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Tiger Woods PGA 2005

I took a pass on Tiger Woods last year. With each iteration bringing only a few new innovations and 2003’s release still holding up its end of our longevity deal, I really just saw no good cause to rush out and buy it. Besides, waiting a year means you get twice as much good stuff later, right?

You’ve got to credit EA on cramming just about everything PGA-related they could think of into Tiger 2005. A good 14 courses, some 35 golfers to go up against with potentially an infinite number more through the Make-A-Face options, product endorsements, course editing, One could argue that there’s almost too much there, requiring a second disc on the Gamecube version that leaves you swapping discs between rounds. In EA’s defense, I’m sure that it’s difficult to guarantee what courses the player will want to be on at any one time, but when you have to switch discs between every single round of golf, you just know there’s got to be a better way to go about things.

The two big improvements of this year’s edition of Tiger Woods are largely cosmetic. First, there is the TigerProofing. What this essentially is is an editor that allows players to alter existing courses, widening the fareways, shrinking the greens, deepening the bunkers and filling them with purple sand, mowing dollar signs in the rough, whatever you want to do to make your own custom course short of laying out the land. By building up your “Dream 18” course to particular standards, “Legendary” golfers will drop by to play it, increasing the course’s prestige and yours by proxy. It’s a fun little toy for those creative types who always wanted to make their own course. While it’d be nice to have total run of the land and make the golf course you’d always dreamed of instead of basing it off templates, this is probably more than we really ought to ask out of a game. As it stands, the TigerProofing of your Dream 18 golf course is a simple and fun way to pass the time, not to mention a good excuse to save up Legend coins to buy new designs and templates. That the Legends don’t include anyone from the ranks of the LPGA is a bit of a letdown. Understandably, it’s a different organization with which EA would have to work, but outside of this series I doubt the ladies will get their shot.

The second marked improvement is that of the Make-A-Face II. This marked improvement over the previous version of the character creator adds a number of new options to the face making process. My exposure to EA’s character creation had been limited in the past, and I was very surprised at the sort of visages you can make with this thing. I modeled a version of myself with such accuracy that I’m beginning to think a small part of my own soul might have gone into the game and that it might be trapped in there and I wake up at night, sweaty and screaming from a dream where Tiger Woods was making my virtual self sign an Adidas contract while Vijay Singh sat off to the side, moving slider bars around which added liver spots to my shifting facial features….

Ahem.

The point is, yes, Make-A-Face is eerie. My wife frequently made comments during the course of reviewing this title, that I sure picked dorky shirts to wear. “Yeah?” I’d say, “Well, Nike doesn’t seem to think so, and they pay the bills.” Shirts aside, it’s very disturbing to see yourself dancing and playing air guitar like a fool on a golf course after a particularly well placed putt, and depressing when your swings go awry. This game may not have taken a piece of my soul, but it sure inherited my real-life ability to drop a ball into the sand, even on a course that contains no bunkers.

I kid. I rock at this game. It’s hard not to crank out a solid drive with these swing controls. Driving and pitching in Tiger 2005 remains the pedigree of the series, the analog smooth and responsive, and the power boost button mash a fun way to add a little juice.

I wish I could say the same about the short game. Chipping and putting leave a lot to be desired. It’s a matter of the green being too difficult to read. Other golfing sims might give you a better sense of which way the green rolls, but putting here is much more difficult. You only get a curved line and a caddy estimate on where the sweet spot lies. The problem is, you are not armed with a comparative measure, so while the caddy advises you, you don’t know the practical difference between 4 and 8 inches. This becomes all the more problematic because the camera zooms as the aiming marker moves around the green, leaving very little usable information on which to base your putt. EA has included a new Tiger Vision mode, which shows you the best spot on the green to hit, but you only get a couple of uses of this mode on each course. It feels like just another excuse to get his name in there.

Chipping faces much the same problem. You get a slight read on the green, but the area is too small to be fully useful.

The game’s camera is a bit of a problem this time around. It maintains its simple tracking system; hold down a button and it flies over the course to your marker, but that’s really the only option you have for checking out the course. There’s no option to look around at all at the end of its string, which keeps you from getting a good look at the terrain so as to measure your shot. It’s simple, but perhaps too simple. The replay cam is fairly limited as well, and occasionally suffers from odd angles that miss the shot or, in the most extreme case, somehow pass through the ground and look up from below, looking at the hole on the green as a peg jutting out in some upside-down bizzaro-world.

The graphic performance of this year’s Tiger is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, the character models look outstanding. EA really pulled through with the Make-A-Face thing, and it shows off marvelously here. The animations on the golfers look great, save a few custom swings (via the Create-A-Swing option) that leave the characters looking a bit stiff. The course graphics, however, aren’t as great. Trees look quite blocky up close, the green often looks like a very blurry texture, seams and misalignments are plainly visible in the skyboxes. What’s more, the frame rate on the Gamecube tends to dip on replay scenes or extreme close-ups of shots, resulting in a stuttering look that’s none too pretty.

Audio is light and quiet as golf ought to be, and benefits from a pair of announcers that truly help the game along. They’re funny at times, have a ton of lines, and add great atmosphere. The one drawback I find to their presence is that they always call the lie of the ball correctly when it’s in flight, which ruins a bit of the hanging suspense as to whether it will roll into the hazards or not. It’d be more fun if they were wrong from time to time, instead of offering no surprises. Regardless, they sound great, and the tour they give you of each hole before you begin your round contains helpful information.

I’ve always taken issue with the design of EA games when it comes to the front end menus. Finding options, getting games started, saving and loading; all these things have troubled me about their sports games. Tiger 2005 is a marked improvement, with clean, easy to understand options, though they are sometimes buried in strange places. For example, it took me some time to find out where to go to challenge other golfers or retry the little events that are interspersed between tournaments. I was surprised to learn of the calendar mode that ties into the Gamecube’s internal clock to remind you about special holiday tournaments or challenges available on professional golfers’ birthdays.

EA, thankfully, threw in the “Play Now” option, launching you onto the next step of your career mode or onto some random match to pick up some cash for stats or clothing in the extensive wardrobe shop. I’d remind you, however, that Play Now is a bit of a crap shoot when it comes to which disc you’ll be using, and can leave you grumbling as you get up when you thought you’d be playing. Every freaking time, I swear!

I can’t really recommend Tiger Woods 2005 on the GameCube, knowing that there are few other good options for golf fans without wandering into that creepy Mario territory. You’ll have a good time playing around with the Make-A-Face and Tiger Proofing, not to mention the career mode that could keep you going for years, but graphic and gameplay issues might make you want to look elsewhere. If you’re going to get Tiger 2005, and have the option of another gaming platform, you may want to look there. Both the PS2 and Xbox provide online play this year, and you won’t have to swap discs.

Or, maybe this is just another year to sit out. 2006 might be your bag.

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Posted by Brad on Nov 1st, 2004 and is filed under Game Cube Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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