If you took the rules of golf and translated them into a Japanese instruction manual, you'd have Camelot's We Love Golf!, a game so insidious in nature that it's literally impossible to sound unexcited about it. But unexcited you will feel when faced with a shot meter more complicated and unintuitive than an actual round of golf. It is no surprise that early screenshots haven't shown a single glimpse of the horrid mechanism. I like Camelot's Mario Golf, but this thing is like its disappointing sister-game, Luigi Golf--and without the fun, stereotypical accent.

Basically, in order to tee off, the game requires you to do all of the same calculations required to launch the original Apollo space mission. Yeah, that stuff fits in your car radio now, but applying rocket science to a golf swing is a little more tricky.

There's a Wii Remote icon matching your swing, and you hold down A, equip the mithril armor, start your back-swing, and time it to the delayed club icon. Then you collect the bird crank, talk to the mayor, pause at the peak of your back-swing--making sure the club icon is lined up with the applicable twing twang--and finally follow through with your swing after reaching the corresponding shaded area on the graph. But it has potential!

I could go on about how needlessly frustrating We Love Golf! is, but you have more fun things to be doing, like kicking field goals in a 90s-era Madden game. In its current state, the game would make a great April Fool's Day gift for any dad. The developers are still apparently improving things, which is good news, if they want to sell more than 12 copies. In the meantime, it appears that the Wii will continue to go without so much as a solid round of putt-putt.