- JP release: 26th December 1997
- NA release: N/A
- PAL release: N/A
- Developer: T&E Soft
- Publisher: T&E Soft
- N64 Magazine Score: 40%
The second golf game on N64, and again it’s exclusive to Japan. This is a significant improvement over The Glory of St Andrews, but is still far from being a good golf game. Like St Andrews, this one also covers only one specific course.
Augusta Masters doesn’t try anything new in terms of video game mechanics for golf, using the tried and tested bar system from Golf on the NES. There’s nothing wrong with it as it’s a good system, but the big flaw with Augusta is that it’s very, very difficult to correlate power to distance – it just never seems right.
This is especially evident during putting, anything above 50% power is far too hard, and really anything over four tiny bars will cause the ball to spiral out of control. The balance for getting it right requires perfection, but you never know what level is needed. If you don’t land on the green very close to the hole, you’ll be adding 5 to your score.
So with difficult gameplay, graphics that are detailed yet also extremely ugly and only one course, there isn’t much to this game.
Poor
For starters, it used digitised players. Like ‘blue screen’ special effects in old movies, this looks woefully dated, with golfers appearing divorced from the backgrounds they’re placed upon.
James Price, N64 Magazine #14
Remake or remaster?
This game doesn’t need any special treatment.
Official ways to get the game.
There is no official way to get Augusta Masters #98
Europe
Japan
North America
N64 Games by Date
1997: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1998: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
1999: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2000: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
It’s amazing just how much the original Mario Golf would just utterly blow this game out of the water hazard just a year and a half later.
I mean, it’s not even like this game actually appeared all that dated for its time. Contemporary releases on other platforms like PGA Tour 98, Everybody’s Golf 1 & 2 and Actua Golf all used a similar presentation style, with 2D billboard sprites for your character and rather simple looking 3D graphics. Likewise, Golf games being based on a single course were also commonplace. And it’s not like T&E Soft were strangers to the genre, in fact, they were perhaps THE most prolific golf game developer of all time (You may in fact know them as the developers of Nintendo Touch Golf on the Nintendo DS!). Mario Golf on the N64 was just that far ahead of everything else at the time.
God bless you Camelot