Here's the new stuff! (And the old stuff now gone...)
Ok, let’s stop focusing on what’s the same or missing, let’s have a look at what’s new in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08.The biggest addition is the Confidence Meter, which keeps a historical track for how often you’ve played every hole in the game and how well you did. Now on paper this looks quite good. Say the last time you played a hole you landed in the bunker off your drive but managed to scramble back to a par finish, you’ll be fairly confident overall.
But in practise, unless you play Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 so often every hole blends into one, you yourself will know how well you did last time you played that hole. For example, that damn ‘Road Hole’ bunker just in front of the green on the 17th at St Andrews catches me nearly every time. As soon as I see the bloody thing I’m fretting about where to play my shot… I don’t need a little green meter telling me I was crap there in all my previous visits.
But worse than being reminded of how bad I was, the Confidence Meter also applies a penalty to your shot should you have fluffed it in the past. So just to make it clear… if you’ve played a whole well in the past you’ll get a boost from the game to play an even better shot. If you’ve played that hole poorly in the past, you’ll find it harder to play again as your confidence will be low. Never mind the fact that you’ve birdied the previous six holes and you’re 15 strokes in the lead… you’ll still take a penalty.
Click for larger imageThe next ‘new’ bit is the Play Now section which is essentially a quick start button. You skip all the golfer creation stuff and just pick a ready made player, so that’ll be Tiger then, and then head out onto the course. And that’s it. No really, that’s it. But still, EA consider it worthy of a nice ‘new’ logo next to it in the game manual.
There’s a new championship to lay too, the FedEx Championship. It’s like the PGA Tour except it’s FedEx. It does mean that you can skip straight into the play-offs without having to slog through the various minor tournaments as a golfing hack but it does mean that until you’ve built up your golfer’s attributes you stand to get an ass-whuppin. And why include a game mode that allows you to skip a big part of the rest of the game? Ah well, it’s obviously something I’m missing.
Now, remember way back in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 04 players would come up and offer you challenges for cash? You know, a quick bet on who can drive the furthest or chip closest to the pin? Well, that’s gone from Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 and in its place comes the ‘new’ Tiger Challenge where you’re set various tasks such as making a 50 foot putt, pitching to within 4 feet of the cup, playing a short 9 holes or a full round against increasingly tougher opponents . The reward for wining these challenges is more skill attributes in related areas of your game… so pretty much like the previous version’s training/challenge system then.
I’m sorry if I appear so down on Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 but when you get into a tour you realise just how much of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 is re-hashed from previous games. The commentary by Gary McCord and David Feherty is the exact same bunch of lines from Tiger Woods PGA Tour 04 for crying out loud. And even that still has the annoyance of calling your shot before it’s been landed or being so damn wrong as of to be no help at all. When putting, if Feherty tells me one more time to just start it off on the right edge of the hole when the slope clearly goes right, I’ll take my real clubs and ram them through my screen. And how about the stuff that’s been taken out? No doubt the clunky, but life extending Course Architect will be added in as a ‘new’ feature in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 or 10. So much for the much-vaunted Tiger Proofing that we saw in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06.
Oh, and it’s a damn lonely game of golf now too. I’m on what must be my tenth amateur tournament and though I’m playing 36 holes of stroke play, I’ve yet to even see an opponent… Still, I guess it means I won’t be griping about it when the guy who’s driven into the rough on the last three holes suddenly makes a 215 yard sink into the hole from a bunker with a 3 wood.