Welcome to this week's version of "To Tell The Truth!!" Let's meet our contestants!!

"I'm Contestant #1 and I hit the links a couple of times a week, carry a 20+ handicap, drive the ball 220-250 yards and have been playing for over 10 years."

"I'm Contestant #2 and despite the fact I've been playing golf for a little more than a month, I can win just about every PGA Tour event I enter; I can beat the best golfers in the world in match play; and I drive the ball at least 320 yards."

"OK, would the real golfer please stand up?"

Most logical people would believe the first person, but if you've played any of the games in the Tiger Woods series, you know that the second person is simply describing his player's astronomical ascent to the top of the golf ranks despite playing the game for a short period of time. This article will cover what we here at Operation Sports would like to see in future versions of Tiger Woods.

Tiger Woods 08 made some positive strides this year, but it still suffered from some glaring weaknesses that held it back. And I'm willing to bet plenty of people out there who golf on a regular like myself feel that there needs to be some kind of shakeup with the only authentic golf sim available on consoles today.

Since our suggestions of "make the game harder" hasn't really worked, maybe its time to rethink how the entire game is played.

Improved Skills/Attribute Training

More important than anything else is figuring out how to handle your golfer's constantly improving skills. Recently EA Sports has made the questionable shift to forced upgrades of your golfer's abilities. In years past, if you didn't want to increase your skills, you didn't have to. This allowed players to hold back and keep their digital hackers within reasonable levels of realism. Now, if you win a certain Tiger Challenge or tournament you immediately improve. You are limited to your potential but that moves up as you win more, so before long you've maxed out your golfer.

This may seem like an obvious solution, but what if the range of abilities was narrowed? In other words, right now when you start off with your new created player your abilities are pretty poor and not nearly good enough to compete against senior citizens at the local municipal course let alone the PGA Tour. However, after a while you become dominant even against the best in the world.

So maybe if your player started off with abilities similar to a player on the Nationwide Tour or on the cusp of getting a Tour card that'd help control the super golfers. Then as you play more and more your ratings get better but you're not ridiculously great. Instead of adding double-digit yards to your drives, you add one or two at a time.

This would also allow them to keep all CPU-players on the same level. It's silly that early on some pros are horrible compared to others simply so you have a chance to compete with them in the Tiger Challenge. Michael Campbell shouldn't be limited to driving the ball 260 yards because that's all you can do.

New Career Mode

Speaking of the Tiger Challenge, I think it's time for something different. The folks at Tiburon have added different games and altered the mechanics of the mode but in the end it's still the same thing. It's tough to come up with a fix to a major part of the game so here's something we think would be very cool. Pardon the lack of a better name, but think "Road to the Tour."

You create your player then start off on the Nationwide Tour. You play at lesser-known courses but play all over the world as you try and play well enough to gain entry to the PGA Tour. After the first year on the Nationwide Tour if you've won three tournaments, finished high enough on the money list or completed any other qualifiers you can win your Tour card. Or if you get a sponsor's exemption to a PGA Tour event and win you can get your card that way; but if you fail at those, then you need to go to Qualifying School.

During Q-School, you play in the September pre-qualifying tournaments and if you succeed you move on to the next stage and on to the final six-round tournament. Finish in the Top 25 and you get your card.

As you play through the Nationwide Tour and Q-School, you can play practice rounds or the training mini-games to improve your skills, but only in small increments. Again this is more life-like as winning a long drive challenge doesn't mean you can suddenly hit the ball 25 yards longer than before. You could also be limited in how many practice rounds and mini-games you can play.

If you fail Q-School you go back to the Nationwide Tour and start over. If you do get your card it would work just like real-life where you have to perform well enough to keep your card. If you fail to do so, back to the "minors" you go.

Features like sponsorships could remain the same but would now serve to gain you entry into certain PGA events. Also instead of simply accumulating sponsors as you go, you'd have to pick and choose which golf company you want and you have to stick with their equipment.

The PGA Tour season would still wind up with the FedEx Cup and maybe you could play in the Presidents Cup or Ryder Cup when the specific years roll around. Eventually your player would finish his career after so many seasons and that would be that.

OK, that's enough about features, how about specific issues when on the course?

In-Game Tweaks/Fixes/Changes

Revamp Confidence

Golf is not as easy as it looks on TV (it's not as boring either, but that's another discussion for another time). There are a ton of variables that go into playing a flawless round, but even for the best players in the world a flawless round is never a given. So why are these variables so hard to replicate in the game? For example, even if you have a wayward tee shot go out of bounds, it's not too hard to come back and do no worse than bogey, then come back and proceed to birdie the next few holes.

So to counter this seemingly robotic behavior EA Sports implemented a "Confidence" feature that influences the size of the shot circle. More confidence will decrease the size of the circle; less will make it bigger, meaning less pinpoint accuracy. Since this means next to nothing in-game, things should be changed. Maybe make it more pronounced and have it affect more than just a landing spot. Make it hard to execute a draw or fade, lose the ability to spin the ball, have misread putts -- something more than a shrinking circle.

To offset a slumping round, if you do manage to pull of a great up-and-down from a bunker or sink a long putt, you right yourself and maybe get in a zone of sorts. Suddenly putts start to fall with ease and shaping shots is a lot easier.

I realize this is EA we're talking about so the chances of this being overdone are about 98.73156% but since confidence is a huge factor of the game it should be a more prominent feature.

Swing Stick

This is where you might sense some contradiction, but the swing stick was too hard to use last year. It wasn't that it was too hard to hit straight shots, just that any kind of error resulted in a terrible shot that tended to land out of bounds. This may happen to those of us not cut out for the big time, but it's not realistic for great golfers.

What an errant swing sticking should result in is a ball that veers off-course and into the rough or a greenside bunker, but not off of the course all-together.

With that said it should be a lot harder to hit a "perfect" shot. A shot shouldn't always go right where you aim even if you hit it just right. If it's a wide fairway and you make perfect contact the ball will stay in the fairway but maybe it'll be 3-5 yards to the left or right of exactly where you were aiming.

With irons this gap is smaller but it shouldn't be a cinch to have the ball head right at the pin or the middle of every fairway.

Draw/Fade

The draw/fade addition to '08 was a welcome one, but it's a little too precise. In real-life, while setting up for a draw you alter your foot position by opening or closing your stance, positioning where the ball is in your stance and maybe even turning the clubface a bit.

So a more realistic take on this feature in-game would be to open or close your stance (similar to how you open or close the clubface before a shot) then aim out to the left or right. Then you have to slightly influence your swing with the analog stick. The second part is exactly what you used to have to do in previous Tiger games to complete a draw or fade, and it felt more realistic than moving a marker and circle. So essentially if you overdid the swing it'd be a wicked slice or hook.

Maybe a good compromise would be using the current system of moving the circle away from the arrow along with the previous setup of having to alter your swing. Now it wouldn't be as refined as moving a marker or as arbitrary as moving the analog stick slightly off-center.

Putting

Some people really hated the new Putt Preview feature that told you exactly what your putt would do; however, I think it could be tweaked in a way that relates to stuff we've covered already. If you're putting skill isn't great then the putt preview will give you a bad read or you'll read too much break or not enough break.

Another great putting suggestion I came across was from OS user SizzleLikeAStizzle. He suggests using both analog sticks to putt. You pull back on both then follow through with both -- this would successfully replicate the putting stroke. If you're too quick with the right stick you close the head of the putter and pull your putt or vice versa.

He also makes mention of one issue I've had forever now, and that is the desire get rid of the distances on putters. It's really an antiquated system that has been around since the original EA Sports golf games on the Genesis. So the new putting system would be about relying on the to the hole option and then simply aiming the arrow at the hole. If it's an uphill putt, you'd have aim past the hole for more power and if it's downhill aim short of the hole.

Putting is all feel so there should be an element of unknown when you're on the green.

Ball Positioning

This was a limited feature in previous Tiger games before '08 and it adds a nice layer of depth. If you take a full swing with the ball back in your stance it'll react differently than it would if it were in the middle or in the front. So bringing this feature back along with opening or closing your club face would really add to the realism and help to make it that much harder to hit accurate shots.

Weather Effects

Weather is a huge influence on golfers but it's pretty much non-existent in the game outside of wind. Maybe there's light drizzle on the course and everything slows down. Or maybe it's been sunny and hot and the greens are hard and fast. Also wind should be consistent across a course, not random per hole. If the 8th has wind blowing from right to left at 10mph, if the 9th tee is next to the 8th green the wind should be 10mph from left to right.

So that's our wish list for Tiger Woods 09 and beyond. We realize a lot of these ideas are huge under-takings and probably will never be seen in the game any time soon, but some of the other fixes are quite simple and could seemingly be implemented immediately. If you have any suggestions you'd like to add, feel free to post them in the comment section below. Stay tuned to OperationSports.com for our previews and review of Tiger Woods 09 in the coming months and visit our Golf forum to discuss any golf game you please.