If you've played an Electronic Arts golf game before, you'll know the drill: lots of features, lots of tweaks, and lots of that absurdly quaint pomposity that golf culture revels in. Royal this, top-tier that. This year Tiger Woods PGA Tour is taking a nostalgic bent with its, er, featured quest: a series of legendary whackers stand in Tiger's way in what amounts to a golf-based version of Bruce Lee's film, Game of Death. The game bends the concept of unreal head-to-head challenges to the sport rather than in the opposite direction, like Shaq Fu and Michael Jordan's Chaos in the Windy City - two starring exhibits in the EA hall of infamy.
Most of the games I've reviewed in the past eight months or so have centred on a theme of saving a nation, planet, galaxy, or universe. Curiously, this game is better than most of them at persuading you that your mission's really quite important. Put a ball in a hole and the world is yours, young warrior.
Actually, it's probably not too late to reinvent Happy Gilmore as an action RPG or first-person brawler and make it work. Come on, developers, please make it so.
If conquering legends isn't your style, the career and quick-play modes will cater to your contemporary golfing needs.
This edition is a new awakening for me, because it's the first time I've stepped into the man's very expensive shoes since taking up the sport myself. I suspect that the game might be "better with Kinect" but fate saw fit to drop a refrigerator on me - I kid you not - so I have had to fore(!)go the enhanced motion-sensing input and use my controller. For the first time, I feel qualified to assess a golf game's true accuracy.
