Dr. Dume ~ The Doctor is In

Golf is to Scotland what soccer is to England, rugby to Wales and American football to, well, America.

Unfortunately there is nowhere in Dume Swamp flat enough for a green, or solid enough for a fairway. My golfing activities are restricted to hitting balls from the tower. I can get a Feral at 150 yards on a good day.

Stumpy is not happy about it because there’s no way to put a tee into the granite slabs of the tower floor. He lies down and holds the ball in his fingers. Honestly, you should hear him complain – and I only undercut my stroke four times. That was because he held the ball too high the first time and because he was shaking so much the second and third times. The fourth one was deliberate.

It’s a well-made game, I have to admit. The gory parts were most realistic. Basically, it’s a golf game with extensions. On normal computer golf, if you slice the ball it goes off into blank green and flat scenery. Away from the course, nothing exists but flat grass.

Not in this one. I hooked a shot into the car park and broke a windscreen. I then had to complete that hole as fast as possible before the owner of the car came out of the clubhouse. All car owners are big, angry and vicious in this game.

Now I had to complete the course before he found out who broke his windscreen. Other characters in the game will tell him who did it unless they’re bribed or killed. I chose the cheaper option, even though I was armed with only a bag of golf clubs.

That does change: if you birdie a hole you get a shotgun in your golf bag. A hole in one gets you a nailgun. Very nice, and very handy at the seventh where I had to cross a bridge with a troll under it. The Billy Goats Gruff would have been a much shorter story had Little Billy Goat Gruff been properly armed.

The car-owner almost caught me at the twelfth but I had already woken the Wyrm that lives in that hole, so I left them to fight it out.

It seems he won because he reappeared at the fourteenth. I had just dealt with the horde of goblins and won myself a rocket launcher. That slowed him down a bit, but the car-owners can’t be killed, I think. Unless there’s some weapon hidden somewhere that I didn’t find on my first round.

To survive, you have to complete all eighteen holes and make it into the clubhouse—which is full of big, angry car owners. You have to reach the bar and order a round of drinks to placate them. It goes very much against my nature, but that’s what it took to win the game.

It wasn’t real money, but the game was so realistic I had to count my pocket change to be certain.