Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Preview

However, the success of said games suggests that there are plenty of people who would disagree with Twain's assertion. Ranging in seriousness from the cartoonish, arcade efforts of Sony's Everybody's Golf and Nintendo's Wii Sports through to the detailed simulation of today's subject, EA Sports' Tiger Woods franchise, golf games have ballooned out of their curious cultural niche to become a mainstream form of entertainment.

It's all Tiger Woods' doing, of course. Not EA Sports' licensed series which carries his name, but the golfer himself - young, handsome, dashing, so multi-ethnic that it'd make your head spin, enormously successful, and as a result, quite astonishingly rich.

Tiger turned around a sport traditionally seen as the preserve of rich white men with sagging paunches, making it fresh and interesting to a whole generation of young people - exactly the kind of young people who play videogames. That his name adorns the most successful golfing franchise is no coincidence; it's no more and no less than his right.

Even with Tiger's face grinning out of the packaging, however, EA can't afford to rest on its laurels with a franchise like Tiger Woods. Golf's ascendance into the ranks of the world's favourite sports videogames has been rapid, and without continually delivering innovation and progress, its descent from grace could be equally rapid.

At least in part, it's that pursuit of innovation which was behind the decision, almost two years ago, to move the Tiger Woods franchise from its original home at EA's Redwood studios to the studio in Tiburon, Florida. Florida, as the developers are keen to point out, is the home of professional golf in the USA (Tiger himself lives just six miles down the road from the studio), with 180 courses in the city of Orlando alone.

More importantly, though, moving to Tiburon allowed a new development team - many of whom had cut their teeth on massive franchises like Madden - a chance to inherit the well-respected series and try out some new ideas. Giving the team room to breathe a little, EA's powers-that-be handed then an 18 month development cycle (compared to 11 to 13 months even for huge games like FIFA and Madden). With only weeks remaining in that cycle (the game is due out in Europe in early September), we took a swing at both the Xbox 360 and Wii versions.

Xbox 360 / Playstation 3

For the "next-gen" console versions of Tiger Woods, the team at Tiburon inherited a unique challenge - namely the fact that there has been, arguably, remarkably little actually broken in the franchise for some time. Indeed, the most common criticism applied to the series is that it often fails to change much between iterations, a critique which looks a little flaccid when reviewers proceed to admit that there isn't much that needs changing.

Rather than fixing the unbroken, then, EA has opted to update Tiger Woods in two key ways - tweaks, and additions. On the tweaking front, a few of the changes are immediately apparent. Graphically, the game has always been a looker, but it's got noticeably richer colours, more natural looking distance haze and soft focus, and higher quality environments.

Character models have muscles which move and animate realistically, a technique borrowed from Madden, and tiny details like grass overlapping with soft bunker edges combine to make the whole game look closer to the real thing than ever before. The changes seem subtle, until EA Tiburon's Tom Goedde shows us some of the same scenes in Tiger Woods 07, side by side. It's by no means a revolutionary leap, but 08 is by far the better looking game.

Similarly, the changes to the basic play of the series are relatively subtle, but look set to have a big impact on how you play. Shaping shots - curving the ball from side to side - has always been a part of the game, but the team has reworked the system dramatically for 08. Rather than trying to mimic the motion of a golf club through an analogue stick, which was hard to do and tough for the game to read accurately, you can now draw and fade (secret golfer code for shunting the ball left or right along its path) with the right and left bumpers.

How far you can draw or fade is based on the particular abilities of the golfer you're playing, but the system itself is incredibly easy to understand - you simply see a large pulsating circle on the fairway representing your target area, and nudge it left or right with the bumpers on the control pad.

Similarly, a new putt preview system massively simplifies the task of working out the exact lie of the green, showing you exactly how a ball will travel along the surface. The idea, Goedde confides, was largely lifted from a system used by televised tournaments on the Golf Channel. It's all part of what the team sees as its goal with the Tiger franchise; make things more strategic and involving, rather than simply more difficult.

Beyond such small changes, however, the challenge facing the Tiburon team was to come up with headline features that gamers would actually care about - the kind of thing you put on the back of the box, possibly with an exclamation mark next to it. On that front, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. Three, to be precise.

First up is the smallest of the new features, but arguably the most immediately striking - Photo Game Face. Tiger has always been noted for allowing players to vastly customise the look of their golfer, tweaking all manner of facial statistics to create a unique look. This year's major upgrade to the system is the ability to import high detail photographs of yourself (or take them with the Xbox Vision or Eye Toy cameras) and make a face directly out of those pictures.

This is no simple system that stretches the picture over a dummy head, with ghoulish results, though. Photo Game Face asks the player to place a number of reference points on the picture, and creates a fully 3D, fully animated facial model from them. You can even import a profile picture to make sure that your nose and chin shapes are just right. The final results are uncannily accurate; a little judicious tweaking and players can, apparently, look just as good as the pro-golfers in the game do.

Speaking of tweaking, you can fiddle with the photo-generated face as much as you like, just as you would with a traditional Game Face. There are even presets which will let people change the ethnicity and even the gender of their face - with the game being clever enough to tweak bone structure and musculature as well as skin tones to give a rather spookily realistic look to these morphed faces.

The whole point of this exercise is that aside from putting yourself in the game, you can also put yourself in other people's games through the multiplayer modes on offer - essentially creating an online identity that's actually got your features. Which, helpfully, leads us on to the next of EA Tiburon's big innovations - arguably the biggest of the lot, in fact.

Online gaming is a big deal in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08, and while the usual assortment of multiplayer modes will be available, the feature taking the limelight is something called EA Sports GamerNet. This is a unified system which will basically act like a combination of downloadable replays, user-defined challenges and time-shifted multiplayer, and could well set the standard for how games of this type work in the future.

Erase and Rewind

The basic idea is this; every single thing you do in the game, every single shot you take, is recorded. All of the data for those shots (think of it a bit like telemetry data - all of the various variables which go into making a shot) is kept on the console for the duration of your session, and at any point you can opt to clip out a piece of your performance which you thought was particularly good (or just interesting or funny) and post it online.

So far, so normal; the clips are stored online in something called the EA Sports Locker, and you can download other people's clips from their lockers, too. The interesting part comes with the ability to set up "challenges" in those clips. Essentially, the game lets you specify exactly what it was about the clip that was good - and challenge other players to do better.

Those win conditions are incredibly flexible. If you've uploaded an entire 18-hole match, it might well be that you want someone to simply beat your score on that course - which allows for time-shifted multiplayer, since it means that your friends can download your performance, watch it as much as they like, and then try to beat it. When they do, the system will let you know - and they, of course, can upload their own performance for you to try and go one better.

Alternatively, you might have clipped out a single hole where a bad shot managed to bounce off trees four times - the win condition here could be to beat the number of bounces. An extremely long drive could simply set a win condition of beating the distance while staying on the fairway. And so on.

It's exactly the kind of feature which suits an essentially turn-based sports game like Tiger Woods, and if it works as advertised, it could well nurture an incredibly active user-generated content scene for the game, with new challenges popping up on a regular basis. Of course, since you can replay the original shots used to create the challenges to your heart's content, the whole thing also performs as an excellent trainer for the game, allowing mediocre players to analyse the tactics used by far better players and learn from them.

It's not just the GamerNet system which is recording everything you do in Tiger Woods 08, though. The third major, headline feature in the game is something called Shot Confidence, which draws on the same database of information - a recording of everything you've ever done in the game, down to the sort of lie you're in, the club in your hand, the weather conditions and so on.

Building Confidence

Using those statistics, Shot Confidence works out where the strengths and weaknesses of your game are down to a fine-grained level - whether you're crap under pressure in tournaments, say, or if you panic a bit whenever a shot goes near water. In-game, this information is expressed with a "confidence" and "risk" meter for each shot you take, and visual cues that indicate whether the shot you're lining up is one you're "confident" at taking.

At a most basic level, this lets you work out exactly what you need to be working on to get better at the game. It also gives a small (but presumably noticeable) performance boost when you're in a situation where your stats say you're very confident - and even the in-game commentators will make note of how you've performed in various situations in the past.

Of course, for more advanced players there's the option of opening a massive, eye-popping page of statistics and graphics - this is, after all, a game from the guys who brought the world Madden. Goedde makes clear that the team expects most players never to even look at this screen; but it's there if you want it, and its data is used in much more user-friendly ways throughout the game.

As headline features go, the three being focused on in Tiger Woods '08 represent a pretty good haul for a mature franchise. Crucially, they sound equally interesting for long-term veterans of the series and for new converts, which is a tough balance to strike.

However, perhaps the toughest task facing the developers in Tiburon isn't to be found on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 at all. The team is also working on the second iteration of the radically different Tiger Woods game on the Wii - which we'll be taking a look at in another feature.