Even though a game that is made for the Arcade, namely the Neo-Geo, shockingly Neo Turf Master's Golf is perhaps the best golf for retro-gaming in terms of balance between fun, complexity and graphics. By contrast, retro-consoles do have golf games available, but most of the time these games slink into being "golf simulators" where the complexity is very high at the cost of enjoyment, or are far less complex to the point of being top-down minigolf. Perhaps the only drawback of Neo Turf Master's Golf is that it contains only four courses in total spanning about 20 holes each, which is not much compared to many other golf games retro-computers and consoles. A very good "mod" for this game could consist in keeping the game engine exactly as it is but add other available courses.
Due to all the former, Neo Turf Master's Golf has seen its fair share of tribute from other golf games, remakes and "ports". It is a highly underrated game.
Neo Turf Master's Golf allows the player to use the putting wedge when being on the fairway close to being on the green. The putting wedge is impervious to any wind effects and ironically, impervious to terrain shape as well such that the shot will be directly a fraction of the distance to the hole. On the other hand, via observation, it seems that regardless how well calculated the shot is using the putting wedge, for some reason in Neo Turf Master's Golf you cannot ever score with it while using this mechanism. Using the pitching wedge on the other hand close to the hole but still on the fairway, is still susceptible to wind and terrain shape but the player stands a chance to score.
The default strategy in Neo Turf Master's Golf due to the design of the game is to simply take the shot, preferably without any overdrive, which seems to always yield the best way to attain par across all holes.
Changes to the shot parameters, hook, slice, changing from wood to iron, or using a putting wedge on the fairway are all components of strategies that would make the player get better than par results.
Perhaps for easy adoption, the game is designed to not require new players to fiddle too much with the options in order to obtain decent results.
Ending up in close proximity to trees with the ball might make the next shot impossible towards the hole. Depending on the environment and the proximity to the trees themselves, there are various options such as using hook and slice, preferably leveraging wind direction, in order to hopefully shoot the ball around the trees. However the easiest way to get out of this trouble is to just use a putting wedge, that gives the player about total and would pass under any tree in the game, at the cost, of course, of a shot and more pressure to make par after the shot.
Neo Turfmaster's Golf offers up four different courses, Germany, Japan, U.S.A. and Australia. Seemingly random, reading out these courses from left to right and from top down counter-intuitively yields the difficulty of the course depending on their position in the enumeration. In other words, Germany is the easiest course and Australia the most difficult.