Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

When you think of dominating sports figures, certain people come to mind.  Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Brett Favre, Dan Marino, Joe Montana, Hank Aaron, Sammy Sosa, and Jack Palmer are a few of the names that could be mentioned.  When you talk about golf, there is no denying that Tiger Woods dominates the field consistently.

The Tiger Woods PGA Tour series has been around since Tiger Woods PGA Tour 1999.  Now Tiger is most likely seeing his last action on the Xbox and PS2 with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 (TW07).  Does his retirement from the PS2 give him a proper send off with a Green Jacket, or does Tiger shoot for the fairways and end up with a side trip to the water and sand traps?

The best word to describe the graphics in TW07 is odd.  The characters in the game look like people you might find out on the golf course.  The clothing the characters wear has textures to give the impression of wrinkles, but it’s still fairly easy to notice that they are rather flat.  The polygon count for the characters is rather low, and without any eye movement or blinking, the characters look a bit creepy.  Still, the animations from the characters after a good or a bad shot are well done.  They move smoothly.  However, it won’t be long before you see them repeat amongst the characters you play against.

The backgrounds are a mix of pleasant and putrid.  The fairways of the courses look smooth.  When a ball lands in a sand trap, sand flies up where the ball hits.  However, the trees look faded.  Moving up close to the trees, they look faded and like something that came from something five or six years ago.  When the ball hits the rough, the lie looks flat.  When you move up to the ball in a short cut scene, a smattering of grass surrounds the ball.  The mix is very distracting and really shows the age of the engine.

Occasionally you do see some deer in the background, but you don’t see much else.  You can hear a crowd clap, but you never see where they are located on the course.  You never see any other golfers on other parts of the course that you are on either.

EA Trax is back to provide the music during the menus of the game.  I have to admit that I wonder what EA was thinking when they chose the music for the title.  The music is light, mostly driving by percussion with a few keyboards and strings to fill out sounds.  It almost gives a Zen-like experience.  Some might think that this is appropriate for a golf game, but some might wonder if they really want music that could put you to sleep as you are trying to get into a golf game.

The sound effects are sparse, but you don’t expect much from a golf game.  You hear birds chirping in the background.  The golf club swooshes as you swing the club.  If you have a powerful shot, you get a Matrix-like accent with the swing.  The ping of the club hitting the ball is bright.   You hear a crowd politely clap after a good shot, and groan after a bad one.

The commentators for TW07 don’t speak much, but you’d expect that from a golf game.  While their voices aren’t grating, you’ll get sick of them rather quickly.  One of the narrators has a sense of humor which makes a serious game a bit lighter.  Unfortunately, you’ll hear them repeat phrases all the time.  I swear if I hear, “Get your bucket, we’re heading to the beach!” one more time I’ll scream!  Their commentary also seems to be inaccurate.  I had some shots that I thought were decent and they mentioned how bad it was, while I thought I had shots that could have been better and they thought that the shot was great.  I’m not an avid golfer, so maybe my impressions were wrong, but if the shot ended in the fairway, I usually thought that was a pretty good shot.

Selecting the shot type is done with the Square button.  Triangle resets your targeting marker.  Circle gives you a fly by from your position to the marker.  R1 and R2 changes the club selected.  You can move the aim of your shot with the D-pad.  The right analog stick is the Shape Stick.  This changes the area where the club hits the ball, giving you a higher or lower trajectory or forcing the ball to hook or slice.  Pulling back on left stick and then pushing forward to swing hits the ball.  The straighter you pull back and forward, the straighter the ball.

Some of the more advanced controls for TW07 are questionable choices.  While in your backswing, hitting L1 gives you extra power.  Trying to do this isn’t very comfortable and makes you wonder who came up with that decision. While the ball is in the air, hitting L2 and moving the left analog stick in a direction gives the ball spin.

It takes a while to figure out how to line up your shot, select your club, swing the club, hit the ball, and give the ball spin.  It never feels intuitive.  While you can fool around with the controller as much as you want to as long as you don’t move the left analog stick, it can take a while to line up your shot.  Also, if you don’t want to hit the ball with full power, there isn’t any way to see if you are going to hit the ball with 50% power or 90% power or 20% power.  I missed several shots because of this, especially in putting where power is crucial.

Tiger Woods starts you off with a character creation screen.  Here you create your personal avatar for the game.  The number of options available for you when you create your character is impressive.  You start out by choosing your age, gender, skin tone, height, right or left handedness, and difficulty level.  Once you get into the actual character creator, you can change such options like your hairstyle, hair color, facial hair, body structure, eye color, and clothes.  The number of options for your character is staggering.  You can make a character very similar to you if you take enough time to create it.

There are tutorials in the game, but these are all video tutorials.  I would have thought that by this time you would have a real tutorial that shows you how to perform an action and then lets you practice the move.  I also found the same video for two of the tutorials, even though the swing was supposed to be different.  Didn’t anyone in QA catch this?

Once you have your character created you are ready to go play some golf.  The easiest way to get in a round is to go to the Play Now option.  If you select this option, you play a round on Pebble Beach without any other interruption or pressure.  You can also select the Game Modes option to select the game you want to play in the other game mode options. 

The Team Tour mode is a career mode where you recruit players to join a team with you and become strong enough to challenge Team Tiger.  To get golfers to join with you, you have to beat them in a challenge.  A map shows where you can go to challenge golfers to join your team.  As more golfers join your team, more locations become available for you to gain members to your team.

One-ball and Team One-ball is a multiplayer game where you alternate hitting one ball towards the cup.  You must hit the ball at least halfway to the pin or you lose a turn. If you put the ball into a water hazard you lose two turns.  In Elimination Mode you set up two teams.  The team that loses the hole loses a player.  The first team eliminated loses.  The PGA Tour Season Mode lets you play up to 30 years of PGA Tour events.  Skills 18 has you play a round of stroke play golf while hitting the ball through colored hoops on the course and keeping the ball in play.  SkillZone is comprised of four mini-games.  Battle Golf is a two-player match where the winner of each hole removes a club from the loser’s golf bag or adds a club back to their own bag.

If these golf modes aren’t your tin cup of tea, then you can select more traditional modes.  These include Stroke play, Match play, Bloodsome,  Greensome, Skins, Practice, Stableford, Alternate shot, Best ball, and Four-ball.  Most of these should be familiar to you, but some modes like Bloodsome and Greensome have tutorials to explain the way they play.

All the modes in the world aren’t worth their weight if the golf game stinks.  For the most part TW07 plays a good round of golf.  Swinging with the left analog stick is a greater challenge than the old days of the three button taps.  The ball moves accurately, and you can definitely tell the difference between hitting the ball in the fairway verses into the rough or a sand trap.  The courses are accurately recreated.  If you want to get in a round of golf, it’s not a bad way to do it.

There are several caveats before purchasing that Country Club membership though.  The game is really slow.  While it’s shorter than walking an actual course, it takes a while to get through the course since you have a short cut scene before and after each shot.  You can skip them by hitting X, but you constantly have to do that.  While it’s not so bad if you are playing solo, it really drags if you have a computer player join you.  It takes them a while to make their shot.  While you can press a button to fast forward their shot, it still drags the game down.

If that wasn’t bad enough, loading the game from a memory slot takes a long time.  The load times are unbearable for the game.  The series has been around for several years.  Why it takes so long to load the game is a mystery and is inexcusable for a series around for so long.

There were several glitches I encountered when I played the game once.  The ball in the right hand corner to indicate where the club sweet spot would hit the ball disappeared.  I would see the cursor when I moved the right analog stick, but the ball wasn’t there to show how far away from center the cursor was.  I also noticed that the Ideal Line Camera shot was no longer available.  This made putting more difficult.  Rebooting the PS2 fixed the situation, but something like this shouldn’t happen.

As mentioned before, there are several game modes to play in the game.  The menu system is a bit convoluted to get to them, but they are available if you want to play them.  They do offer a nice variety to regular golf.  It helps to break up the monotony.  There are 21 courses available for you to test your golf game.

There are two ways to play multiplayer.  You can play with four players using the multitap, or you can play online with a total of four players.  The biggest problem with the online mode is that you really need to have an experienced player to play well online.  Your character has stats that are upgraded during the game, but if you haven’t played long enough to compete with other players, you’ll often find lopsided games.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 07 looks like it will be the swan song for the series on the PS2, and I would say that it’s about time after playing this game.  If other versions of the game had the issues I experienced with it, I’m surprised that it lasted this long.  Die hard golf fans will probably enjoy TW07.  If you are a recreational golfer with a previous version of the game, it’s hard to recommend this version.  Give it a rent before you decide to make it a purchase.

Gaming Trend Score

67

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 54
3. Controls: 68
4. Gameplay: 70
5. Value/Replay: 75
6. OVERALL:67