PlayStation 2

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004

LETS GET SOMETHING OUT of the way right now. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is a brilliant game. It's easily the best golf game that you can buy, and noticeably improved over the 2003 installment. Read no further, get the game, and be guaranteed many hours of enjoyment with this title. As difficult a game as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003 is to beat, it has been done with '04, in almost every area.

Despite my graphical demands, Tiger Woods leaves no facet of the game uncovered, leaving all competitors cowering in the shadows.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is the Tiger Woods of PS2 golf games – there simply isn’t any competition and it gets better every year.

For the most part, Tiger Woods 2004 is just like the other ones. You use the analog sticks to hit, which still works great. Putting is solid thanks to a smart system that emphasizes aim and control rather than awkward touch and feel, and helpful Caddy tips can get you out of a jam. You can still add power by slamming on the L1 button during a backswing or correct swing mistakes by tapping L2 while the ball is in the air to add spin. Vets of the series will hop on and whack balls without skipping a beat.

EA Sports has spent the past four years slowly improving the quality of its Tiger Woods PGA Tour series of golf games, and it arguably hit its stride last year with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003. That game all but perfected the series' dramatic visual style and tactile analog swing mechanic, while piling on loads and loads of courses and gameplay options. In fact, the 2003 edition was so well made, it could have made a halfhearted Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 irrelevant. Fortunately, EA Sports clearly hasn't been resting on its laurels and has poured enough great new features and courses into Tiger Woods 2004 to make it a worthwhile purchase for any and all golf fans.

The Tiger Woods PGA franchise has been growing slowly but surely over the last several years. It began ambitiously with true 3D courses and it soon added the analog swing method, which revolutionized it and breathed life into it. With each year's new iteration since, we've seen new courses and new players but the advances have always been small steps forward -- not leaps. This is the same with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 for the most part. It has the additional courses, the new PGA pros, and even some new modes.

For a sport that usually gets tagged as boring or elitist, golf certainly comes off as active and inviting in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004. It’s not as arcadey as Hot Shots Golf, but it makes several concessions to the short-attention-span crowd while still offering gobs of options and realism for true fans of the sport.

Le nouveau Tiger Woods est un excellent jeu de golf d'EA Sports. Probablement le meilleur jeu de golf à ce jour. Il conviendra à tous les joueurs. Les débutants seront séduits par sa prise en main instinctive, et les spécialistes apprécieront les très nombreuses possibilités du soft. Un jeu vivement conseillé !

Feel like spoiling a good walk? EA can help you. Although the 2004 edition of its stick wiggling and button mashing golf series appears at the start of the Christmas rush, flanked on either side by a collection of what must be worryingly saleable alternatives, it's a good place to start. Newcomers are certainly most welcome, and should be warned that this is no tap-tap-smack PC golf sim, but a more organic version in which players use analogue sticks to swing clubs, and furiously mash the shoulder buttons like a Curling scrubber to add spin.