Planet Minigolf
PS3 via Playstation Network
Zen Studios
$US10
The good thing about Planet Minigolf is that its biggest problem is potentially treatable with a patch.
The bad thing, unfortunately, is that if that never happens, that problem - control - rates pretty high on the list of issues not to have.
On every other front, Minigolf is an extraordinary package for $US10.
The 16 nine-hole courses, which disperse over four different environmental themes, look great and offer a healthy mix of surprises and homages to classic minigolf traps, and a surprisingly rich course editor allows players to create their own courses and share them online.
There's a single-player campaign as well as online/local multiplayer (up to six players), and players can customise their character's look for both components.
Minigolf even supports three-on-three team play, and the truly patriotic can represent their country and contribute their scores to an inspired multinational leaderboard.
So it's too bad about those controls: The default analog stick scheme is way too touchy to feel natural, and the button-centric alternate controls (in addition to being entirely too easy to miss completely in the menus) suffer the same problem to a smaller degree.
Practice makes that touchiness easier to anticipate, and the present settings are nowhere near unreasonable enough to completely derail the experience, but Minigolf will need some developer fine-tuning before it feels as effortlessly intuitive as the PS3's best traditional golf games do
