Reviews

When I came back to the Spectrum via emulation I imagined that there might be a decent Crazy Golf game produced for it in the intervening years. To my mind the Spectrum is the perfect platform for an isometric golfing game - Bobby Bearing but with a putter and windmills to play through.
This game has 4 nine hole 2D courses with slopes indicated only by arrows. Only one course of the four has any animated objects to avoid even though the game has spilled into 2 separate loads.
It looks and plays like a compiled basic game with really poor graphics.
Perhaps the worst bit is that this game has a selection menu with all four courses on it but choose either of the wrong two (those intended for the flipside of the cassette) and the game will crash during play.
Hole 2 of the animated course is the most frustrating. There is an elephant on the course and every indication that the right decision is to play the ball into the reach of its extending trunk and watch the ball shoot through the elephant and into the hole. But no such imagination applies. The trunk is just an object to be avoided (much like the game).

1988 Accolade Inc (UK)
by Chris Fayers

Mini Putt was written by the author of the unloved Uchi Mata. Unfortunately Chris is not the most well credited programmer around. Well, maybe he doesn't deserve much credit, looking at his games. Maybe, besides Uchi Mata, which is in fact a good game, just not understood, every other game he wrote are painful experiences both to the wallet and to the player himself. Mini Putt is no different. A bland game, hard to play, hard to finalize and hard to look at. It's redeemed only by the two player option.
Thankfully, Chris is now much better at writting games: www.fayersbespoke.com

I actually found this to be quite decent, especially compared to the author's other games, the insult to judo Uchi Mata for instance. The one main negative is no sound which creates the boredom. But on the gameplay front I didn't find this one too bad, which surprised me.

This isn't really a bad game, especially when you consider the author's other titles such as Los Angeles SWAT which was abysmal. The main problems for this however were, for its concept, it was overpriced at £8.95 for cassette and £14.95 for disk and outdated for 1988 standards. But aside from that it's not too shabby.