Quick roundup of minigolf games that I’ve tried out with my brother recently. We found all the real-life courses in our city, then turned to the virtual world. A trend that applies to most of them was that too much content is locked behind single-player progression, or skilful mastery of the games. This makes them bad party games, which is what a mini golf simulation should be.

First up was Kidz Sports: Crazy Mini Golf 1 and 2 for Wii. Very very budget. They use a knockoff of Mii avatars that are very like Miis but with a couple more options possibly, and the inability to remove a hat once it’s applied. The same muzak plays incessantly as you struggle to get the motion controls to respond. “Arcade” controls are pointless, but the Wii Remote is just not responsive enough (or the game doesn’t use it well) for “Simulation” controls. The sequel expands the theming beyond the one tropical setting(!), and adds Motion Plus support; what this actually results in is recalibrating and reconfirming in between every shot. Every single shot. On top of the slapdash presentation, let’s just say it failed to impress.

Carnival Games MiniGolf has a proper publisher behind it. The money has gone into voice acting that quickly becomes annoying and making very gimmicky holes; it’s less a simulation of real minigolf, which is fine in theory but the unconventional courses get in the way of just playing and putting, even though the motion-controlled putting action felt better in this game. The game characters are also distracting in their soullessness. There’s a decent variety of course themes but yes, most are locked behind single player challenge and each theme only has three holes, and one is always an extra-gimmicky cop-out.

Golf Mania was real cheap on PS3, but after buying it, it became apparent that it was first and foremost a PSP game that didn’t look or run any better on the home system. For the price it’s hard to complain. The minimalist style was attractive at least, and by the looks of the trailer holes and “themes” (just backgrounds and textures mostly) get more interesting and out-there as you go on. Of course, again, you have to clear a course with par or better to unlock later courses. And once again, the physics and putting mechanics were unintuitive.

Finally, Infinite Minigolf is brand new, and it’s built around user-generated content. I hope this means it will be fleshed out over time but it’s still early days it seems. There were also issues we had with the multiplayer, such as not being able to use customisations on a local player two due to the user account system, or multiplayer not counting at all towards the global progression milestone system. But these are niggles; the base game is solid and fun, far and away the most robust and satisfying so far with obvious care put into presentation and mechanics. There’s a fancy schmancy scoring system and wacky powerups, but it can all be turned off for some minigolf fundamentals if desired. Hoping for some content updates over time.