![]() ![]() ![]() The analogue swing system is no longer absurdly sensitive, and the addition of a real-time shot meter makes it much, much easier to see where your swing is going wrong. It helps that the controls are an awful lot better this time around. Your skills still go up and down according to your performance in either mode, but generally Tiger Woods 09 seems to have a more positive feedback loop, where the more you play the better you get. The gimmicks and the mini-games have gone, and what you’re left with is some great ‘light bite’ golfing for those times when you haven’t got the stomach for the main course of a PGA Tour tournament. The Tiger Challenge itself now provides you with a brilliant set of challenges that test you on all areas of your game, including some excellent three to five hole one-on-one matches. You can now, if you want, take your new golfer straight out onto the PGA Tour and have a decent shot at making it into the top ten in your first tournament, and there’s no need to put your golfer through the alternative Tiger Challenge mode first. Instead, the game arranges a quick test of your Tiger Woods skills then presents you with a set of attributes for driving, pitching and putting that go up and down as you play. When you start a career your golfer is no longer painfully rubbish. In case you’re wondering, that’s my way of suggesting that a greater range of voices and animations might be nice. ![]() That means that if you’ve always wanted to see what you’d look like punching the air or shouting ‘get in your home’ in an irritating American accent, your dreams have just come true. Sadly, it’s still not in the same league for character or environmental detail as Sony’s Everybody’s Golf: World Tour on the PS3, but at least it only looks slightly dated – and that’s mostly thanks to the ropey crowd animations and some dubious tree textures.Īs with Tiger Woods 08, you can still import your own face into the game via uploaded photo or USB camera (the Xbox Live Vision camera for 360 owners). EA seems to have fixed the models, the textures and the lighting so that it all meshes together as it should, and the improved water effects and touches like the breaking waves on the shoreline links courses make the game easily more impressive from a graphical standpoint. All those disparate onscreen elements never seemed to belong together. With Tiger Woods 08, it seemed firmly stuck, as if EA had botched together assets from HD and non-HD versions of Tiger then tried to patch it all up with some ropey lighting. Sure, some small children were frightened by the Uncanny Valley Tiger of Tiger Woods 06, but at least it looked like the series was moving forwards into the HD future. What’s more, the game was visually unimpressive. The biggest issue was the way the game handled player skills in the central My Career mode, saddling you with an utterly useless golfer to begin with then practically forcing you through the rather gimmicky Tiger Challenge mode if you wanted any chance to improve. ![]() You see, while Tiger Woods 08 was good it left us with a large shopping list of potential improvements. I know “It’s just better, trust us” or “We’ve erased the mistakes we made last time around” don’t make for such appealing back-of-the-box blurb, but this really is the major selling point. What should is that, through a wide range of tweaks and a slight shift of focus, EA has finally made Tiger Woods the current generation golf game that it should have been two or three years ago. Performance coach? Club tuner? Simultaneous online play? As we’ll see, these aren’t exactly poor inclusions, but are they really the kind of killer features that make you think “Blimey, I’ve got to get me some of that!” Probably not. With PGA Tour 09 the Tiger Woods series has hit its fourth iteration on the current generation of consoles, and you can feel that EA is really struggling for those big new features that can justify this year’s upgrade. ![]()
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