[For this guest post I welcome back Richard Moss, who previously wrote about Sonic Drift and Pro Evolution Soccer 5. Richard is creator of the excellent documentary podcast The Life & Times of Video Games, and is on Twitter as @MossRC]
Annualised sports franchises are, as a rule, incremental. With each new instalment the number at the end of the title goes up by one, and the player and teams rosters in the game get updated, while the back of the box trumpets some exciting new feature that only a hardcore player of the series will even notice. But every so often the increment is bigger — more like a leap than a step. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10‘s Wii version is like that.
True to virtual sporting tradition, PS3 and Xbox 360 owners got a superb refinement on the same game as last year, with the usual mix of quality-of-life improvements and hit-or-miss new stuff — their “exciting” new features being live weather, a couple of gimmicky new tournament modes, more dynamic crowd noises, and a “Precision Putting” system that lets you feel out the distance on one putter rather than choosing between a gazillion putters of varying range.
But the Wii version had a pair of new features actually worth getting excited about: MotionPlus controls and Disc Golf. I’ll come back to the second one later; let’s talk about that first thing.
Golf games had come in many different styles and sentiments since the genre took off in the 1980s, but for all their differences most coalesced around the same basic swing mechanic. While precise implementations varied, just about every game would involve either a two- or three-click swing gauge. Not everyone was happy about this. Soon Front Page Sports Golf and others — including the Tiger Woods PGA Tour line that Links: The Challenge of Golf and Front Page Sports Golf designer Vance Cook led to the top of the genre — toyed with the idea of a more life-like control scheme such as a flick of the mouse or joystick. (Vance led the Tiger Woods team from 2000-2008, so he was gone by this point.) These alternative controls made for a more active, analogue, and satisfying experience than tapping a button three times, but they were still nothing like a real golf swing. They could capture the emotion and the feel of playing golf, but never truly match the all-body experience of the whip on a great drive or the sway on a good chip shot.
Enter the Nintendo Wii. Its motion controls allowed players to stand up and happily swing their arms around like they were really playing tennis or golf or boxing or bowling, or any sport that predominantly uses the arms/hands. Now virtual golf could feel like real golf…well, kind of.
You see, once you got into the idea of a golf simulation — with fade and draw and topsin and backspin and loft and lie and weather (and I could go on and on) — then the Wiimote revealed its great con; it was a mere parlour trick. You could get the same results from lounging on the couch doing a little waggle and flick with your wrist. (Though, as Iain wrote, it was still enough to give a brilliant golf experience when its limitations were worked into a game’s design.)
To service fans who wanted more precision, Nintendo bolted on the Wii MotionPlus accessory. It added a multi-axis gyroscope so that now the Wii could read rotational motion and much better approximate the Wiimote’s position in space — at least relative to its starting point.
Tiger Woods 10 brings the MotionPlus to the world of golf simulation in what the game’s marketing proclaims is “an enhanced, true-to-life golf swing”, and it makes a brilliant first impression. Dive into the tutorial or start a round of golf and after a bit of introductory fanfare the game guides you through the mechanics: point the Wiimote down, hold the B button (and A if you want to do a practice swing), then marvel at how the golfer on screen seems to mirror your imaginary club motion as you wind back for the swing. There’s even a delightful *whoosh* sound of the club striking the ball played from the Wiimote’s little speaker as you complete your swing.
Of course it’s still nothing like a real golf swing, however, with no way to account for stance, club head position, or the actual power with which you strike the ball, and with fade/draw determined by a twist of the wrist while spin by default involves pressing the directional pad and waggling the remote.
And it’s on this point that your enjoyment of the game hangs in the balance. Do you want the feeling of real golf? You’ll love it at first, but eventually it’ll wear thin. Do you want perfect precision over your virtual golfer’s swing? You’ll either need to invest dozens of hours mastering the “advanced” swing mode or to look elsewhere. Or are you happy with an arcade-style experience wrapped around a deep simulation of a golfing career, where you can create and customise every tiny detail of your virtual golfer (down to chin dimples and weight distribution between left/right and top/bottom of his/her body) and develop their skills along with your own as you slowly rise through the professional golfing ranks, knowing that a good swing in the game is nothing like a good swing in real life?
I had both versions, thanks to my dad and I having the same idea for Christmas 2009 — to gift the other a golf game that we could play together. (I gave him the Wii version; he gave me the PS3 release.) From sales and reviews of both this game and the subsequent Wii entries, I know that lots of people loved the new MotionPlus controls, but I tired of them quickly and an injury meant that my dad never even tried them. (We both played the PS3 version extensively, though.)
Returning to the game over a decade later and playing a few rounds, I can see why. I don’t really mind that it’s so obviously lacking the fidelity to emulate a true golf swing, as I never got much cared for real golf when I tried it, but it’s the inconsistencies that get me — the fact that multiple swings that feel and look on the screen to be almost exactly the same can produce wildly different results, one a slight fade at 100% power, another a moderate draw at 48% power, and a third dead straight at 73% power. I’m sure that, if given enough time, I could smooth out those inconsistencies, but with minimal feedback or transparency from the game in how it actually reads your motion it would be a laborious process of trial and error.
Moreover, rather than feeling that the MotionPlus swing enhances the experience of playing out a virtual golfing career — which is the core game mode — I find that for me, at least, it actually detracts from it. Sports games are an abstraction of reality; they by definition are an imitation of their chosen sport, selectively choosing which aspects to reproduce on a screen. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10‘s swing mechanic, while marvelous for enhancing the wish fulfilment and physicality of your virtual golfing, in one single moment of technical inconsistency can suddenly shatter the illusion and destroy your suspension of disbelief. This motion control thing is still all just smoke and mirrors, you’ll realise, and from there you’re stuck; the swings here are too abstract to feel like a simulation, but too real to feel like an abstraction.
I got a greater sense of realism, quizzically, from the PS3 version — with its once-revolutionary, now-outdated Shot Stick/Loft Stick analogue swing — and while that matters naught to the game’s many quick play solo and multiplayer modes, when it comes to an EA Sports career mode, the sense of realism becomes paramount.
Such unease on the abstraction versus realism front is missing entirely, however, in the game’s delightful Disc Golf mode. It’s virtual frisbee, on a golf course — a lite-simulation of a popular sport that’s been around for decades. Here you don’t get an elaborate career mode or any purpose-built courses — just the same 28 courses available in the other modes — but you do get a game that’s ideally suited to the MotionPlus controller, where your motion maps 1:1 with the frisbee and the throwing action is nearly identical to tossing an actual frisbee. Even playing solo, just trying for the best score you can muster, it’s brilliant fun.
But, alas, EA never spun it out into a standalone disc golf game, and the only extra depth they added to it in subsequent releases before the Wii version got cancelled was an online multiplayer option. Which is perhaps fitting for a franchise that even in this near-pinnacle release could never get a firm grip on its identity and never could match the fidelity promised by its marketing. A true-to-life golf swing? Not even close, but it’s fun when it works.
Top of the charts for week ending 11 July 2009:
