| Budget titles are by nature less than promising — think of them as Little League baseball, with just a few stars moving on over the years to the Big Game -- but occasionally we find a diamond in the rough. Or in this case, a golf ball.
Golf Resort Tycoon is Activision Value’s latest budget sim, following in the somewhat ignoble footsteps of Ski Resort Tycoon and Fast Food Tycoon. Where those titles bombed, though, Golf Resort Tycoon has a mysterious charm. Maybe it’s the soothing sound of little sim-golfers putting and slicing, punctuated by shouts of either victory or shame.
The setup is standard sim: The player starts with a clubhouse and some cash, and can build the bare-bones basics of a course. Most buildings generate money, and most unlock other, better buildings that generate even more money. Anyone who’s ever played a sim before will be able to jump right in. The basic strategy entails placing necessary buildings (restaurants, bathrooms, hotels, etc.) around the course to keep the golfers happy (and loosen their wallets).
Hole design is where golf enthusiasts will be separated from the rest of the players. Most sim veterans (myself included) have never played golf, and so we’ll concentrate on designing the resort as a whole. Golf fans will find a huge array of tools to build a killer course. The most basic involves building fairways, setting par and placing pre-designed hazards.
Where it can get really fun is the landscape design. Like most other sims, GRT lets players raise and lower land, in this case creating hills or even small mountains. A wise man told me that a golf-course designer needs to be part sadist; well, there’s nothing as sadistic as a really rolling, hazard-laden hole.
Graphics are very chunky and scale is way off. This is disappointing, because a typical nine-hole resort doesn’t come close to filling the amount of land given. So why is the racquetball seemingly in scale, but then the tennis court and hotels look like they were built for garden gnomes? Especially considering the size of the virtual golfers wandering around.
Much of GRT seems borrowed from RollerCoaster Tycoon. We won’t say stolen — this is definitely a unique game unto itself. But the menus and the interaction with golfers bears more than a little resemblance to that other game.
One last word: Had this title been just $10 cheaper, its score would have been higher. While $20 is a bit much for Golf Resort Tycoon, $10 is perfect. Our advice to sim fans is to look for this one in the bargain bins. | 
