Me, Mini Golf, and Wonderputt

Wonderputt could be working on nostalgia for me—nostalgia on two different levels. The first one being that, as a child, I loved mini golf. I really would only play it at three specific times though. The first one being if my dad took me to the driving range, where they also had a mini golf course for the kids. The second situation being if one of my friends had a birthday party at Adventure Landing, where we would spend all day driving go-karts, playing mini golf, playing in the arcade or, eventually, playing laser tag. The third time being when my family went to the beach—it isn’t a real beach if there isn’t a chintzy ocean-themed mini golf course there.

The second level of nostalgia comes from the fact that it is a mini golf web game on a flash portal. I remember playing that Nabisco-themed mini golf game on Candystand when it first cropped up, hitting the ball though a course assembled out of product placement for Life Savers, Oreos, Nilla Wafers, Chips Ahoy, and I’m sure plenty other Brands™ of junk food and candy. Taking a cursory glance at Candystand today, the game seems to have gone away after the site was sold by Nabisco. I’m sure there was another one on Shockwave that I can’t remember as clearly. Wonderputt provoked all these memories.

I do think Wonderputt is a good game, partially disregarding my nostalgia. It has an extremely polished look to it, and plays fairly well too. The big gimmick here is that the course is mainly a single screen that evolves as you play. One example: cows release from a barn, they eat the grass field like a lawn mower, then an alien swoops about in a flying saucer, abducts the cows, and deposits the golf ball onto the field which the cows just carved into a hole for the course. It is all delightfully whimsical and frequently very clever.

Gimmicks like this are what defined mini golf for me. I got bored of the driving range mini golf because it was so very “standard”. The Adventure Landing course was cooler, with waterfalls, caves and more bank shots. The by-the-beach mini golf courses always topped them, with big pirate ships, even bigger flashing lights and the rest of the glitz. Wonderputt gets this. It doesn’t need to be meaningful or lasting in any way, it just has to be silly fun that lasts in the moment.

[Play Wonderputt]