerous Golf concept. Precedent guides the way; Katamari could assist ably, either as a sticky golfball or in the sense of escalation. Why only mess up a room when you could demolish the building? Perhaps we can hope that some unfortunate accident, perhaps a golf ball to the head, could knock some sense into Three Field’s sensibilities and kick out the inexplicable need to ruin the fun just to keep score. Until they see fit to sort out their shit and make the genuinely great sequel we know they are capable of, perhaps I should petition Sony to change the game’s name to Disappointing Golf.

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