Unfortunately we can't tell you how they play yet, as EA is still working on the AI - and we reckon what we're seeing is just lifted from last year's outing, judging by the way Arnold Palmer occasionally plays the same badly aimed shot into the same cruelly placed rocks 10 times before conceding. Golfing 'Legends' will also play a part in your general single-player game, with the likes of Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Alan Partridge's favourite Seve Ballesteros posing challenges and eventually taking you on. We're also told that there's some sort of clever 'prestige' calculation that measures the quality of your design against observations various golfers have made over the years, and then has one or two of them pop up to challenge you to a game depending on the result. (And because we're sad.)Įqually interesting from a bored-man-on-a-tired-weeknight perspective is the promise of a 'Dream 18' option that lets you create your own 18-hole golf course. We also like the idea of designing our own logos and custom images for fairways and flags, if only for the comedy value of being able to turn to a mate and make obscene jokes about which badly drawn half-naked celebrity he's just clubbed his ball onto, and where. We quite like the purple stripes, for some reason. Tiger Proofing, since you ask, does for existing courses what Game Face does for existing faces - it slaps them about a bit, colours things differently and allows you to tweak everything you could reasonably desire, whether it's the upkeep of greens, fairways and bunkers, the size of them, the weather conditions, the tee positioning, or even the design of the fairways. Fortunately, Tiger's 2005 outing has another customisation suite that we do care about, and EA calls it Tiger Proofing. We feel sure, as EA Sports clearly does, that somebody out there will be excited about the Game Face II features, but that somebody doesn't work here. Or, like us, you can whack the "randomisation" button and run a mile. You can then toy about with the distribution of weight around the body and venture into the Pro Shop to buy shirts, trousers, shoes, clubs - even swing types. And that's only the ones we could be bothered to scribble down. In addition to all the obvious characteristics - height, weight, skin, eye and hair colour, etc - you can add blemishes, freckles and laugh lines to the face, fiddle with size, fullness, bulk, eye size, eye rotation, lid definition, bags, corners and crows feet, lip definition, wrinkles, corners, neck length, and moles, scars and piercings on the nose, cheeks, brow and chin. Literally heading these up is the new Game Face II set of features, which enable you to create a golfer customised to an absolutely ludicrous degree, far in excess of any other character customisation tool we can recall, and that includes stuff we've seen in 700 variations on The Sims over the years. The main theme this year, as it turns out, is customisation - of people, of courses, even of your own golf swing. Ahead of getting our hands on some online-enabled code in the run-up to the game's late September release, we've been investigating some of the buzzwords on this year's fact sheet, and trying out some of the new courses. In other words, the rest of the game, which is shaping up to be, well, just about whatever you fancy shaping it to be. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 will very definitely make up for this in one way or another - the 'one way' being the inclusion of those online options, including tournaments, leagues and stat tracking for skins, capture the flag, best ball and other modes, on PS2 and Xbox and 'another' being the various things we've been tinkering with in our preview build this week. At least we were - none of our mates were all that keen on "popping over for a quick round before work," even if they were always partial post-pub. But we're not giving EA that, because we wanted to play it online, and it seems inconceivable that while our yankee pals were invited to do so, we were forced to potter around offline in solitude. Of course, the 2004 vintage was actually fantastic - a well-worked expansion of existing principles that introduced real-time events (for which we still fire it up on occasion), a full PGA Tour, and lots of other bells and whistles to a stick-driven golf game that already looked and handled far better than any of the others. Having tee-sed us with the prospect of online play last year and then dropped it into a bunker at the last minute with very little warning, EA Sports has some work to do this year with its Tiger Woods franchise if it wants to regain our trust. And, no, we have no idea what's going through their heads either. Since this preview was published, EA has confirmed that the Xbox version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 will not feature online support in Europe, but the PS2 version will.
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