Jack Nicklaus is a living legend. Eighteen major PGA championship titles. Seventeen holes-in-one. Five-time player of the year. A golf game sporting a name like Nicklaus has a lot to live up to.
Jack Nicklaus 4, the latest incarnation in the Nicklaus series for the Mac, improves on its predecessors by adding richer, more-detailed graphics, better ball physics, numerous multiplayer options (LAN, AppleTalk, Internet), and more types of golf games to play. Accolade, the original developer, worked hard to make Jack 4 a game worthy of its namesake. Unfortunately, it failed.
Jack 4 promises “graphics so detailed they look like photos” — a promise it doesn’t keep. Some of the details are good — the foggy weather, the detailing on the golf ball, the trimming of the fairways — but the graphics are a far cry from photorealistic. Instead, they appear as typical 3D-rendered images. To make matters worse. Jack 4 crams back-ground photos next to these graphics. The result is jarring.
Forget the graphics, let’s get to the gameplay. You aim shots with a superimposed arrow, then click three times on the swing meter to hit the ball. Nothing special here. Most shots are accurate. But there are times when Jack 4 cuts you too much slack. On the pro level, it’s too easy to hit good iron shots, even when you totally mis-hit the ball. This advantage may be great for first-time computer duffers, but it won’t win over old pros.
Once the ball flies, it travels accurately. The ball physics are incredibly realistic. It’s heartbreaking to watch a putt slowly roll 30 feet past the hole on a sloping green, but it’s realistic. Unfortunately, you can view these dynamics from only one angle. You can view the course from four different heights, but not when hitting. There isn’t an overhead view that can be on at all times, so aiming is more complicated than necessary.
If you ignore these faults, you’ll enjoy the five courses. The legend himself designed four of the courses. You can play at Mexico’s Cabo del Sol, which includes Nicklaus’s two favorite “finishing holes,” or play a round on South Carolina’s Colleton River Plantation, what many pros call his best-designed course. Tee off at Atlanta’s tree-lined Country Club of the South or Ohio’s Muirfield Village, a course often rated among the top 10 U.S. courses.
The fifth course in Jack 4 was designed using the program’s easy-to-use course designer. With this terrific device, take a stab at designing your own courses as well. Put in nasty dog legs or enormous hills or island greens. But beware: It requires a lot of work. You have to plan the layout of a course and then put in everything from trees to ball washers. It’s not a quick process, but it is fun.
Despite the course designer, Jack 4 is not the best golf game. Access Software’s Links LS offers two important advantages: richer graphics and better gameplay. Jack 4 redraws about twice as fast as Links, which makes play more bearable at higher resolutions, and Links LS doesn’t come with a course designer. But we’d rather be playing golf than building courses for an inferior golf game. In the end, Jack Nicklaus’s line of golf sims doesn’t live up to his legend.
Renninger, Dean. (April 1998). Jack Nicklaus 4. MacAddict. (pg. 53).
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2014-08-08 / 
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JNG_4.toast_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
