I played the demo of this a while back. But it timed out before I could try designing a course and, until I got a helpful comment on the post I made about it, I didn’t realise you could restart community game demos.

Anyway, it’s taken until now for me to try it again. Since then, the demo appears to last much longer and the price has gone to 400 points.

Frankly, it’s now a complete no brainer. The controls and physics are utilitarian, without anything special, but they work. The game may not have a graphical wow factor, but it certainly looks nice.

So why buy it? And why claim it’s a no brainer? It’s the course designer. It’s easy to use without being too simple and I knocked up a hole in no time and then had one of those moments of tiny awe as I leapt in and actually played a hole I’d designed. And then I made another. And played that, too. It didn’t work too well (I’d gone crazy on the hills), so I altered it a little, making the initial hill after the tees a little less unforgiving, but putting a nasty bunker in the middle of the fairway at the bottom. Oh, that bunker! It seems almost magnetic. (It’s a shame that you need to leave so much room between different surfaces, but that’s a very minor nitpick.)

It’s a little work of genius, that course designer and all in a community game selling for a mere 400 points. I urge you to buy it. Maybe once I’ve finished a full eighteen holes I’ll share my course with you over Live. (And maybe I’ll even rename it before I do, so you don’t have the word “Poop” in your course list. What can I say? I’m a twelve-year-old in a thirty-five-year-old body.) A golf game is a perfect thing to have sitting on the hard drive and one where you can design your own courses and play as a robot wearing a cowboy hat? That’s even more perfect.

On Saturday mornings I quite often get up before my wife. Big games of killing seem like too much effort, so I often just watch repeats of Time Team on More 4. I think from now on I’ll play Easy Golf instead. It’s like the Time Team of games.

That’s a compliment.