Firestone Country Club

The PGA Tour has been playing at Firestone for quite a long time, first at the World Series of Golf, and now as part of the World Golf Championship series.  Now I must admit, even though I've never played the course, I have fond memories of it.   The first golf video game I ever played had only one golf course, Firestone.  This was a very long time ago, back in the 90's.  It was on my grandparents old computer, which was running on Windows 95.  I remember that it was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen, and to this day, I can still remember the game fondly.  That said, I know quite a lot more about golf than I did when I was seven, and it has to be said, Firestone is a terrible golf course.  It's the ultimate expression of one of some of the worst trends in golf.  The routing of a golf course is extremely important, a poorly routed golf course can never reach its fullest potential.  If you look at the Firestone's South Course from an aerial view, you'll notice that virtually every hole runs in straight lines, parallel to each other.  This is the worst thing a golf course could do.  Every hole will look the same.  It doesn't help that every hole is pretty much the same.  The par 3's are all around 200 yards, and the par 4's have very little variation.  Ideally, you could have almost 200 yards between the longest and shortest par 4's, but Firestone has less than 100.  I'll grant that the par 5's are a little interesting, and the 16th is justly famous, but it only has two of them.  So here we have a golf course that looks and plays in the most boring fashion possible.  Perhaps it's little surprise the professionals love it there, since everything is right in front of them and there's no surprises.  Maybe Tiger will do something interesting so that the week won't be a complete bore.

Update: Tiger shot a 61 today.  After two days, he's ahead by seven shots.   He did something interesting.

Super Smash Brothers: Melee Versus Brawl

When it comes to Smash Bros, I've always been a Melee fan.  It's what I learned on, and for quite a while my roommate in freshman year and I went head to head for many an hour.  He was very good at the game, and he only got better as we went along.  I'll admit, he and another one of my friends are really good at the game, about as good as a casual Smash Bros player will be.  I'm not quite at their level, but I put up a decent fight, they actually have to try to beat me.  I play Falco, and my friends play Sheik and Falco.  The action is intense, and honestly, I had trouble playing as other characters because of how slow they fell.  Falco falls fast, and I got used to that.  Now, I've been playing Brawl in recent days, and I'm still not used to the slow falling in that game.  I'm sitting around waiting to hit the ground, it really does mess up my timing.  Everything in Brawl feels slower, and while I do like the game, I feel that Melee was overall better.  The arenas are less chaotic, the action is faster, and some of the items in Brawl are a little ridiculous.  I hate to say that Brawl is oriented towards more casual gamers, but it just isn't as focused as Melee.  So, if you want to have a serious fight, play Melee, if you want to goof off with friends, play Brawl, turn all the items off except for the various bombs, set the drop rate to high, and watch everything explode.  The cluster bomb thing is ridiculous.