“EA SPORTS™ Knickers” – Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004

**Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004** (EA Sports, PlayStation 2, 2003)

I have never watched golf, but the Tiger Woods phenomenon still couldn’t pass me by. As he emerged and started winning everything, the sports pullout of the Daily Express that my dad would pick up turned over days of front pages to documents from Tiger’s childhood framing him as an ever more prodigious talent. He had a reach that eclipsed the sport, and for EA and their big wallet signing him up as the face of one their games must have been one of the easiest decisions ever. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 features Tiger prominently, but so did the previous four years’ editions. So this one being the first to reach #1 since 1993’s PGA Tour Golf II was also a matter of release date good fortune plus the usual EA Sports katamari of features and licences working its momentum year after year and slowly easing out competitor series.

All the features start with the basics of hitting the ball. In contrast to the three click swing approach of 1993’s version, one of the returning features in PGA Tour 2004 is a control mechanism based on pulling the analogue stick back and flicking it forward. This is both more straightforward and more difficult to truly master, at least if you have co-ordination as imprecise as mine, that makes moving a stick in a straight line a sight more taxing than mere timing. You can add on assorted different types of shot, plus use extra button presses to add spin and extra power for a wider range, but the basics prove versatile already and give something of a sense of physical technique at work. Which was something the series would get to pick up on even more at its height a few years later.

The big new draw specific to the 2004 version is Game Face, in which you can design your own character to a level of detail which rivals and in places exceeds The Sims. As is common with these things, I didn’t really get a golfer who looked like me, but I found myself attached to my virtual not-quite-double anyway. You can choose celebration animations and kit your golfer out in clothes and accessories, with increasingly elaborate options unlocked as you progress and earn money and success. Or you can stick with your EA SPORTS™ Knickers, a name that provides a vision of branded underwear and a nice reminder that American games don’t get localisations here but sometimes really should.

On heading out to the course for the more general rounds of golf or the tour itself, my erratic hitting made for a frustrating experience. Not so much for failure, as I was fine with gradually improving and working out how to putt and how to miss bunkers and lakes a bit more often. No, it was more of a presentation thing. Sports games all round tend to mirror TV coverage, and I imagine that must be where the approach of PGA Tour 2004’s commentators comes from. But listening to these two chucklefucks calling every shot as soon as I hit it and wisecracking about how “that’s a good lie – if you’re a bovine” got grating fast. Even on TV, I’m pretty sure they don’t just follow a single golfer around talking about how hard to watch they are.

Getting away from just imitating TV helps with some of the other ways PGA Tour 2004 makes an impression. Connect well enough and the screen shakes, or the game sticks multiple views of the same shot up on screen, the better to emphasise the momentousness. Put the ball close to the hole from a long way away and the sound and controller vibration pulse like an elevated heartbeat in anticipation of greater excitement still. It succeeds in elevating emotion above strict simulation. As with FIFA, it was a winning move when combined with licence-hoarding that deprived rivals of other elements of simulation.

In keeping with that emotion-first approach, I found my way into enjoying PGA Tour 2004 most through some of its less realistic modes. The one in which you try to land the ball on a series of targets is a great quickfire accuracy test. And the World Tour mode, in which you play a series of one off challenges against other golfers in what feels quite an ‘80s sports game fashion, fixes nearly all my complaints from the more standard ones. (Though the fact it has a bunch of real-world male golfers alongside caricature fictional female ones is a regressive oddity). Alternating shots with Justin Rose or whoever meant that at least the commentator boors weren’t just picking on me, and the way each hole ends in either a draw or a win for one player or the other means the occasional total disaster hole doesn’t undo half an hour of effort.

There was also a moment when one of those heart-pumping chips to the hole ended in the ball slowly trickling its way in off the pin, and I was rewarded with a message that I had won a trophy ball. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 already felt like every contemporary video game trick being applied to the game of golf, and this moment of highlighting an achievement tangential to the game I was playing brought it forward even from that. This was the game of manipulation being played at Tiger Woods levels, and I couldn’t help but enjoy it.