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 Hands on with Tiger Woods 08
| Impressions of Tiger Woods 08 |
Before I start talking about Tiger Woods 08, let me preface this by explaining that before I loaded up the game I had an interesting conversation with one of the EA marketing guys. He told me that this was the most impressive Tiger ever. Nothing unusual there you might think, what else would you expect him to say given he's a part of the marketing team. However, when I asked why he went on to explain to me that the improvement in Tiger from 07 to 08 was more substantial than the improvement in Madden this year. My reaction was "wow", especially given that I'd spent 12 hours the previous day playing Madden and witnessed for myself how much it had improved. After playing Tiger 08 though I'm tempted to agree. Let me try and explain to you now exactly how it has improved and what new features it brings to the table.
I started out by trying to write down a list of all the game modes in Tiger 08 but eventually gave up... there really are THAT many. Tiger 08 has a ton of small mini games and a ton of traditional games as well as the usual career mode, a brand new Tiger Challenge (featuring over 30 new challenges) and an online system that has been enormously popular in the past. It's a deep game and never has it been more apt to say that there is something for everyone than it is for this game.
One small thing that I hadn't read about before I played is that when you are lining up your shot and you hit the button to zoom in on the target ring, one single tap of that button will take you straight there rather than slowly zooming all the way in. You can still press it down and have it zoom like it always has, but if you're impatient or you need to squeeze a round in quickly for whatever reason then a quick tap of the button will take you straight to the target recticle. That's not the most interesting bit though because now when you zoom in you can use the shoulder buttons (LB or RB on the Xbox 360 controller) to show you how a fade or hook will affect the path of your shot. You can actually see how a hook might get you around a tree, or how a fade might get you between a few nasty bunkers strategically placed to protect the front of the green.
When I moved the target using LB and hit the shot, it just hooked the ball without the need for me to swing the club any other way than straight back and through. In other words, it automatically hooked or sliced the shot for me depending on the extent to which I pressed LB or RB. That doesn't make hooking or fading require an enormous amount of skill so I'm hopeful that on the higher difficulty level, using LB or RB will simply show you the path and you will have to manipulate your swing to hook or fade the ball in the manner that we've had to in previous versions - that is by bringing the club back and following through at an angle - but either way, it's an interesting new addition and I took a video of it so you can see what I mean. You can check the video out here.
EA explained to me that, from the the feedback they received last year, putting was still a bit too easy - especially with the ability to preview the path that your putt would take as many times as you wanted to. So, this year they've changed that and for the better. You can still preview the path but only once and that means you have to be more selective about when you preview it because you can't keep going back to check on it. Any adjustments you make to the alignment of your putt after you have previewed it will have to be carefully judged, which makes the task more of a challenge. Apparently, on the higher difficulty levels this preview can be turned off altogether, so in actual fact you can customise this, as with many other aspects of the game, to suit your preferences. The putting system has been something that EA has worked on consistently almost every year as they try to find a system that balances the difficulty factor against the "fun" element. I believe that this new system reaches a nice balance and EA are aiming to try and get the user to judge the slope and speed of the green themselves, rather than having the CPU do the work for them, which is an essential part of playing "real" golf.
So how did it work out when playing the game ? Well, I can honestly say that on the default 'Play Now' level, putting wasn't especially harder than it has been in the past - but that was with pins on the default easy setting, with tees at the shorter length and little if no wind to speak of. So I landed in some pretty nice positions close to the pin making the putting reasonably straightforward. I've never been one for switching back and forth to check the preview anyway and I've played a lot of Tiger si nce 2002, so I didn't have much difficulty. However, it's nice to know there's a way of making it harder should I choose.
The biggest new addition is EA Sports Gamernet, which allows you to save replays of your shots, spectactular or otherwise and upload them online so other users can check them out. You might hit a seriously long drive which you want your friends to check out, or a crazy shot that hits 2 spectators, bounces off a golf cart and lands next to the hole. From there, anyone can log on and check out those shots. These are categorised into different channels depending on what kind of shot you hit, with a search engine to filter your friends and find whatever you are looking for. But the fun doesn't stop there because once you find a shot you like, you can try and beat that challenge by hitting a longer drive or doing the exact same shot yourself. One example we found on Gamernet already was a chip shot that bounced off the surface of the water and landed on the green before rolling into the hole. An amazing shot that proved difficult to beat, but it's out there for anyone to try once the game launches. Other challenges we experienced were more reasonable - driving a certain distance was a popular one, as well as hitting a tree and bouncing onto the green. Gamernet has a nice ranking system associated with it and you can earn points for putting up a popular challenge that a lot of people try or for posting a video that a lot of people watch. |
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