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Maentwrog Castle Golf Club
by Kevin Martin
| Links Corner Course Database ID Number - 171 |
Release Date |
CRZ Filesize |
Par |
Course Length |
| 2000-12-27 |
18,907,645 bytes |
72 |
6765 yards |
| Type |
Style |
CRZ Filename |
|
FICTIONAL |
WOODLAND |
maentwrog.crz |
| Course ID |
Course Key |
| d650d320dbe211d49618186b92cd0000 |
43570f41a63ebf4115b6285fa9cb78b6 |
|
LINKS CORNER REVIEW |
Reviewed by Ian Downs
The Course -
Maentwrog gave little away on the nice splash intro, but once onto the 1st tee, things began turning a little sour, although the course did give a fair presentation.
Set amongst a wooded valley, the trees play a large part in this course. As you slowly begin the early holes, the odd view of the Castle Towers loom as a nice theme to this course. Every time you see the towers, you want to play the next hole to see what does lay in wait ahead. The hole layouts are fairly varied and give a good test of your driving skills. There are a few holes that require accuracy from the tee with a tree in the line of sight, plus the planning of the 2nd shot can come into the equation too. The par 5's are reachable, but one, in two shots, giving a possible good score. The greens are testing too, so no shot reaching them is a matter of simple putting. Fairways become narrow here and there and the often rolling fairway is found on a few holes too.
Unfortunately, I stumbled across so many faults that I fear this course will score lower than it could. The design of placing so many bunkers by the edges of terrain changes causes quite a few dark shadows in the top view, and some pretty ugly visuals if you meet them too. Bunkers were simply extruded, and any shots against the faces will simply rebound. The first hole shows a terrain of `liip' around 2 bunkers, whilst the rest on the course are rough faced. None of the bunker edges are smooth, they are all hard edged, which causes a terrain mapping change and problem when crossing into fairways/fringes and greens. This is found on 80% of the bunkers, and some edges on the faces could have been turned to reduce this too. Fringes were another area lacking attention. On the 2nd, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 15th and 16th fringes, they all had various mesh problems or simply never ran the distance around the greens. Fairway edges into the rough were also found to have problems too. The 10th, 11th and 16th were but a few holes that the join either fell away or was raised too sharply. Again, the dark shadows in the top view gave this away. The course suffered badly from these faults in my opinion, and it would take a lot of fixing to correct these. A simple learning of extruding and changing the edge hardness before adding terrain/texture would have made alot of the visual problems disappear, albeit for the pulled verts.
For those wanting more on that Castle Tower, I had to check it out too, and this was one feature that does make this course a little more interesting than some, here's a screenshot from the APCD. >
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Reviewer Notes: by Doug Jensen
This reviewer plays using hardware rendering at 1024 x 768 32 bit color. I play No Wind, Medium and Moderate and play the back tees. I play my normal round and consider myself a average links player. My ratings are from 1 (very bad) to 10 (very good) for Visuals and 1 (very easy) to 10 (very hard) for all other ratings.
Kevin Martin is the designer of Maentwrog Castle G.C. A Park Style course with trees, sand and water, Maentwrog Castle G.C. was very enjoyable to play. It is very well laid out although the design could have been more polished. But the playability was hard to beat.
Maentwrog Castle G.C. is very nice visually. Kevin made good use of brush and trees along the fairway.
Maentwrog Castle G.C. can be very tough off the tee as you will be tested with narrow fairways and an assortment of trees and sand in your landing area. On #3 you will have to use a fade to get around a tree. On #5, trees and sand will put a test on your drive. There is moderate slope on the fairways but with the exception of #2 and #10, the slope is not too severe. The pins are located centrally on the green except for the Par 3 #11 where the pin is located close to the edge of the green. You will not find many if any flat putts on this course. The green on #11 will test you with severe break around the hole.
Course Info :
Cameo Screen?
Splash Screen?
Text file?
Hole Previews?
15mb
Reviewed January 2001 |
This course is available as a FREE download.
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