World Class Leaderboard review - Sega Master System

World Class Leaderboard offers would-be Nick Faldos the chance to play their favourite sport without the need to shell out for expensive clubs or risk a potentially lethal meeting with Brucie on the green. As always with golf, the object is simple. Just hit your hard, white, dimpled ball in the direction of the green. Each course has a par (the amount of shots you should need to hole the ball), and the player who uses the fewest possible shots is deemed the winner.

The Sega conversion of the ageing C64 classic offers up to four golfing heroes the chance to challenge each other on four of the World's most demanding courses! Just watch out for the bunkers, trees and lakes - they have a tendency to get in the way of your potentially awesome shots. Oh yes, and let's hope it's not a windy day!

What the Mean Machines staff thought

The office still hasn't calmed down from the arrival of the PGA Tour Golf last month on the Megadrive, so being a bit of a golfing fan I expected rather a lot from World Class Leaderboard. US Gold haven't disappointed us one little bit! Although the graphics are quite slow, all of the skill, timing and atmosphere of real golf has been successfully captured. Invite a few more players around for a game and the competitive atmosphere really hots up. The graphics and sound are both superlative (especially the great sampled effects and speech) and are merely the icing on a pretty special cake. I had a look at Golfmania and Great Golf for comparison, but World Class Leaderboard is simply far superior. Whether you're a golfing fan or not, World Class Leaderboard is thirty quid well spent.

Programmers Tiertex have certainly come up with the goods here! World Class Leaderboard is a superb golf game - one of the best you're likely to play! With four ultra-challenging courses, a multi-player option, great graphics and even some sampled sounde effects thrown in for good measure, this oozes quality, playability and longevity. The control method is excellent - it's easy to use, but is designed so that only experts can really place their shots exactly where they want them to go - and the courses are well chosen to thoroughly test the player's on-screen skills. The nature of this game means that it never becomes dull; trying to beat your par is a challenge you'll go back to weeks, months and even years after you first played it - I know because I still occasionally play the original Leaderboard, and that's over five years old! If you're after a high quality sports simulation, send your caddy out for a copy of this!