The 3D rendering engine takes advantage of contemporary accelerators, so even at high resolutions, waiting between screen redraws was minimal. On my 850Mhz testbed with a Hercules GeForce2 MX installed, building new holes and changing positions on the fairway occurred in the blink of an eye. My only disappointment so far in playing this late beta is that I wasn't able to exploit the true 3D capabilities of acceleration – real-time, first-person walkthroughs of each hole or a “ball cam” that lets you follow the flight path of your ball in a window.

The physics engine allows players to input their own golf skills. In addition to customizing the golf swing (left-handed, right-handed, etc.), now you can adjust individual club distances to reflect your own talents. This seems to be a very promising addition, since it lets players put themselves into these course in a much more convincing way. New physics wrinkles like balls bouncing accurately off of bunker lips have been added as well. While on the putting green, a new color-coded terrain grid makes reading the greens much easier, I found. The golf swing simulations are familiar: your choice of beginner difficulty settings with the swing gauge, the classic two or three-button club control scheme, or a kinetic system in which you swing the club by moving the mouse laterally.

At long last, hard core tinkerers finally get a course designer in Links 2001. My early experiences with the thing demonstrate that it is powerful, extensive, but also daunting. Starting with a blank grid of triangles (I hate when that happens), you click and drag your mouse to draw hole designs, plant terrain and foliage, assign hole locations and elevations. An extensive set of tabs and sub—menus bring you into the minutiae of controlling every centimeter of the course. Every terrain type and course feature imaginable is in the database, from stone cliffs to various types of wooden creek bridges. While my experience with the design was brief for this preview, I must say that I was intimidated by its abstract programmers' approach. Rather than starting with some basic link shapes or conventions that a casual user can tweak and play around with, this designer has you loading enormous libraries of object files and clicking many menus deeps to get what you need. That's fine for the truly ambitious designer, but I would have liked to see a more accessible approach pitched to those of us with lives. It remains to be seen whether at-home course architects embrace this high-powered tool to create the kinds of amateur course libraries we used to see coming from the Jack Nicklaus.