Desert Golfing, Finally a Realistic Golf Sim Makes it on the Iphone.

Give me the beat boys and free my soul I want to get lost in the desert and golf.

I just passed hole 311 and saw a cactus for the first time. In the video game world that is called immersion. With “Desert Golfing”, an app I’ve been playing on the iPhone, the large team of developers set out to make a game focused on making you feel like you’re actually golfing in the desert.

The mechanics of the game can be easily described to a new player but that does not mean there isn’t a complexity to the game-play that requires substantial amounts of time dedicated to your stroke to master the sands. For those players who have experience with other golf or billiards sims, they will be able to hop on into the game without a struggle. Like a slingshot, you’ll pull back to launch the ball. Desert Golfing generously gives the player an arrow to show the distance and angle of your swing, besides that you’re on your own.

The flag pole clearly identifies which hole you’re on, of the desert’s endless course. For each hole, the total count of the strokes required to sink the ball in the hole are tallied up at the top next to a “+”. Alongside the stroke count is the total stroke count. I’ve surpassed a thousand strokes and my arms aren’t even close to getting fatigued. With over a 1000 strokes and having just recently pulled flag 311, I’m averaging about 3 strokes per hole.

Very few successes in life measure up to the amount of satisfaction that comes from a hole-in-one in Desert Golfing. Ideally you’ll shoot for a hole-in-one but occasionally the game throws you a hook and will give you a course that for some reason bust your balls and grinds your gears so hard that you’re walking out of the course with almost 31.1 strokes on a single hole. There are two main challenges that each golfer will come across. First example is dealing with a cliff that hangs over the teeing area. Second comes from over or under shooting your initial drive and having the ball get stuck in valley. Some valleys are so tough and steep that the only way to get out of them is to back track, thus hurting your overall score in a frustratingly painful way.

The cost is $1.99 and I’d say I’d pay even up to $3.11 for the game.

Graphics - really crispy
Performance - runs really well
Audio - just enough and not too much, you can still listen to music or a podcast while playing
Advertisements - none, god bless
File size - like 2 MB, at most
Replay-ability - infinite
AOTY (app of the year) - not sure when it was released but most likely

Desert Golfing drives it out of the range. This is a completely flawless game that I can’t recommend enough. I gifted two copies of the games after a few holes and they are now just as hooked on stroking. We’ve been sending each other screenshots of our scores, which makes this single player adventure a community experience.

9.99/10

Halo 3 in the MCC on PC review. It's finally here.

2020 has been a painful year but a lesser mentioned travesty has been 343's decision on how to release and work on Halo games for their PC port of the MCC. Slowly beta flighting and releasing the Halo games in chronological order based on the story and setting has been an almost criminal case of deliberate and toxic wide-spread blueballs to the Xbox community. Starting with Halo CE, would've been one thing but to dedicate months of pushing out Reach first hurt. Give us Reach when you are looking around the office for tasks to do, don't give us Reach when you're trying to hype us up on repurchasing the game, this time on steam. At least the time between Halo 2 and 3 felt very quick, with Halo 2 being a pretty decent port and game that hasn't aged too poorly. CE felt like I was playing CS 1.6 or Doom 1, compared to what I was currently playing (Modern Warfare, Fortnite).

So we get Halo 3 finally for PC. Yes we had the el dewrito, or whatever it was called, where we could experience what Halo 3 could be like on M&KB, but it wasn't the full thing and we all knew it wouldn't ever become the full thing. What the community need was a Microsoft backed Halo 3 port to the PC, not a Russian version that they somehow managed with Harry Potter's wand to get running for who-knows-how-long on the PC.

July 14th, (I guess silently July 13th also), I get an email from Steam telling me that Halo MCC DLC is available and I should be at home getting kill sprees instead of crimping wires at work. After work I see my boys are already getting clapped on Halo 3 and I join in. Unlike all the previous releases of Halo to the MCC on the PC, this one actually works and it works well. In the entire night I was playing I never experienced any game breaking or even annoying bug. What 343 delivered was actually the Chrondalisa Halo 3 experience. Reach I  struggled with v-sync off and on and frame limitors. That game was a constant battle between screen tearing like a paused VHS or about as responsive as me telling my girlfriend to play bumper jumper for the first time.

Bugs in Halo 3 - None.
Graphics in Halo 3 - Halo 3.
Frame-rate in Halo 3 - 311, easily.
Audio - except for the unlocking in the battle pass being 31.1 decibels louder than the rest of the game, I think Marty would be proud.

The other Halos suffered from a large discrepancy between using a mouse and keyboard or a controller. Halo 3 doesn't seem to suffer in the same way. I'm 3 over 11 in terms of experience gaming on WASD vs my Xbox controller, which basically means in Counter Strike I get swept under a corporate building's rug which then gets decommissioned as a practical office complex due to not keeping up with earthquake regulations in San Francisco, thus leading to being torn-down or condemned. Halo CE and 2 suffered from the hit-scan era of video games, where the bullets are accurate. You get a mouse and a hit-scan game and you're more preoccupied clicking on heads with a pistol than even needing grenades, or melee. Halo 3 we get some of that good old projectile shooting. This means you need to shoot 5 or 6 burst rounds to do the 4 rounds to kill people. This levels the playing field, where you might be able to whip the mouse quicker than the controller, the players are still at a similar playing field when they are both waiting on the battle rifile to do what they want it to do.

Halo 3 for MCC on PC gets a 7 out of 11. And if you need that on a 10 base scale, that equats to a 9.343 out of 10.