Journal Sylver Dragon's Journal: Early Review: Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 on the Wii
This Saturday I had the opportunity to go over to my parents home and play the new Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 on the Wii. I should mention up front that I only got to play for a couple hours or so, so this review might lack some depth. That said:
Graphics: If you bought a Wii, you either consciously or unconsciously decided that the new control scheme is more important than graphics. Certainly, this game looks pretty good, but it's not going to be blowing people away with the graphics. The characters do look pretty good, but throughout the game jaggies abound.
Interface (menus): While the menus are not normally something you think about in a game, you will think about the menus in this game for a long time to come. I wonder if the Wii version of this game was ever play-tested past the, "ok, it boots, ship it!" stage? I will admit that I never got to personally control the menus, and for that I am thankful. Watching my father try to navigate around the menu system was like watching a fish flop about on land as it seeks water in a final attempt not to suffocate. Now, my father does not have the finely honed pointing skills of his sons who wasted much of their young lives playing video games, but he is still not the epileptic the game made him out to be. Watching my brother, who did misspend his youth, work the menu system wasn't quite as bad, it simply looked like a fly with one wing torn off dealing with a sufferer of Turrets Syndrome. While he could get around, it was not in a fashion which was normal; and he would occasionally go zipping about in random directions. On top of that, the game would simply select an item, seemingly at random, and spit it out at you. While I tend to believe both my brother and father that neither of them was pressing buttons when that happened, I do still wonder if it wasn't caused by them strangling the remote in frustration, wishing for that action to be trans-substantiated to the developer who came up with the control scheme for the menus. If nothing else, this was a great learning experience for my brother, who is a game programmer, and now has a great appreciation for just how god fucking awful a menu system can be.
Interface (avatar creation): One of the neat features of this game is the ability to make a character which is uniquely you. First and foremost, this process is hampered severely by the menu problems listed above; however, if your persevere enough you can come up with a reasonable facsimile of what a love child between you and a chineese woman would look like. I somehow doubt that the built in golf-pros were created using this tool, as nothing we could do could change the eye and jaw structure to anything even close to the norms for those of us of Eastern European descent (aka standard Caucasian). After a bit, we just gave up and accepted that this really wasn't that important to the game. Besides which, with the dominance of the overly muscled white males (read: Duke Nukem types) in video games these days, I figure this is a good way to get away from that. Of course, I should note that we only spent about half and hour on creating my avatar, so we might have been able to work something out, but with the menu system being what it was, I just want to get to playing and let the torture of watching my poor dad fumble around in the menus stop. One last note on characters, you can only have 4 on a system. For many people this may be OK, but for families or groups who get together and play, this is going to suck. We ended up with avatars for me, my brother, my father and my wife. When we went to create one for a family friend (who is over regularly with his wife) we were told that we would have to delete one of the existing profiles. Now, my father's Wii does not have a lot of save games, he owns Wii Sports and Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, that's it. Neither my brother nor I live at home, so we aren't loading his system up with tons of save games, so he has tons of free memory. Why can't we just take a few more blocks of it and add some more avatars? We'll let the game know when it has consumed too much, and delete some.
Interface (actual play): At some point, you'll finally get your avatar created, or just use one of the pros, and strike out on the virtual course to test your ability to whack a little white ball with a fucked up stick; or as it's known, play golf. The first thing you will get to do is select a course from one of several scenic locations. At the very least, I think they were scenic, but considering that some foul warlock had blotted out the sun, it was too damn dark to see the beautiful courses of Ireland. Now, first and foremost let me mention a problem we have noticed with my father's TV. It a 52" Samsung LCD HDTV, it's fairly new, having been purchased in December '06. But it seems that it suffers from a poor vertical viewing angle. The top of the TV sits at around 3 feet off the floor. So, standing, my eyes are just shy of 3 feet above that. And, in that position, the TV seems rather dark. Because of this peculiarity, In Wii Sports Golf, we tend to set up our shots, sitting down, and then stand up to swing; and this works quite well. In Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, you almost can't see anything on the screen sitting down, standing up, you'd do just as well to turn the TV off. Now, part of this might be that the Wii really isn't meant for HDTV's, it goes up to 480p and that's it. So, something (read: the brightness) maybe gets lost in translation. Though, I go back to the question of EA's QA, did EA decide that nobody who bought a Wii has an HDTV, so there was no need to test on one? Or, did they even do any testing of the Wii version?
So, you get your shot lined up at what might be the flag in the inky darkness, and start whacking away. With any luck, you'll hit a nice clean, straight shot. If not, you'll get a little arrow letting you know if you hooked. I would assume that it will also let you know if you slice, but that mechanic was strangely absent during our time playing. This is especially bad when you actually want to slice, on purpose, to get around an obstacle. While I have personally spent hours on the driving range trying to excise a slice from my golf swing, there are times when you realize that you can use it to your advantage. So, you open the club face up a bit, and bingo, you hit a shot straighter than an arrow. So, you open the club face even more, and wham! you have a shot straighter than a fundamentalist christian. In fact, no matter how hard we tried, a fade shot seemed impossible to come up with. For a game which bills itself as a "golf sim", this was a really bad oversight.
The gameplay wasn't all bad. Once you accept that you are shooting blind, and that you'll never hit a fade (draw shots do work); the game is actually fun. And crushing a shot out there around 250 yards is enjoyable. Chipping works pretty well, too. Putting though is odd. As you line up to putt you get this techno-grid with pretty lights running down it. The idea is that the lights show you how the ball is going to roll, and it actually works ok. The only downside is that it is distracting as hell. Though, since the game doesn't seem to pay much attention to your actual swing, it balances out.
Lastly, I should say read the dialog boxes on the screen carefully. During play, if you have more than one remote, they can occasionally go to sleep while you are waiting for your turn. If your turn comes up, and your remote is asleep, you will get a box telling you to hit the "1" button to wake it back up, or, hit the "1" button on another remote to end the game. Sadly, after several holes, this happened to me. Even worse, my brother, who had just finished his shot, saw the box and thought it was talking to him, so he hit the "1" button on his remote. Without any sort of, "are you sure?" type box, we were back at the main menu, our round of golf over due to a bad button press. Now, I do understand that too many "are you sure?" boxes get annoying quick, I've been using Windows for a long time; however, I don't think it would really hurt to have one come up when you are about to throw away a couple of hours worth of gameplay, because someone got jumpy on the button.
Conclusion: "EA sports, it's in the game." I'm not quite sure what "it" is, but in the case of Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, "it" is not a good game. "It" in this case may mean frustration, an evil warlock who has stolen the sun, or a golf sim which doesn't simulate much; but that's about it. I think my father put it best as, "I'm thinking about taking it back." He is, however, going to give it a few more days, to see if it grows on him; I'm betting on "no". Especially considering that after the "crash" of our round of golf, we switched over to Super Swing Golf for the Wii, which I had brought with me. Even having to deal with the fact that all of us were stuck playing the same character; and that we sort of had to figure out the controls by guessing and my iffy memory (note to self: always bring the manuals for games you haven't touched in a month or more); and the fact that it's very Anime, of which my father is not really a fan; still, all of us had a lot of fun with it; and it seemed to be a better golf sim, even with its quirkiness. If anything the quirkiness of the game just added to our enjoyment.
If you are looking for a hardcore golf sim, keep looking, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 isn't it. It has a lot of good ideas but the execution needs execution; preferably, the group who created the menu system first. It's an exercise in frustration just getting the game going, the actual golfing itself lacked any depth and light, and the game just misses out on really using a control system that is really spatially aware. But, with the way EA works, you can expect them to take another whack at it in '08. Maybe next time, they'll make a game worth playing.
Graphics: If you bought a Wii, you either consciously or unconsciously decided that the new control scheme is more important than graphics. Certainly, this game looks pretty good, but it's not going to be blowing people away with the graphics. The characters do look pretty good, but throughout the game jaggies abound.
Interface (menus): While the menus are not normally something you think about in a game, you will think about the menus in this game for a long time to come. I wonder if the Wii version of this game was ever play-tested past the, "ok, it boots, ship it!" stage? I will admit that I never got to personally control the menus, and for that I am thankful. Watching my father try to navigate around the menu system was like watching a fish flop about on land as it seeks water in a final attempt not to suffocate. Now, my father does not have the finely honed pointing skills of his sons who wasted much of their young lives playing video games, but he is still not the epileptic the game made him out to be. Watching my brother, who did misspend his youth, work the menu system wasn't quite as bad, it simply looked like a fly with one wing torn off dealing with a sufferer of Turrets Syndrome. While he could get around, it was not in a fashion which was normal; and he would occasionally go zipping about in random directions. On top of that, the game would simply select an item, seemingly at random, and spit it out at you. While I tend to believe both my brother and father that neither of them was pressing buttons when that happened, I do still wonder if it wasn't caused by them strangling the remote in frustration, wishing for that action to be trans-substantiated to the developer who came up with the control scheme for the menus. If nothing else, this was a great learning experience for my brother, who is a game programmer, and now has a great appreciation for just how god fucking awful a menu system can be.
Interface (avatar creation): One of the neat features of this game is the ability to make a character which is uniquely you. First and foremost, this process is hampered severely by the menu problems listed above; however, if your persevere enough you can come up with a reasonable facsimile of what a love child between you and a chineese woman would look like. I somehow doubt that the built in golf-pros were created using this tool, as nothing we could do could change the eye and jaw structure to anything even close to the norms for those of us of Eastern European descent (aka standard Caucasian). After a bit, we just gave up and accepted that this really wasn't that important to the game. Besides which, with the dominance of the overly muscled white males (read: Duke Nukem types) in video games these days, I figure this is a good way to get away from that. Of course, I should note that we only spent about half and hour on creating my avatar, so we might have been able to work something out, but with the menu system being what it was, I just want to get to playing and let the torture of watching my poor dad fumble around in the menus stop. One last note on characters, you can only have 4 on a system. For many people this may be OK, but for families or groups who get together and play, this is going to suck. We ended up with avatars for me, my brother, my father and my wife. When we went to create one for a family friend (who is over regularly with his wife) we were told that we would have to delete one of the existing profiles. Now, my father's Wii does not have a lot of save games, he owns Wii Sports and Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, that's it. Neither my brother nor I live at home, so we aren't loading his system up with tons of save games, so he has tons of free memory. Why can't we just take a few more blocks of it and add some more avatars? We'll let the game know when it has consumed too much, and delete some.
Interface (actual play): At some point, you'll finally get your avatar created, or just use one of the pros, and strike out on the virtual course to test your ability to whack a little white ball with a fucked up stick; or as it's known, play golf. The first thing you will get to do is select a course from one of several scenic locations. At the very least, I think they were scenic, but considering that some foul warlock had blotted out the sun, it was too damn dark to see the beautiful courses of Ireland. Now, first and foremost let me mention a problem we have noticed with my father's TV. It a 52" Samsung LCD HDTV, it's fairly new, having been purchased in December '06. But it seems that it suffers from a poor vertical viewing angle. The top of the TV sits at around 3 feet off the floor. So, standing, my eyes are just shy of 3 feet above that. And, in that position, the TV seems rather dark. Because of this peculiarity, In Wii Sports Golf, we tend to set up our shots, sitting down, and then stand up to swing; and this works quite well. In Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, you almost can't see anything on the screen sitting down, standing up, you'd do just as well to turn the TV off. Now, part of this might be that the Wii really isn't meant for HDTV's, it goes up to 480p and that's it. So, something (read: the brightness) maybe gets lost in translation. Though, I go back to the question of EA's QA, did EA decide that nobody who bought a Wii has an HDTV, so there was no need to test on one? Or, did they even do any testing of the Wii version?
So, you get your shot lined up at what might be the flag in the inky darkness, and start whacking away. With any luck, you'll hit a nice clean, straight shot. If not, you'll get a little arrow letting you know if you hooked. I would assume that it will also let you know if you slice, but that mechanic was strangely absent during our time playing. This is especially bad when you actually want to slice, on purpose, to get around an obstacle. While I have personally spent hours on the driving range trying to excise a slice from my golf swing, there are times when you realize that you can use it to your advantage. So, you open the club face up a bit, and bingo, you hit a shot straighter than an arrow. So, you open the club face even more, and wham! you have a shot straighter than a fundamentalist christian. In fact, no matter how hard we tried, a fade shot seemed impossible to come up with. For a game which bills itself as a "golf sim", this was a really bad oversight.
The gameplay wasn't all bad. Once you accept that you are shooting blind, and that you'll never hit a fade (draw shots do work); the game is actually fun. And crushing a shot out there around 250 yards is enjoyable. Chipping works pretty well, too. Putting though is odd. As you line up to putt you get this techno-grid with pretty lights running down it. The idea is that the lights show you how the ball is going to roll, and it actually works ok. The only downside is that it is distracting as hell. Though, since the game doesn't seem to pay much attention to your actual swing, it balances out.
Lastly, I should say read the dialog boxes on the screen carefully. During play, if you have more than one remote, they can occasionally go to sleep while you are waiting for your turn. If your turn comes up, and your remote is asleep, you will get a box telling you to hit the "1" button to wake it back up, or, hit the "1" button on another remote to end the game. Sadly, after several holes, this happened to me. Even worse, my brother, who had just finished his shot, saw the box and thought it was talking to him, so he hit the "1" button on his remote. Without any sort of, "are you sure?" type box, we were back at the main menu, our round of golf over due to a bad button press. Now, I do understand that too many "are you sure?" boxes get annoying quick, I've been using Windows for a long time; however, I don't think it would really hurt to have one come up when you are about to throw away a couple of hours worth of gameplay, because someone got jumpy on the button.
Conclusion: "EA sports, it's in the game." I'm not quite sure what "it" is, but in the case of Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07, "it" is not a good game. "It" in this case may mean frustration, an evil warlock who has stolen the sun, or a golf sim which doesn't simulate much; but that's about it. I think my father put it best as, "I'm thinking about taking it back." He is, however, going to give it a few more days, to see if it grows on him; I'm betting on "no". Especially considering that after the "crash" of our round of golf, we switched over to Super Swing Golf for the Wii, which I had brought with me. Even having to deal with the fact that all of us were stuck playing the same character; and that we sort of had to figure out the controls by guessing and my iffy memory (note to self: always bring the manuals for games you haven't touched in a month or more); and the fact that it's very Anime, of which my father is not really a fan; still, all of us had a lot of fun with it; and it seemed to be a better golf sim, even with its quirkiness. If anything the quirkiness of the game just added to our enjoyment.
If you are looking for a hardcore golf sim, keep looking, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 isn't it. It has a lot of good ideas but the execution needs execution; preferably, the group who created the menu system first. It's an exercise in frustration just getting the game going, the actual golfing itself lacked any depth and light, and the game just misses out on really using a control system that is really spatially aware. But, with the way EA works, you can expect them to take another whack at it in '08. Maybe next time, they'll make a game worth playing.
Early Review: Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 on the Wii More Login
Early Review: Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07 on the Wii
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