Playing Shot-Online reminded me of something that makes me very happy -- the times when those of us with no athletic skill whatsoever can still look good in sports.

I know absolutely nothing about golf except that the player is supposed to hit little white balls with clubs and pray that they go into holes a couple hundred yards away.

After a little time playing Shot-Online, a golf-based computer game, I got better at golfing and actually looked like I knew what I was doing, virtually anyway.

I just had to ignore the fact that I was playing on my computer and not actually at some course.

Besides giving me an ego boost, Shot-Online had other good qualities about it.

The game is multi-player, and provides a small area that looks like a scene from The Sims to play around with when you aren't actually golfing.

Each player's golfer can walk around, buy things with money earned in the game and talk to other people who are playing at the same time.

The actual golfing aspect of the game isn't very exciting, but it's simple and easy to use. I couldn't see myself playing this for hours at a time, but Shot-Online was definitely a way to distract myself while I was procrastinating from homework.

I only ran across a few minor problems in the game while I was playing it.

First of all, the options menu on the main screen is difficult to understand, and there's nothing in the user manual to explain what each option means.

This isn't really a big deal, but I thought it was annoying.

Some of the text is in black and some is in yellow. The yellow text usually didn't look right and had stray letters all over the place. Like the options menu, this problem isn't really huge, it was just something that made the game seem less smooth.

Overall, I thought Shot-Online was entertaining, but it wasn't fun enough to hold my attention for a long time.

It might be more interesting for people who are actually into golf and know things like which clubs to use or how to keep your ball out of the woods.

Nevertheless I'll be sure to keep this game around for the next time I want to put off something more important. Grade: B+

-- Reviewed by Lauren Bressler