His latest attempt to curry corporate favor is, if nothing else, surprising, as Sony rarely fills any role at Kotaku beyond the raw asshole, paraded out and abused in their fair weather farm show.

But self-aggrandizing, David and Goliath shenanigans notwithstanding, the tenor of the article was shockingly sycophantic given the site’s history with the company.  And while I hate to say I told you so (He really doesn’t -Ed), it would lend credence to my theory of some weeks ago: that Kotaku now has more to gain as an equal opportunity brown-nosed bottom-feeder than by maintaing a facade of respectability through conveniently edgy, in-your-face editorializing (read: pandering to the Xbox crowd, a demographic which has grown almost day and date with the site itself).

But hats off to Stephen Totilo all the same.  He’s clearly paid enough attention to this industry to understand that game journalists are little more than unwitting copywriters.  And that sort of epiphany is the first step towards a fast car and a crazy stripper wife courtesy of Microsoft, Activision, Sony, Rockstar…not Nintendo though.  They don’t even need our business…even when they do.

Ah, Pangya. The heady days of creeping out strangers online by pretending my friend Sede was my Korean wife, and promising beatings if s/he missed an important shot. Which was every shot. Let’s back up. Pangya is a thirty dollar “fantasy golf” game based on a free online Korean grindfest known as Albatross18 in this part of the world.

We called it Rorigolf due to the sometimes embarassing jigglyness of the underaged characters. But we’re under court order not to speak on this further.

But this game is worth it. With extra modes, a storyline crafted from the greatest minds that ever spent eighteen days in a trench, and pretty damn good connectivity, Pangya is a good answer to the shortcomings of the PSP versions of Hot Shots Golf. Bear in mind I love that series, but the PSP iterations have been my least favorite. I was hoping Pangya would fill that spot in my shrivelled little soul and I wasn’t disappointed.

The story, though, isn’t going to be for everybody. It veers madly between canned Janglish weirdness that you’ve seen a dozen times over, from Top Shop to the “zany” magazine laffs found in Retro Game Challenge, and careens across the gaming highway into the tanker containing pure awesome that causes it to turn over and coat everybody with molten goodness. Much like the time time I shot at the Wherehouse Music mascot, minutes before I was forcibly ejected from the Erotic Exotic Expo.

I’d like to know which side of the ocean produced this, at any rate. While I love the finished product, I have to point out that there’s at least two notable typos in the opening cinematic, including the bold new word “everday”. It harkens back to the days when translations were credited as “ENGLISHING” and done by a guy named David who had no last name (check the original Ninja Gaiden for this gem, if memory serves).

You’re going to deal with a tutorial more overbearing than a Thai mother. In the words of a great man, DON’T PANIC. The fact that they need a tutorial just to teach you how to open the item screen is not a personal insult against you. It’s just that some people really are that stupid! Evolution did somehow allow for people who can’t outsmart the packaging on the game box.

Don’t panic about the overly easy gameplay when you first start, either. Pangya begins, by default, in “Beginner Mode” where the power bar moves more than twice as slowly as you’re probably used to. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but Mike informed me that you can go to the options menu and disable “Beginner Mode”. This led to one of our inane arguments about how to tailor the game experience to the player. Mike points out that I shouldn’t have a problem going to the options menu instead of my favored method of choosing difficulty when starting the game. I pointed out that we don’t use dungeons or rape as a warfare tactic anymore because we’ve made some goddamn process as a culture.

Look, maybe I’m the creep here. But if I’m going to the option menu, it better be to make the dialog easier to hear or to correct the reversed camera some dick comp-sci dropout thought would be a good default setting.

FACT: More games should have arbitrary fantasy settings. Pangya’s courses are a welcome departure from the familiar at times, including giant mushrooms and lillies. The courses start out deceptively simple and evolve into some killer blockages. Look around. An innocuous canyon might turn into the greatest shortcut if you’re good enough to send the ball down the flume. You’ll be expected to knock a ball over or onto a giant navy warship. If the game seems too easy or mundane, you haven’t been playing it long enough.

There’s some crazy, addled talk about how this game… almost exactly like Your Earth Game Called Golf… uses “air lances” and “clovers” to banish some kind of Dark Lord. There are wizards and little kids with eyes bigger than your stomach and giant hairy dogmen you can play as. In a sense, you have to admire this kind of weird anime abandon applied to something that has for so long been thought of as the domain of old men in questionable pants, stoners, and some combination of the two.

This is the meat of an experience. The oddity. Mutant League Football? Still my favorite from the genre. Choro Q wins for trippy racetracks where it fails in good racing or “RPG” elements or working controls, really. Speaking of which, Pangya is said to have RPG elements itself, which is also a tiny white lie. You’ll gain money and spend it on items to boost your stats, but it’s no more an RPG than Halo. Clothes are affordable, but the club sets are almost as grindtastically expensive as the PC counterpart.

Pangya, in short, is an excellent game that should appeal to players who have shyed away from golf games. It’s not perfect… nothing aside from God Hand ever is… but it’s a worthwhile game and you should be playing it.