Intelligent Game Reviews

Variety, so they say, is the spice of life. Every serious golfer I know certainly believes that to be true… they tell tales of the great courses they have played and are always on the lookout for a new challenge. In that spirit Microsoft has collected 10 Links LS courses and released them together in the aptly named Links LS 2000 10-Course Pack.

The Courses

Let me start off by saying that there is only one new course included in this bundle. Indeed, many of the courses were previously released with Links LS versions in past years. Others have been released as add-on packs. Despite that, there are a lot of courses here for those that have not been upgrading year by year and even if you only get a few new courses, the $19.95 bargain compilation price may make this worth purchasing. The previously released courses, while not new in and of themselves, have been updated with 3D tournament graphics for online tour play.

In the bundle are, naturally, 10 courses. These include Bountiful Golf Club, Castle Pines Golf Club, Entrada at Snow Canyon, Firestone Country Club, Kapalua Plantation, Kapalua Village, Latrobe Country Club, Pinehurst No. 2, Sea Island (The Cloister) and one new course, Three Canyons Fantasy Course, created from the minds of the master golfers at Access Software. There is a lot to choose from here, and great golf variety both in golf play and scenery.

There are too many courses here to comment in depth, but I want to touch on the new course. It is very challenging and quite picturesque. Set in, naturally, a southwestern canyon setting entwined around a lake, the course offers some stunning vistas and a great collection of par 3 and par 5 holes. The course is quite good, especially tough in a stiff breeze and with fast greens. And while it might not alone be worth the price of the package, I prefer real life courses to made up ones, the course designers at Access deserve a lot of credit for manufacturing an excellent course for PC golf.

Just to check, I went back and looked at the old versions of the courses that are included here that were once bundled with previous versions of Links LS. As far as I could tell they were identical save for the 3D tournament objects and the option to include crowds. I can’t swear this is 100% true, there may be some tweaks here and there, but to the casual observer they are otherwise the same. The courses I checked were Entrada, both Kapalua courses and Latrobe. These were included in the Links LS 1998 and Links LS 1999 packages. I can also attest that Pinehurst No. 2 is identical to the course that was sold as part of a two course U.S. Open at Pinehurst package published last year (see our review.) At first I was really disappointed with the duplication of courses… but then I got to thinking about it a bit more. For $20 you get 10 courses. Suppose you had purchased the previous two games and had one expansion also. That still leaves you with 5 new courses at a decent price. Given that, the bundle seems a lot more valuable than my initial impression.

And the really nice thing about the 10 courses is that they are truly varied. The Hawaiian courses tend to be wide open with undulating fairways and rather straightforward greens. The Carolinas courses have flatter very narrow fairways that demand good shots from the tee and tricky greens where pin placement can really punish a bad approach shot. Overall it’s a solid collection of interesting courses, with nary a poor choice in the lot. So if variety really is the spice of life, there is plenty of spice in this collection.

The Verdict

For fans of PC Golf the king has long been Links LS. And while players who have upgraded year by year may not find that many new courses in this compilation, it’s a valuable addition to the library of those who haven’t.

Links LS 10-Course Pack Screenshots

The older courses have been enhanced with tournament objects and galleries… here I attempt a putt in front of the hushed crowd at Bountiful.	The new Three Canyon’s Fantasy course is rather challenging, though it isn’t worth the price of admission if you have the other courses already.
With varied terrain and scenery, as well as 180 holes of golf, there is something for every golfer in the collection.

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