Another autumn, another school year, another Tiger Woods game. EA is pretty predictable about these things; every year sees yet another installment in each and every one of their sports game franchises. The good: EA makes good, solid sports games with great graphics and lots of extra game elements, like management simulations, create-a-player modes, and stats out the whazoo. The bad: churning out yet another WhateverSport0X title every year means that the 09 version can feel a lot like the 08 or 07 versions, or in the need for some discriminating differences, they get forced to change the game for the worse. With the release of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, it’s more of the former, but with enough of an update that it makes the trip to the game store worthwhile.

The previous version, TW08, had its problems. Chief amongst those were twitchy analog stroke controls and poor network connectivity. It was the sort of annual game update that left a bad taste in the mouths of many longtime golf game fans, and many of them simply went back to playing TW07. With TW09 on the doorstep, a lot of virtual golfers have been worried about investing in the game yet again; will it be another letdown? With that in mind, let’s look at some of the differences between TW08 and TW09.

The most obvious difference is in the swing; in TW08 most beginning (and many experienced!) players would find themselves hooking and slicing off into the rough on their drives from the tee, especially with the analog swing control. With TW09 things have returned to normalcy and it is now possible for a raw beginner to pick up the game and play a respectable round of golf the first time out. In fact, at first it almost seemed too easy. In TW08, in my first tour event ever, I put up a four day PGA event score of 80 over par. In TW09, my first tour event came in at 56 under par. In TW08 I was conversant with the various animations the spectators went through when they were beaned with the ball; I knew that they writhed about in pain differently if they were hit in the head, the groin, the foot…I got to see it all. In TW09 it was hard to leave the fairway with an errant shot; no matter how crappy my swing, the ball seemed to stay in the short stuff. I was beginning to wonder if rounds with my online pals might not be very dull and drab compared to the trips through the woods such excursions quickly devolved to in TW08!

Luckily, things get interesting as you progress in the game. In TW09 the designers simply made the beginner clubs have large, very forgiving sweet spots, meaning that your swing can be a little “off” and the ball will still act as if it had been hit fairly straight. The thing is, the beginner clubs are limited in the distance they can hit; as you begin upgrading your clubs, they become tunable, and most people will tune their clubs for distance and/or “Workability” (draw/fade amount), and the sweet spot will shrink. The first time your online buddies see you drive 100 yards past their ball, they will run out and upgrade and tune…and very shortly everyone will be back to the occasional long trek through the woods and into the deep bush. In TW09 the designers have struck a nice balance between approachability and expert play, and it makes this an excellent choice as a golf game for both new and experienced players.

TW08 had “confidence”, which made shots more precise after you got good at a club, shot type or hole. TW09 has removed this feature, and instead offers the Club Tuner. In the Club Tuner the player can hit a few balls with a new club, get feedback from Tiger Wood’s coach Hank Haney, and change the way the club hits. You can adjust for a nasty tendency to hook or slice. Although that doesn’t help me much, as I tend to do both, you can also adjust the Power and Workability of the club to increase the sweet spot if you are a true virtual duffer. Of course, you can also do what everyone else does, and lower the Workability whilst cranking the Power to get those 400 yard drives, at the expense of the sweet spot and your drives in the fairway percentage. You know my mantra; choice is good. The only down side is that I haven’t figured out a way to stick two of the same category of club in my bag, so I can’t take along my accurate driver and my cannon at the same time, but that’s not really a downside.

TW08 had skills, and in typical RPG fashion you would play and slowly build up those skills over time from 1 to 100 until you were a god amongst men. In TW09, there are fewer skills, and they are measured differently, and go from 0.0 to 10.0 (and slightly above, with stat boosts). They are now called “Dynamic Skills”, and leveling up your golfer is no longer a one-way linear progression from duffer to pro; your skills can actually decrease after a round! Yes, TW08’s Confidence system could do something similar, but to a much lesser degree. Miss the fairway with a few drives? Your Power skill loses a few percentage points. Come out of the rough or bunker poorly? Your Short Game skill drops. This has a nice effect on the gameplay, as in TW08 you were only worried about improvement of the skills until they were maxed out, whereas in TW09 you are always concerned with consistency. It keeps the game interesting, and is such a neat twist that I have to consider what a cool idea it might be for an RPG to apply this mechanic to a player’s abilities.
Hmmm.

Still in the realm of stat boosts for skills, Hank Haney will come along after a round and offer custom drills based on any problem areas he noticed. Miss several putts? Hank will offer to let you practice on one of the greens that you 3 putted, and for every successful close putt you will earn a skill boost. While these boosts are temporary, they can help you do better in the next round, and the better you do the more likely you are to earn a more permanent positive skill adjustment. It’s a nice positive reinforcement cycle that players should take advantage of, but if you do get bored with the drills you can skip them. The only real problem with the drills is that Hank will occasionally offer up an impossible scenario. He seems to especially have problems with vertical differences between the ball and the green, and occasionally will ask you to make a shot that no club in your bag can handle, with any amount of loft-tinkering/powering-up/spin-controlling tom-foolery. It’s worse than the hardest GamerNet challenges folks post, but it only happens occasionally, and you can just skip that drill.

A great new addition is the swing meter, which helps visualize your analog stick swing motion by providing instantaneous feedback. This is a big help, as you can now see how straight your backswing is before you commit to striking the ball, and how far back you are holding the club. Personally, I don’t use the “partial backswing” method to adjust my power for anything other than putting; I prefer the “timed hold” method of pulling fully back and then counting out seconds of delay. Each second I pause takes 10 percent off my swing power. There’s your Tiger Woods gameplay tip from GibGezr, folks.

One of the changes that many folks have been asking for is for EA to update the announcers. McCord and Faraday have been spouting the exact same lines for far too many iterations of the game, and I personally was really hoping they would spice up the virtual commentary the same way they did with Madden 09. Unfortunately, although they change the commentary, it is for the worse. Far, far worse. They mostly kept the same lines, but replaced the voice actors with Kelly Tilghman and Sam Torrance, both of whom sound like they’d make great figure-skating commentators. Faraday and McCord sounded like golf commentators, and many people aren’t going to realize how important that was until they hear the awful delivery of Tilghman and Torrance. There isn’t any way to mute them without also losing the hole description during the flyovers, which I enjoy. It’s not just the lines and voices that are bad, the game commentary system is also late on many calls and sometimes just totally off the ball. You quickly get tired of watching your chip shot bounce on the green and roll to a stop next to the hole, only to eventually hear Torrance say something like “this might be on the green”. I suspect the physics engine rattling the ball around inside the cup is the culprit behind some extremely delayed putting commentary; the crowd and the announcers will sometimes wait 5 seconds or more before celebrating. Even the tee-off announcing at the start of a round is poor; when you are leading a tournament by 50 shots they still say “and now on the tee…the next competitor“. I mean, how weak is that? They make you pick a nickname for your golfer when you create them, and the crowd shouts it out occasionally, so at least they could have the announcers call you by it. There is no hole description before you tee of for the first hole of any course.

There are five new courses: Wentworth, Sheshan, Wolf Creek, Bay Hill, and the Gary Player Country Club in South Africa. These are excellent choices, and sure to please the fans. All of the courses have received a make-over and graphical upgrade. The level of detail is higher than last year; it’s a small improvement, but some of the holes are more accurately represented as a result, and the whole game comes off better for it. The view of an impending sunset over the ocean at Pebble Beach during one of my multiplayer games caused all four of us to stop and gawk in awe. Trees are still six-sided, and best viewed from the fairway…but you knew that.

If you play a lot of multiplayer with your friends, you’ll love the new Simultaneous Play game mode. Before I actually tried it I was skeptical; wouldn’t simultaneous play make for a disconnect between me and my friends, making it seem that I was all alone on the course? After playing it, though, I can safely say it is a big enhancement to the experience. While you are playing your shot, you see your friends’ shots as glowing coloured lines streaking past, so you still get a sense of them being on the same course as you. By playing simultaneously the game is many times faster, so you can play 18 holes very quickly, and because other players can keep hitting their strokes while you are lining up yours, you don’t feel as much pressure to hurry your shot. Everyone I’ve played with has adored this new feature, and I just wish it had of been available in some of the team modes and for skins/match play as well. This feature alone makes TW09 worth the price of entry.

There are a few bugaboos that are holdovers from TW08. While server issues are nowhere near as extreme as they were at the launch of TW08, their still are the occasional disconnects from MP games or GamerNet challenges. Really, they are very occasional, so it’s not a big deal, but EA does need to work on this. Xbox Live online notifications still pop up in the bottom middle of the screen, which can be distracting, but even worse than that they cover up the accuracy zone of the 3-click stroke meter, so 3-click aficionados will still find themselves cursing their friends for signing on in the middle of a stroke. You are restricted to wedges for club selection when you get close to the green, and I sometimes want my 9 iron! Multiplayer games end abruptly without returning you to the round’s lobby, so chat just drops after the last hole; everyone hates that. You want to chat a little about the match and even set up another one without having to set up a new lobby and re-invite everyone, and the overly-simplistic lobby system is no help; it only supports text chat, and user-created rooms close as soon as you all head off to a match. Lastly, the Xbox Live camera create-a-player is good, but not as accurate as the Rainbow Six: Vegas one, and while you can edit your character after doing it, it won’t let you change the skin colour. This is a drag, as most people will find that they don’t get very good skin tones through the camera. I’ve seen green and blue on my friends, and my own avatar came with a risen-from-the-dead grayish pallor.

All in all, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 is a worthy successor to the throne. Virtual golfing fans should run out and grab this at their first opportunity, as everyone else is going to be moving on from the previous versions; TW09 is superior. Gib gives it 4 out of 5; go get it, and see you on the links.