There is genuinely enough content here to keep you going for months so much so that your pained reviewer was actually told off several times for trying to get too much done in-game before putting anything into writing. Then again, they may be rebadged versions of previous attractions, but on the whole the Legends Tour and Scenarios - coupled with the lucrative four-rounds-to-a-course PGA Tour and all the other trimmings - make for a mountainous undertaking. The former is a professional golfer, the latter is a T Hawk from Street Fighter look-alike. For example, getting to Ben Hogan means tackling the likes of Adam Scott and Billy Bear. The Legends, including the likes of Ben Hogan, Seve Ballesteros and Jack Nicklaus, also headline the Legends Tour, and the idea is to beat them one by one - having challenged and defeated the mixture of rank and file golfers and peculiar fictional futters who stand in front of each of them. with slightly jinked around presentation that has EA's licensed Legends of the game pitching the challenges to you instead of a boring square-edged menu box. The Scenarios section replaces a similar scenarios bit of previous games - challenging you to complete a series of tricky holes (all the par-5s, for example) with only a certain number of shots, or come back from a certain number of shots off the pace, etc. You can take this marvellously engrossing golf mechanic out onto the fairways of a very many courses - some real, some fictional - and get rounds in either by choosing to play in straightforward match or stroke play rounds or one of a few quirkier options (speed golf remains a fave), or opting for one of the meatier aspects of the game like the PGA Tour, real-time events, or the new Legends Tour and Legends Scenarios.Īctually, to describe the Legends bits as 'new' would be a bit misleading. Then again it's an EA game, isn't it? Woods-be Legends Frankly, if some of our friends can get their heads round it, it must be intuitive. It's a lot to take in at first, but anybody who spends time with the (very detailed) tutorial will soon get into the right habits. You can change the angle you peer out from behind your golfer on the tee, you can zoom to your aiming marker by holding circle and adjust its position using the D-pad, cycling through clubs using R1 and R2 and changing shot type with square, and you can reset the whole thing to its original projected shot position by pressing triangle. In terms of directing your shot, the old system continues to work well. On top of that, you can choose from a variety of alternative shot types (flop, for example, sends the ball almost straight up and down, which prevents it from rolling around so much on landing), you can add a power boost during the back swing (tap L1), you can bend the ball left or right during flight (known as fading and drawing) by moving the stick at a diagonal instead of backwards and forwards, and you can add spin to the ball when it lands (allowing you to move it some way further on the green or fairway), depending on how much experience you've ploughed into improving your "spin" attribute between rounds. The analogue swing system, for example, is as satisfying and finely tuned as ever - you just pull back on the stick and then push through to the other side when your club reaches the peak of its back swing. Tiger Woods virtually invented this approach, and the 2005 edition sticks to it almost without meaningful deviation. Golf, as we've already established this week, works very well as a videogame given a certain underlying design philosophy - the game should be visceral, fast and rewarding, and simplify the frustrating nuances of the sport that take years of practice on a quiet fairway next to a motorway at 5am in the morning to master. However, when you start to notice a shift towards a sneaking sense of dissatisfaction, that's when the first group ought to start paying close attention, because it applies more to them. (Hi Mum!) So then, in the interests of making this as straightforward as possible for all concerned, people in the second group will find that the initial excitement and glowing praise heaped upon the game is highly relevant to them. The third, finally, is my mother, who pops in occasionally to see what her son's wasting his life on. The second is either curious about the game, having heard so many people raving about it, or blissfully unaware of its charms, having stumbled in here on the off chance of surprising themselves. The first has been with the Tiger Woods PGA Tour series for a while now, most likely having fallen in love with it after sampling one of the post-2002 vintages. (Actually, there are slightly more than three people overall, or it probably wouldn't be worth my while.) That is to say, there are three types of people reading this review. There are three people reading this review.
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