17 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
Satisfying, despite a few quirks and complaints
Date of Review: Jun 28, 2005
The Bottom Line: Tiger Woods for DS doesn't quite live up to its console counterparts. The controls are glitchy and the difficulty curve is poorly skewed. However, the game still offers satisfying experiences.
The golf simulation genre has been utterly dominated by the Tiger Woods franchise for several years now. Thus it's not too surprising that the launch of the Nintendo DS was followed shortly by a Tiger Woods game to satiate the handheld gaming and golf enthusiast market. One would expect the DS's touch screen functionality to add a nice degree of tactile interaction with the game, which it does (most of the time). The game is flawed, but it's also the best there is on the handheld front (unless PSP improves upon it).
The game features a nice story mode which allows you to create your own golfer with very minimal skills, and then win events in order to buy more attributes (higher drive distance and putting accuracy, for example), and eventually compete with the big boys (Tiger Woods) and even a few legends (Jack Nicklaus). This will be quite familiar to anybody who's played a previous Tiger Woods game, or any other create-a-player sports games such as NBA Street. Unfortunately the level of difficulty doesn't follow a smooth curve...it just gets nigh impossible immediately (once you play the 4-day tournament at Emerald Dragon). This really isn't because the AI all the sudden becomes massively skilled, more just because the layout of Emerald Dragon (one of game's imaginary courses) is ridiculously difficult. The game's lackluster controls don't help, either.
The biggest control problem with Tiger Woods DS is unpredictability. Approximately 86% of the time, your shot does exactly what you'd expect. The other times, it goes completely sideways, or gets hit with one hundredth of the power you expected. This, I suppose, can be chalked up to improper processing of the touch screen inputs. Basically, to make a shot in Tiger Woods, you first place your cursor where you want on the course using the D-pad (a familiar system for nearly all golf gamers). Then, to perform the actual shot, your bottom DS screen shows a swing path, which looks like a slightly angled capital "J." There's a boost bar on the side of the screen which you can rub with the stylus quickly to generate extra power, and then you trace a "J" shape on the swing path diagram. Assumedly, the accuracy and followthrough of this motion is what determines the quality of your shot, although this is never explicitly explained. A practice or training mode would have been extremely helpful in this respect.
Another, less fatal, control problem is putting. Foregoing the swing tracing system of traditional shots, putting in Tiger Woods consists of placing a target cursor wherever you think is the best place to aim the ball based on the lie and speed of the green, and then simply press "A" to hit it. No swing dynamics are incorporated, it's based entirely on your ability to read the green. There are "Caddy Tips" in the corner of the screen, but for most putts over 10 feet, the game thinks for an excrutiating long period of time (during which you trying to move your cursor goes at about one tenth of usual speed) and then finally returns "Unavailable" as the answer, and you're on your own. The grid that the game places over the green provides next-to-no information, leaving you stuck with a best guess, which almost never works out. When the caddy tips work, putting is relatively painless, but these special exceptions for long putts add some frustration to the game.
The graphics of Tiger Woods DS are about on par with something you'd see on the N64 or PSX. The courses are nicely rendered in 3D, and the blockiness is easy to forgive once one rememebers that these kind of 3D capabilities would have required a full-tilt home console just a few years ago! The sound, on the other hand, is a let down. There's no music, and the sound effects sound distorted, perhaps because of the DS's powerful-yet-tinny speakers.
The saving grace of Tiger Woods DS is that, despite all these hinderances in the realm of control, the game is still rewarding and fun. There are times when you'll be extremely frustrated at what seem like utter software flukes, but you'll play through the pain and still have fun competing in tournaments and maxing your your create-a-player. Unfortunately I don't know anybody else with a DS, but I would imagine the multiplayer capabilities (head-to-head wireless matches) only increase the game's value. Overall, I'd recommend Tiger Woods to anybody willing to put up with slightly quirky gameplay for the satisfaction of having a Tiger Woods game, replete with all its real courses (such as Sawgrass and St. Andrews) and real players (such as Vijay, Tiger, and Nicklaus). It's not the perfectly polished package that the console Tiger Woods games are, but for the linksman on the go, it's as good as it gets.
