Mini-golf with sound effects from someone who apparently watched way too much Looney Tunes and decided to cram it into a computer. Zany Golf — that's Will Harvey's way of saying "this is going to be chaos, and it's going to be fun."
It's classic minigolf, except instead of boring hotel holes you're navigating flying saucers, waving toothbrushes, a ramp in the middle of a lake, and bizarre contraptions that'll send you somewhere you couldn't imagine even in a fever dream. Eighteen holes await, each one designed like someone was under the influence. You move the ball with precise angle and power, then watch and hope the little sphere doesn't grind into the depths or get caught by some eccentric mechanism in the middle of the green.
The controls are straightforward — set the angle, set the power, and go. No drama, no line grid to help you out. You've got to do some math in your head, and that's exactly the evil that makes some bits simple and some bits infuriating. The graphics are pixelated DOS fare with yellows and blues that blast through your retinas like it's the mid-nineties. The sounds — I can't forget those — are absurd beeps and weird noises that sound like someone created every sound effect with their mouth and then digitized it. That's exactly what makes it brilliant.
Zany Golf was innovative for its time — who was doing minigolf in '88? This corner of gaming was probably slightly overlooked, treated like a joke among serious titles. Today it's not a title you'd pick up out of nostalgia like "Hey, that was a legend," more like "Wow, people actually spent their free time with this in the nineties?"
If you want absurd minigolf with personality and weirdness, Zany Golf is exactly the ticket. It's not a masterpiece, but it's got that essence of those days — when a programmer could afford to be strange without worrying about marketing. These days fire it up in an emulator; it's a short jaunt for a while, and it won't cost you anything.
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