Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004

It’s easy to make fun of golf. There are the clothes, for instance. There’s the seemingly pointless aim of smacking a small white ball miles around a piece of countryside. And there’s the insistence on adhering to a set of rules so old that they make your grandmother appear forward-thinking. But for all that, it’s still an enormously popular sport and pastime. There are even fans and players of the sport in the Pocket Gamer office and, perhaps more surprisingly, they’re not afraid to admit it, either.

But playing golf in a computer game is somehow different, managing to avoid the social stigma attached to the real thing. No doubt the fact that you don’t need to spend hundreds of pounds on the kit is a large contributing factor. But probably not so big as the fact as you can play as the one golfer it’s alright to like, Tiger Woods. He’s got the million-dollar endorsements, more cool than your freezer and a physique that Colin Montgomerie can only dream of. So it’s no surprise at all that he’s the perfect poster boy for golfing games and now his star is shining on the N-Gage with this, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004.

Initially it’s not much to look at, granted. The visuals, which in a golf game, need to work hard, are limited. While Tiger’s animation as you play him is good, the landscapes through which you’ll eagle, birdie and par are lacking in detail and could, pretty much, be from any course anywhere in the world. The 3D viewpoint is only used when taking your shot; whilst the ball is in the air, the game switches to an overhead map view, showing the path your ball is taking. Despite this, though, it manages to provide a decent sense of the course and enables you to plan your approach shots with a level of strategy that would otherwise be unavailable.

It doesn’t, however, help alleviate the game’s clumsy nature. The low-resolution graphics make precise shot-making more of a gamble than it should be and you’ll frequently find yourself sailing shots into trees that, just a few moments earlier, didn’t look that tall. This isn’t helped by the control system. Instead of providing a method whereby you make your shots by moving a marker along a power metre, before attempting to stop it accurately at the end to signify a cleanly-hit shot, you have to swing with the N-Gage’s joypad. You push down on the pad to start with, causing your player to make his backswing and, when the club gets to the top of the swing, you push forward. This method of control works fine when you’ve got analogue controls like a mouse or joystick on a computer or on a PlayStation/Xbox controller, but it doesn’t on a digital pad like the N-Gage’s. As a consequence your shot relies on timing, you judgement of which should be based on watching what Tiger does on-screen. But somehow it doesn’t quite match up and you’ll find it hard going indeed to gain any level of control over how hard you hit your shots.

This makes early progress in the game very laborious, a matter that’s not helped by the fact that when you start off in the game’s Career mode, your golfer has all the skill and prowess of a drunken monkey. Only when you start placing high up in the tournaments and you start winning money can you start improving your character’s power, accuracy and so forth. As a result, you’ll need real determination to keep going through these opening rounds, but anyone who’s not a big fan of golf to begin with is likely to run out of patience. Fans of the game will be rewarded in their perseverance, however, in the shape of the courses on offer and the in-game competition, which is varied and well-balanced. John Daly (he of the cigarettes, alcohol and belly to match), St. Andrews, Sawgrass and Scottsdale all make an appearance, with the three famous courses available to play in full. These are accompanied by two other courses, Bay Hill and The Highlands, and with the Bluetooth multiplayer mode providing some human competition in the shape of a friend with the game, there’s enough here to keep you happy when the local links are waterlogged this winter. Non-golfers, however, will remain unconverted.