World Class Leader Board

The Good
Man, was I impressed by this game! The moment I ran golf.exe the title screen (with a nice digitized image) appeared and then I heard it... the beautiful sounds of chirping birds... coming from my PC-Speaker!

• Revolutionary, there is no other way for me to describe the sound-effects of this game. Previously, all my PC-Speaker had ever produced were bleeps and all of a sudden I'm hearing a voice-sample of a sports commentator saying: "Ooohh no doubt about it. That's deep in the sand-trap." A programming miracle by Access Software.
• For its time, I think the graphics were rather good. The holes looked nice, with the water, the sandtraps and of course the large amount of trees. There are three main tree-types: deciduos trees, palm trees and pines, and within each class there were several different trees. A nice touch was that the type of tree around the course also affected the gameplay; since palm trees have no leafs on the lower part of the stem you could use a punch-shot (a low-flying line drive) to get the ball past the trees. This was impossible with the pines, you had to pitch the ball over the foliage. The swing-animation of the golfer also looked realistic.
• The game comes with 4 courses of 18 holes each: the real-life St. Andrews, Doral Country Club and Cypress Creek and the fictional Gauntlet course. On top of that, there's a course editor which let's you pick 18 of the 72 holes, place them in any order and change the type of tree associated with the hole. You can't design your own holes, but there's still plenty of stuff to play with.
• Hot-seat multiplayer (= on one PC) for up to 4 players.
• I don't think I like the sport of golf enough (never played it in real life) to enjoy a very deep simulation. World Class Leader Board takes only the following factors into account: the wind, snap, power, aim/direction and the golf club you use. This means there's usually not a lot of time between the different strokes, the pace of the gameplay is not slow.
• A putting range to practice your putting & a driving range to practice the long shots. 3 Difficulty levels, one of which removes the wind all together. You can change the color of the ball ;->

The Bad

• You can't customize your golfer. Player 1 always looks exactly like player 2.
• I could never really get a hang of the wind. It seemed to change in direction and force constantly and a bit unrealistically, making its effect hard to predict. To me the wind appeared as too influential
• You can hear spectators but you never see them.
• The terrain of each hole is completely flat, making the St. Andrews course (which has no trees at all) the most uninteresting course to play & look at. Of course I realize I would be asking for too much if I wanted the developers to implement heights in 1988.
• Your golfer always stands left of the ball, even when the ball lies next to a pond or stream. As a result your golfer is standing on the water. That's a bit silly isn't it?

The Bottom Line
World Class Leader Board is not the most realistic golf game and its Links sequels are both better & better known. However it's still a good game and fun to play and the sounds are amazing for 1988/1989.