The first and only other Tiger Woods game I played was the 2004 incarnation. I was wrapped up in it for days, loving the sheer scale of the game: the innumerable game modes, the dead-on course representations, the piles upon piles of equipment you could collect. Not to mention that I spent hours just tweaking my player with the gameface editor. I absolutely loved the game. That is, until I got good at it. This series is notorious for how it has taken the most frustrating, unforgiving sport in the world and turned it into something about as challenging as bumper-bowling. A week into the game, I was leaving my fellow PGA-Tour pros so far in the dust, I could have bogeyed an entire round of a tournament and still come out on top. My excitement about the game vanished. So here we have the 2006 iteration, and all of the good points of the previous Tiger games have returned fairly untouched; the Gameface is there, the play modes are enough to keep you busy for weeks, the course selection is phenomenal…and EA has even addressed the challenge issue. But they took the easy way out. For example (bear with me, here): I “exercised” my golfer in the legends scenarios to get him up to snuff, and then I took him out onto the PGA tour circuit. I started off in the first tournament pretty smoothly, working myself into a tie for third with a round of 68 (the first place round coming in somewhere near 66). Well, I moved onto round two, and after laughing myself sore because of four consecutive eagles – culminating in an unbelievable round of 52 – imagine my surprise, the round after that, when the scores of my competitors suddenly averaged 56! A ten-point improvement across the board, despite more difficult tee and pin positions! I was at the mercy of “rubber-band” AI, in which the competition is on your heels regardless of how well you play (You’ll most often find this in racing games, where no matter how fast you manage to go, there’s always someone in your rearview). Well, I’m sure this was intended to keep the game challenging, but what it does instead is remove any incentive to play your A-game. This technique of relative scoring only means that when you play a record game, you’d better be able to do it twice, because your best game will quickly become the average. So I would put it to EA to fix what’s broken – the overwhelming ease of this series – rather than bending other aspects of the game to conform to and disguise the problem. In the meantime I’ll cross my fingers that in 2007, we’ll finally get a golf simulator, rather than yet another year of “PGA Jam”.
I have never played golf in real life, and have never liked to watch it on television too. But I have always loved to play miniature golf with my family and friends, but that's an another story. I havn't played so muc... Read Full Review
I have always kept up with the Tiger Woods Franchise, and each year it has become better, but not this time. Tiger '06 is still a good golf game but the changes made from 05 to 06 dont really cut it for me. The New S... Read Full Review
