This year's Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is no exception, though it's shy on the genuine innovation of the Wii MotionPlus version of the game, opting for modest but welcome tweaks of last year's iteration and the many before that.
The modern swing control by way of analog thumbstick remains, tweaked slightly to visually display what your thumb is doing and how it will affect the actual shot before you hit it.
One of its new features, Live Tournaments, is the most intriguing thing to happen to the franchise in a long while.
As it sounds, Live Tournaments allows you to play tourneys online, divvied into three categories: daily, weekly, or Play the Pros tournaments. Daily, play 18 holes (takes about an hour); weekly and the leaderboard shows scores from yours plus three other rounds played in that week. Play the Pros is all that except you're sharing the leaderboard (or hoping to) with the real life scores of real PGA Tour golfers during real life events.
Also new is a live weather feature, or Dynamic Weather, which makes it rain, blow, or swelter in your game parade if it's really raining, blowing or sweltering on the real course wherever it may be in the real world. Oddly, nobody brings an umbrella but nobody actually gets wet when it rains, so it's really just a gimmick phase that just makes you crank harder when it's soggy.
Changed in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is the game's putting mechanics. Now optionally available in the form of Precision Putting, on the green it's all about the gentle, gentle, oh-so-gentle thumbing of one's thumbstick, back and forward, rarely a full pull, easy now, don't push it, don't pull it, easy, don't catch it on your skirt, there you go, now tap the thing. Difficult, maybe, but Precision Putting does emulate the required nimbleness of deft putting rather well, which is cool, especially when it all comes together and you drain an impossibly long one.
Improved is the long-running Tiger Challenge, now known as Tournament Challenge (as if it's not all about Tiger - t'yah, right) where you can re-enact some of the greater moments in golf history. And if it's a Tiger moment, the man himself shows up in a cut scene to talk about it, which is both revealing and absorbing if you're really into golf.
One small but significantly infuriating element to Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 is that a new bonus course is already available for $5. This for a game add-on to a title for which you already shelled out the top-level price of $60, rightly expecting it to be "complete." Oh wait, it's only "mostly complete." If you want the really complete game, you've got to pay at least $65, an unprecedented price for just a game, no peripherals, no autographed bubblegum card or sack of golf balls included.
Offering the option to pay $1 or $2 for performance enhancing equipment and apparel that you can otherwise earn if you play long and hard seems fair enough. Not everyone has the time to log a hundred hours of duffs and Mulligans, but if they can afford to pay for the inevitable improvements made instant, magically, all the more power to them.
But $5 for a course that was made available with the game's launch - included free in a GameStop promotion - is an unjustifiable cash grab. EA and GameStop are surely happy with the revenue generated, but general consumers should feel like they need a shower. Especially when the whole package is going to be obsolete in less than a year when PGA Tour 11 comes out.
Still, make no mistake: Tiger Woods PGA Tour '10 for the PS3 is an excellent golf game. It's visually appealing, deep, inviting to avid golf gamers and neophytes alike, while live online brouhaha and a few new features make for small but significant improvements over last year's version.
It naturally doesn't offer the world-rocking innovation of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 with Wii MotionPlus on Wii, of course, but PS3 owners can take solace in the superior graphics and related new-gen tweaks.
That said, if you want a complete game for $60, EA has pretty much ensured you'll have to wait until this one's in GameStop's pre-played bin for $50, after which you can use the surplus to buy the extra courses.
For that matter, wait until PGA Tour 11 comes out next year, after which Tour 10 will be found in bargain bins and Craigslist listings for, like, $20 obo. Heck of a deal.
- Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Cheat: Enter eltigre as a code at the cheats menu to unlock Tiger Woods golf items in the Pro Shop.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 Tip: Speaking of the pro shop, notice there's also a hefty, bulky, CEC Mining Hazard Suit from EA's sci-fi survival horror game, Dead Space, available for $35,000. You can unlock that by completing the first Boston Challenge. Too funny.
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