There were dozens of us to start, but in the end, the tournament was mine to lose.
I was playing my best nine-hole round yet in Sony's PlayStation 3 exclusive Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds: Eight under after eight holes. I held a two-stroke lead heading into the final hole, a six-hundred yard par five. No one was going to get home in two here, so a par would probably do the trick. A birdie would cinch it.
I crushed a 300-yard drive—terrific length for the novice golfer I had been saddled with for this particular online match. I figured I'd play it safe: Knock a 4-iron to a hundred yards, maybe get up and down for birdie.
And that's when it happened: My wireless controller lost connection with the console. It wasn't entirely unexpected; I've experienced the problem maybe once a week since purchasing my PlayStation 3 in early 2007. It lasts only a couple of seconds, and it's never before happened during a critical game moment...at least not until now.
I tapped the X-button once to start my swing, a second time at the apex of the arc for maximum power, and a third time at impact, but somewhere between the second and third taps the connection conked out. My golfer almost completely missed the ball, duffing it into the rough a couple of yards in front of me.
It was all downhill from there. My next shot hit the top of a low tree directly in front of me and careened into the water. It took three more strokes to get it into the cup and finish at six under, one behind the winner.
I sat motionless for a few seconds. Then I slowly turned red (so said my wife) as I put all of my strength into squishing the malfunctioning controller between my hands.
Of course, this is no slight towards the game, which I quite like. Out of Bounds is the first of Sony's cartoonish Hot Shots Golf games to feature online play, and I'm a big fan of how they've gone about taking the franchise's signature arcade-like action into a large, multiplayer arena.
Players create little Mii-like avatars that run around clubhouses text chatting with one another as they wait for tournaments, which begin at fifteen-minute intervals and can accommodate up to 50 players. It's simple, accessible, and fun—unlike the convoluted and sometimes buggy online modes found in EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour games.
My only beef is that the tournaments involve substantial waiting time between holes. All participants golf concurrently and have a set amount of time in which to finish each hole. The problem is that the clock continues to tick after everyone finishes, sometimes for more than a minute after all players are ready to move on to the next hole. Players can send text messages and scroll through details of how each player faired on the preceding hole, but there is an awful lot of idle time.
Still, I'm not terribly worried about the wasted minutes. As I noted last week, I can always find ways to fill time during lags in games. Indeed, I've been punching out this post during the minutes I've spent waiting between holes in two tournaments.
I'm more concerned about my faulty wireless controller. I never used to fret over those occasional drops in signal, but now I think it might be time for me to buy a new peripheral. The question is, can I hold off until Sony's new rumble-enabled controller comes available? I'd like to. But if I suffer another defeat like the one I described above, I may not have any choice but to buy a new one now—there's a good chance my current controller will be smashed to pieces from being hurled across the room.
