Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 2006

When Electronic Arts announced its move into mobile earlier this year, it also repossessed its extremely valuable Tiger Woods brand. Indeed, some observers attributed EA's full-scale move into the industry to the several less-than-stellar versions of Tiger Mobile that had been deployed by EA's client mobile publishers. In any case, the preview build of Tiger '06 we played at E3 made it abundantly clear to us that EA is devoting its full attention to this project. The Symbian version of the game--which runs on Nokia's Series 60 smart phones and clocks in at several megabytes--is pretty much identical to last year's Tiger game for the N-Gage in every respect, aside from multiplayer connectivity. That was a pretty darn good portable game of golf, and making it downloadable is only going to make it better, in our opinion.

Tiger '06 is different from other mobile golf games in one substantial respect: swing control. This game sports the same "miniswing" mechanic as the N-Gage version. You start your backswing by pressing down on the control pad. Then you rock your thumb forward to swing and follow through. This control method works famously, just as in the previous game, and it's far more realistic than any of the meter-based systems out there. On the other hand, the same method that works so well on full swings is pretty worthless for putting, at least in the preview version. Due to the minute backswing, we couldn't figure out how to hit the ball more than a few feet on the green. Hopefully EA will tune this aspect of the game before release.

Otherwise, Tiger '06 appeared to be a rock-solid port of the N-Gage title (N-Gage is essentially a souped-up version of Symbian, so this isn't too surprising). Most of the gameplay options were grayed-out for the purposes of the demo, and we could only play on a single hole as Tiger Woods. However, we did observe that the standard tournament and career modes were present. At this time, there are no plans to give the game multiplayer or other connected features.

EA's new mobile Tiger's shaping up to be a beast. And since mobile golf games are one of the most hallowed genres for the established mobile publishers, a fight is definitely brewing. We'll get to watch the whole thing play out sometime this summer, when Tiger Woods '06 comes out on a range of phones. Stay tuned for the full review.