Tiger Woods 09 Hands-On Preview (Videogamer)

[Steve_OS]

Videogamer has posted their preview of Tiger Woods 09.

Quote:

"In real life, if you hit a bad patch and find yourself pulling your drives and missing your putts during a round, you wouldn't just play on the day after as if nothing bad had happened. Chances are that it would affect you for quite a while and the same is true in the game. If you consistently under-perform during a round then your stats drop before the next round. It's a system that will need many more hours of play to test than the couple I spent with the preview build, but if it works as it seems it will make playing through tournaments exciting even when your golfer is at the peak of his game."

[OnlookerDelay]

This "Hands-On Preview" might as well have been written by an in-house EA P/R rep. It touches on little more than the new features, and leaves us hardcore golf gamers still speculating on the festering performance issues and core gameplay shortcomings that have plagued it during its next-gen life.

[Qrashman]

Completely worthless review. Sounds like an advertisement to me. Why not just take a picture of the back of the box and post it as your review, it would do the same thing.

[OnlookerDelay]

Quote: Originally Posted by Qrashman

Completely worthless review.

In all fairness, it wasn't called a "review"... it was supposedly and "hands-on" preview. But it told me less than what I would expect from a preview based on press materials. Apparently no one in the gaming press understands, or either doesn't care about really digging into substantive issues with golf games.

[pietasterp]

Quote: Originally Posted by OnlookerDelay

Apparently no one in the gaming press understands, or either doesn't care about really digging into substantive issues with golf games.

Well, it's a little from column "A", and a little from column "B"...That preview is de rigueur for gaming website or magazine or newspaper fluff pieces. I think the big problem is that they assign the preview to whoever happens to be standing in the way when the editor is pointing at volunteers, and so that person most likely has no frame of reference, may not even be a gamer, and almost certainly isn't a golfer. They just get assigned a preview, so they approach it like reporters approach anything they don't know anything about: they gather the most easily accessible information (i.e. EA's PR lit) and report it verbatim.

I knew that preview would be worthless when it started with the line: "EA certainly isn't resting on its laurels this year with regard to its line-up of sports titles. It seems that all its major titles are receiving pretty big enhancements." Pfft, yeah right - NCAA was really a huge step forward. Madden we can debate, but at best it's what the product should have been 3 years ago. A more cynical way to look at that quoted statement would be to ask, why feel the need to defend yourself de novo against accusations of "resting on (your) laurels"? I especially liked the caption underneath the game photo that says "There's still no other golf game on the market that approaches Tiger's production values"...Uh, yeah, that's because there's no other golf game on the market. I know there's HotShots or whatever, but that's really not in the same category as Tiger in terms of what they're trying to accomplish...

Also, I know I've commented on this a million times, but does anyone else think the color palatte in Tiger Woods is just too dark? I mean, it looks like it's constantly overcast at sundown, or they're shooting a "day-for-night" shot in a movie through a dark blue filter. I think of golf as a bright, sunny, airy, open sport, and when I watch in on TV in HD it makes me almost feel like I'm in a fresh-air meadow...Tiger makes me feel like I'm playing in Scotland at dusk, which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that I'm supposed to be at Sawgrass in Florida...

Something about the graphics in the game just seems weird to me, as well...I mean, it's not that they're bad - they are plenty good, actually - they just seem "fake", for lack of a better description. I don't know if it's weird art direction or what, but all the characters look kind of like pastel sketches, as opposed to the strikingly realistic look of characters in a game like NBA 2K. I dunno, maybe it's just me...

BTW, sorry to start all my posts with a quote from you, Onlooker, but other than your Duke avatar, we seem to really be on the same wavelength re: golf games.