TIGER WOODS PGA TOUR 07
EA Sports
Wii
Every year Electronic Arts releases a Tiger Woods golf game, each offering variations, tweaks and modest-to-momentous improvements over the previous edition. Always a decent-looking franchise, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 now features great-looking, high-definition visuals on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 new-generation consoles, while online play (when enabled) features stats tracking, leaderboards and one-off games with twosomes or foursomes and full-fledged, long-playing cyber tournaments.
It's comprehensive, dazzling stuff — the nicest spoiled walk in the woods you're likely to find this season, scoring a solid four stars out of five when reviewed here late last year.
However, traditional video-game consoles have limits, mainly because you use your thumbs to actuate the swing of a club — movements normally associated with your hands, arms and back. In essence, you must learn a new hand-eye skill to emulate a full-body one.
So it follows that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 has come available for the Wii, Nintendo's latest video-game console. While not renowned for its graphical chutzpah — Wii only delivers standard-definition graphics — the new system is righteously acclaimed for its innovative controller. Boasting a form factor more akin to a TV remote control than a conventional game controller, the Wii controller — dubbed the "Wii-mote" — is a multibutton, trigger-laden, motion-sensitive device that translates all motion into in-game action(s). Left, right, up, down, fore, back, pitch, yaw, depth, gyration ... if you can move it, the Wii-mote can sense it — and velocity, too. As such, it's a natural golf-swing sensor, used just so in Tiger 07.
If you're looking for an excuse to pick up a Wii for the kids and then dominate the playtime yourself, Tiger 07 is a pretty good one. In fact, the Wii comes bundled with a free game call Wii Sports, a collection of sports-themed games that are simplistic and shallow, yet fun and accommodating. Golf is one of them, charming and accessible, but not particularly profound.
Tiger 07 golf on the Wii, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated. It uses the Wii-mote to compliment the full-bodied game of golf — essentially the same game available on other platforms, minus the online modes but with a fully integrated, Wii-specific controller configuration; the same thorough golf-simulation experience with the added bonus of stand-up-and-play interfacing.
Still, the Wii-mote is not a golf club. In fact, it only modestly replicates one. It's too small for one thing; not conducive to a proper two-handed grip (using one hand, tennis-racket style, is just as effective), and lacks weight.
The Wii-mote controlling each shot, meanwhile — again in the name of accessibility or perhaps due to programming befuddlement — is a little too forgiving for its own good. That is, if your golf swing resembles that of a hockey player, you'll still manage a solid semblance of grip-it-and-rip-it golf.
Even with user-modified or advanced settings — making for more nuanced control in which it's cognizant of the user's tendency to hook or slice — it's nearly impossible to lightly chop or choke up. There are no bump-and-run taps from the fringe, just an automated backswing and boom!
That seems amiss considering the Wii-mote can track a smooth/rough backswing in Wii Sports, but it doesn't in Tiger 07.
So it's not exactly the be-all, end-all of home-based golf. Not even close, really. It's just a good, clever, novel video game about golfing. Nothing more.
* Score 3.5 out of 5
Golf LaunchpadXTV
Electric Spin Corp
PC, PlayStation 2; Launchpad for PC
If only there was a golf game you could play at home using your own clubs ...
As it happens, there is. Not surprisingly, it's the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 03 through 07 versions — except played using a custom controller called The Golf LaunchpadXTV from Canada-based Electric Spin Corp.
The Golf Launchpad is basically a mini tee-box that jacks into a Windows PC via USB (there's also a PlayStation 2 version, sold separately or as an adapter that works with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 03 through 07, not tested here) and comes bundled with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 for PC.
If you happen to hook your PC into a big-screen TV (with Windows Vista/XP Media Center edition), then we're talking stand-up-and-full-on-crank-it video-game golf as near to the elusive "virtual reality" as you can get. Even when visualized on a small desktop monitor or laptop, the result is the same because the magic is in the hardware.
The Golf Launchpad lets you use your real-life swing to play video-game golf, a circumstance heretofore reserved for well-equipped golf stores and pro shops and expensive, analytical golf lessons at the driving range.
It's quite the little chunk of technology, considering the price, a seemingly innocuous slab of artificial turf over which hovers a golf ball on a tether. Strategically placed within the turf are several optical sensors that track the passing of a club, its velocity, acceleration and angle at impact.
The ball on the tether is actually a free-wheeling object that will back- (or top-) spin like a real ball when struck, except instead of launching into the blue yonder, it just flits around on a calibrated and monitored pivot, eventually (like a nanosecond later) coming to rest in a little net. In those few milliseconds, the Golf Launchpad's XTV technology crunches the accumulated data and transfers it into the game, depicting your drive, chip or putt with remarkable, on-screen veracity.
The set up is a little ungainly and indoor use requires a fair amount of space, but the undeniable, full-body thwacks achieved is worth the effort. Check it out at www.electricspin.com.
* Score: 4.5 out of 5
Dragon's Lair
Digital Leisure
Blu-ray player, PlayStation 3
Back in the 1980s came a wholly original and wholly frustrating arcade game known as Dragon's Lair.
A craze in its day, Dragon's Lair was essentially a Don Bluth (Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, Anastasia) animated film on a giant laser disc (the failed precursor to DVD) that required (paying) viewers to help the hapless hero, Dirk the Daring, make a snap decision every few seconds, multiple-choice style, choosing from one of four directions on a joystick or a simple catch-all "action" button. Decide correctly and the film/game carried on. Decide incorrectly and the game cut to a context-specific death sequence, rolled back and let you try again — providing you inserted another quarter every third try.
Arcade patrons went nutso for Dragon's Lair and several spin-offs followed; among them Space Ace, Thayer's Quest and the hugely ambitious Time Traveller, a live-action adventure in true 3-D using pioneering holographic technology and really bad actors.
However, like many technological wonders, the bubble burst and Lair et al were relegated to the flash-in-the-pan wing of video-game museums under the banner "games that made you pay money to memorize the answers to a multiple-choice exam." Until, that is, PC DVD-ROM and home DVD players became mainstream and Ontario-based Digital Leisure refurbished, remastered, retooled and re-released Dragon's Lair on DVD as a game that required only a keyboard or generic DVD remote for a controller, the latter's menu navigation and "enter" button in lieu of a joystick and action button.
Last year, Digital Leisure remastered the game again in high-definition and 5.1 surround sound, but released it only on standard PC DVD-ROM — a teaser of what was to come, which is this: Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray, the re-remastered, high-definition, surround sound version of the game playable on Blu-ray movie players and, naturally, the PlayStation 3 (which uses Blu-ray technology), and also containing a wealth of historical content and bonus material.
As such, on top of playing the game on your HDTV with just a movie-player remote or SixAxis controller in hand and a nice, optional "easy" setting that allows you to make a wrong decision without starting over, you can now just passively watch Dragon's Lair like a high-def cartoon, albeit one with really choppy editing — each scene jumps seamlessly but abruptly to the next as if a correct decision was made, followed by the "outtakes" that would have been the result of a wrong decision. It's pretty disjointed to watch. Sit-back-with-popcorn movie viewing this is not, but it is timeless in its artistry and humor.
You also can watch it with a picture-in-picture commentary from Lair creators Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and Rick Dyer (each spending an embarrassing amount of time scratching their heads trying to remember what they were doing 25 years ago). There's also behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, documentaries and the like; a solid compendium of the history of Dragon's Lair and the technology and the various iconoclasts involved (fictional and otherwise).
As a game, Dragon's Lair these days falls neatly under the category of "brain games," a simple but ornery affair involving a string of quick, animated clips, rapid-fire prompts and split-second decision-making (a load-up-on-the-caffeine sort of deal).
Ultimately, if that's not your thing, it's a frustrating game and not really novel anymore, but at least you don't have to fish through your pockets for another quarter every 50 seconds.
More important, however, Dragon's Lair on Blu-ray has tremendous value if you're a fan of retro gaming, a weekend video-game historian, an animation buff, a masochistic brain gamer or all of the above. Quick, pick one.
* Score: 4 out of 5
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