“The kind of game you can pick up and play a few minutes at a time” is one of those standard game-review pullquotes, like “great replay value,” “redefines the genre,” etc. The PSP game Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 is, indeed, the kind of game you can pick up and play a few minutes at a time, but I don’t. I play it for hours on end.

I mentioned on Friday that the first Open Tee had consumed an embarrassingly large chunk of my life, and much to the detriment of my marriage, career, etc., the sequel is even better. The developers, Clap Hanz, took a novel approach to the new Open Tee, creating six new courses and 12 new characters while also including the courses and cast from the original. There’s a bunch of new tweaks and features, but all the familiar bits are there, as well. Clap Hanz grafted the new game onto the old.

As a result, the feel of the game is much the same, so this is the section of the video-game review template where I’m supposed to complain that the sequel doesn’t offer enough innovation. Actually, I welcome the lack of innovation. Thank you, Clap Hanz, for not innovating too much. I was playing the original, three-year-old Open Tee right up until the new edition arrived from Amazon last week. My abiding fear was that Clap Hanz would screw with things in Open Tee 2, try too hard to make it “new,” flex their programming muscle, and so on. Nope. This game is “Open Tee 2” in the most literal sense: They doubled the original.

Why does this make me so happy? It’s simple. I am freaking awesome at Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee.

No, really, I am. And I don’t care if it’s a silly PSP golf game. I’m proud of it. When I was a young teenager, I got really good at Crystal Caliburn, a pinball simulation for the Mac. I was talented enough at fake computer pinball that my name was listed in a book of world-champion video-game scores. I was inordinately thrilled with this small accomplishment, but when you’re 13, you’re supposed to be inordinately thrilled with such things. At 26, such pride is a little more unseemly, I admit.

Here’s the thing, though. Grand Theft Auto IV may be, as the reviewers say, a towering achievement in video games…nay, in art…nay, in human existence. But I will never be the best in the world at GTA 4. With work (or cheat guides) I can get to 100% completion, and then that’s it. And with games like Guitar Hero, in which greatness can be measured more objectively, there comes the problem of popularity. Too many people play Guitar Hero religiously for me to hope that I might become the greatest.

Open Tee, though, occupies that sweet spot on the Venn diagram where the “Games I’m Obsessed With” circle overlaps with “Games That Are Only Moderately Popular.” Not only that, but the sequel has made my years of Hot Shots Golf practice relevant again—hooray! Not only that, but Clap Hanz has added an online play feature so that I can regularly kick the asses of people I don’t even know—huzzah!

Yes, Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 is a game that most will play a few minutes at a time, yet I have never been able to stop there. And finally, all my hard work is worth it, I think.

I could expound on the reasons I fell in love with Hot Shots Golf in the first place—it simulates the nuances of golf pretty well for its cartoonish trappings, it has an addictive kinetic feel, the courses are well-designed—but the reason I play it anymore is mostly that it makes me feel on top of the world. What more can you ask from a $30 game?