The games charts are, at least viewed over time, a way of seeing different mainstream visions of what games could be. 2007 and 2008 were fascinating for the sheet number of such visions existing in uneasy equilibrium, and in Tiger Woods PGA Tour they even existed within what was nominally a single game. After the motion-control-emphasising Wii version took the lead in the collective Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 topping the charts in 2007, it fell very slightly behind the HD console versions the following year. They, in turn, have a bit of a different spin on the game.
At heart it’s a more traditionally rooted video game version. At least one of the control methods in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 goes all the way back to the ‘80s, with the option readily available to switch to the 3-click-swing of Leader Board et al. The default is a refined version of something that went back many years by this point itself: a push back on the left control stick before flicking it forwards in line with your golfer’s animation for max power. It’s not a bad medium for combining simplicity, precision and some kind of kinetic force, though the game has to compensate for how difficult it is to slow things down by taking a generous approach to overhit putts.
Selecting your shot, making it, watching the results in beautiful clarity, is all highly engineered and refined. The realism means that all of its real golf courses, present and correct, are far less aesthetically varied and striking than I remember different courses being on different versions of Leader Board on my C64. More than that, while it is beautiful, the series already had been for a while. Possible gains there are really small. There are only so many different camera angles you can add, as neat as occasionally travelling through the air with the ball is. So, as with many yearly sports updates, especially with a less obvious roster change, the question becomes about bringing little advances into everything secondary to go with it.
For Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09, that means putting yourself into the world of golf. That starts with an ever more detailed character creator. That includes the ethnicity meter, a fascinating solution to a knotty problem. That is, societal constructions of race and related attitudes meaning simultaneously that it is something that many people want to select easily, and that providing the direct means to do so might be confronting. The game’s approach is for you to pick a spot on a pair of square plots with “ethnicity 1”, “ethnicity 2”, “ethnicity 3”, and “ethnicity 4” on their axes and a default in the middle. This combines a heroic level of plausible deniability with a level of complexity which couldn’t be taken for granted even with the mixed background of the series’s title star.
Beyond that you can get deep into the looks, animations and vocal tone of your golfer, although you are stuck with a single annoying American accent. And you can start working on your golfing statistics, with progress tailored to what you do best and regular challenges and opportunities to improve them further. I found those a bit of an unnecessary addition to the full nervous endurance experience of tour events, with the ever-more-inventive Tiger Challenge sets of mini-games a much better variation. The commitment to stretching the game mechanics into as many different stimulation arrangements as possible is clear throughout.
You can immerse yourself in playing golf and make your way around the courses without anything like the real world negative environmental consequences of all these watered greens, which is nice. And once you get some wins and some prize money, you can also spend it on your kit and your outfits in a typical range of golf styles (but with a lack of EA SPORTS™ Knickers). The prices for them, not just for flashy watches but for shoes and others, all start in the thousands of dollars. Part of that is simplicity. But partly the lack of cheaper options is to make it more likely you’ll resort to the other option opened up by the consoles it was on, to spend smaller amounts of your real life money on kitting our your virtual golfer. The game doesn’t just give you a taste of being on the right side of exclusivity, but implements its own paywalled version of it.
Top of the charts for week ending 30 August 2008:
