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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 - Performance coach
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PreviousTiger Woods PGA Tour 09 All-Play Review
Wii Review by Dan Whitehead
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Building up your skills through the career mode is still your best bet for improved performance, and the game offers tournaments through 2009 and beyond. Impatient pros can skip straight to the FedEx Cup, or you can test yourself against the big names in the Tiger Challenge section. These challenges are actually different to the other console versions, and concentrate more on winning holes against real-life golfers than the smaller tests of power and accuracy that 360 and PS3 owners get to try.
Other features winging their way over from the other consoles include the Club Tuner, a very handy workshop that lets you customise each club to compensate for any recurring hooks or slices, or just to lengthen their range at the expense of accuracy. The character designer is also much more robust than previous Wii outings, offering the same level of detail as the other versions even though the ability to import your own face hasn't been included. This being a Wii game, they've also included a suite of mini-games alongside the impressive selection of more serious golfing modes. It's doubtful that most sensible players will appreciate the chance to play keepy-uppy with a golf ball, or use the remote to try and pull other player's shots off-course in mid-air, but there's enough serious business that such frivolity can be tolerated.
Perhaps most excitingly, the simultaneous online play has made its debut on the Wii at the same time as its more powerful, and more net-friendly, rivals. This means you can play a round of golf against friends (using either existing Wii codes or EA's own login system) or just dive into a game against whoever is online. Rather than taking turns, you play at the same time, with your opponents' shots represented on-screen by colourful trajectory lines. It's not as smooth as it was on the 360, with the other player's shots sometimes jerking about the fairway, but it's a huge improvement for a console that is almost always under represented in the online stakes.
The courses are recreated reasonably well, but they're empty, soulless places on the Wii.
It's just a shame that the game hasn't received a graphical facelift to accompany the influx of new features. For a console so famous for its bright and colourful games, it's rather bizarre that Tiger Woods on the Wii is such a drab experience. The golfers themselves look okay, but spotting the point where the fairway turns to green can be surprisingly tricky. It's also strange that the spectators have vanished - though you can still hear them. Given that even the PS3 and 360 crowds were just made up of bog-standard looped mannequins, it seems like a peculiar omission.
Even with the dreary visuals Tiger Woods 09 is certainly the best golf game on the Wii so far. For players who can get to grips with the slightly opaque nuances of control needed to hit the medium shots and putting, it's arguably the best version across all the consoles. And yet I can't quite bring myself to give it the same 9/10 as I gave the 360 version, simply because there's significantly more room for improvement on the Wii where precision and feedback is concerned. With the addition of MotionPlus, the Wii version of Tiger Woods 2010 should be phenomenal. For now it's just very, very good.
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Comments: 1-29 of 29 in total
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KingOfSpain
17/09/08 @ 07:04
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"The slightly disappointing news is that the motion control, while vastly improved from last year, " where's the rest to the sentence? I want to know the slightly disappointing news :-)
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wewillselfdestruct
17/09/08 @ 07:11
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Either EA or Nintendo must be censoring Eurogamer now. Which is it? We demand to know!
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Der_tolle_Emil
17/09/08 @ 07:30
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Sounds good. Since We Love Golf wasn't what I was hoping for and Mario Golf is still not confirmed I think this will come in handy.
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"the ability to consistently hit medium strength shots would be more attainable. As it is, you may find yourself changing clubs to reduce the maximum distance rather than trusting your own arms, which is an odd way to play."
Erm isn't that how you play golf? You change clubs and keep your swing consistent rather than using one club all the time and trying to do 20% power or whatever....... |
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I think that was a very grumpy reviewer there. Like any sports game, if you have to invest time in getting it right then it's done it's job. Sure there are some problems but nothing on the scale of how this reviewer made it seem. if EA had made the graphics bright and cheery then it wouldn't have reflected the look of the series.
9/10 is a far more reasonable score. |
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8/10 is a good score but the review sounds overly harsh in my opinion. Perhaps the reviewer needs to play the game a bit more as I have not found any serious problems with either the putting or golf swing. It is not perfect but is far better than I was expecting and quite impressive considering the limited 1:1 accuracy of the wiimote.
I am really enjoying the game and the thought of going back to flicking a tiny joystick to simulate the golf swing seems strange and laughable now. |
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grussbarbar
17/09/08 @ 09:48
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I'm having a lot of fun with this game actually. The controls somehow still don't feel as intuitive as in Wii Sports golf, but the rest of the package (mostly having all the different golf courses and shot types) more than makes up for it.
And the putting, well, it just takes some getting used to. I managed to sink a 32m putt this weekend. ^_^ It might not be the greatest golf simulator, but it sure is a good game. =) |
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Seem to get a lot of reviews like this for Wii games.
With the PS360 you have a fairly standard control set that dates back a couple of decades, with the Wii I've found games have got better and better the longer I've played them and got used to the controls...which for a sim-sport game like this is job done in my opinion. Putting should be difficult, surely that's the point?! |
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Personally I think that they have sacrificed response for accessibility, looks great, sounds great, putting has tried to iron out the the bumpyness(no pun intended). I really dislike how they have made the normal swing the easy swing and so forth, I find it highly entertaining to watch others slice and hook shots in 08 and am surprised by the sensitivity(it is quite relevant).
I cannot wait for the motion plus, where the programming will actually increase the game play and not limit it. I am sure that this title will draw a lot of new users though. |
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grussbarbar
17/09/08 @ 15:51
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Agree@secombe
there are almost no games on Wii where I find the controls to be bad, and they're almost always better than you would think reading reviews. Take the Resident Evil 4 Wii edition and Tomb Raider: Anniversary reviews here on Eurogamer for example. Especially the controls in Tomb Raider are very, very good, once you get used to them. As for the controls in this Tiger Woods game: I can pretty accurately apply 50-100 percent of swing power after about 2 hours of play. Putting isn't really a problem anymore either, except when the green is (relatively) steeply sloped, but that's not really strange, I think. The controls aren't as intuïtive or good as in Wii Sports golf, but they certainly aren't bad. Oh, and I haven't encountered any "force fields" at all. |
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I personally HATED the RE4 controls on the wii.. must be a marmite thing.
As for the controls on this.. yeah.. the reviewers do now seem to be going down root of "well motionplus will be out soon, so therefor we cant score this high because motionplus would make it better" or something.. if its anything like the last tiger woods game.. the controls in that were perfect! |
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""the ability to consistently hit medium strength shots would be more attainable. As it is, you may find yourself changing clubs to reduce the maximum distance rather than trusting your own arms, which is an odd way to play."
Erm isn't that how you play golf? You change clubs and keep your swing consistent rather than using one club all the time and trying to do 20% power or whatever......." Exactly what I thought when reading it. It's kind of, you know, one of the major reasons for having different clubs at all. |
Comments: 1-29 of 29 in total
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