A few years ago, right after The Masters. I remember some player who did well was talking about how he played Tiger Woods PGA tour with another player and that the game version of Augusta National had actually helped them prepare for the real thing. That sounded neat! It was that realistic? So I bought it and… I got bored. I didn’t like the mechanics, the set-up was confusing. I just wanted to play Augusta!
I think I played a total of 30 minutes of the Tiger Woods PGA Tour game before quitting and did the same to this new version. I do have to confess though that I already have a favorite golfing game. It’s the game I measure all others against. It’s a franchise from Clap Hands called Hot Shots Golf (otherwise known as Everybody’s golf). My favorite entries are Hot Shots Golf Fore on the PS2, Hot Shots Gold World Invitational on the Vita and PS3, and Hot Shots Golf Out-of-Bounds on the PS3.
Apparently, development has stopped on the Hot Shots Golf franchise per various news outlets…
Here are the things I really like about the franchise. I like the assortment of characters even though it’s a bit cartoony. I like the different attributes characters. I also like equipment selections. But what I like the most are the mechanics. I like the way they show the wind, I like the way they show the elevation changes. I like the way they show the contour of the course – especially putting. The putting is so good, it actually helped my putting in real life! I like how quickly you can skip from shot to shot to speed through a round. But I really love how you can zoom in across the course to decide the best places to aim. To get in close and see what the ball will do.
Just look at the smooth zooming in this trailer!
So, since hot shots golf is dead… Please no! But since it may be dead… and since I just finished watching The Masters. I gave this golf game a real shot. And… It’s pretty good.
But you know all those things that are what I love about Hot Shots? Ya, this game doesn’t do any of them… at least not very well.
After going through the menu, it looked like the main game was likely what they call “career mode.” In this mode, you create an avatar and then start a “professional career.” Starting out, you create your character, but this process is just… terrible. you basically get one guy you can modify slightly, from meh to ugly, just weird how limited the character mod is. I wanted to see how close I could get to an avatar of me to impress my daughter – not even. Fine. Not that big a deal. Just some weird alien-looking thing. But ok, I can deal with it.
I went through the tuturial so that I had a basic understanding of how to play the game. I chose the tap, tap, tap mechanic out of the three control types presented, since I figured it was close to the mechanic used in Hot Shots Golf and then played my first course. Plus, the analog stick usage felt a bit like it lacked control and was too prone to being too easy.
The game starts with you competing at a Web.com event to qualify for the PGA tour (never mind that web.com is now the corn ferry, fairy, faeri…. ah KORN FERRY tour) Ok… but what was weird was it picked random holes, 6 to be precise, not 18, 6. Then it used “ai” to come up with my 18 hole score based on how I did on 6 holes to give me a score for 18. hmm. Weird. I want to play the whole course. I looked in the options, nothing. I shrugged and kept playing wondering if it was some licensing thing or something.
I quickly started to understand this games way of doing things. How to draw and fade, how to add or subtract power, how to read the greens and understand what club to use and where to hit the ball. How to spin the ball and stop it, or let it roll. It’s all very different than Hot Shots, not bad per se, just different.
Here’s a couple pointed differences. In Hot Shots, the game will show you how far the club hits in a straight line over the course as the crow flies, so to speak. You have to figure out if elevation changes are going to make the ball go farther or shorter. It tells you the wind speed and direction, but you have to figure out where you need to aim to counter the wind. This EA game, takes that guess work out, no matter how you change the shot type, a blue arc tells you where the ball will go. So the EA game has two indicators, total distance and the adjusted arc due to all the environmental and shot shape factors. Different, but not bad.
The other major change and in the hours I’ve spent with the game so far, I still don’t really get is the putting. Hot Shots gives you a really good topographical layout of the green to help judge speed and angle, but you have to pick your line and speed entirely based on what you see. The EA game figures what it says is the optimal line and you have to figure the speed based on the elevation. They do have a topographical reading, but it’s spaced too far apart for accurate readings. However, the line it picks isn’t great either. I often found that picking my line and speed while ignoring the games line holed more putts for me, but I’m probably not interpreting their line correctly. I think the tutorial could be better. *edit – after a couple more hours of playing the game, I got the putting down. It has to do with picking the putting speed for their arc. So it’s ok.
What bugs me the most is the zoom on the camera. In Hot Shots, you fly across the course and can control the camera height, speed and angle. In the EA game, it’s a one click and you’re there zoom. It takes away a lot of the fun of flying over the course and admiring what the game developers have created. Maybe the feature is baked in, but I haven’t found it yet if it is. The zooming ends up being kind of jarring. You zoom to the total possible length of the shot, not the adjusted blue arc and the blue arc can sometimes be off-screen). This creates weird circumstances where you have to use a camera and rotate around the zoom point to find the ball arc. Then when the arc is found, I had to adjust the shot using that weird camera angle. Not intuitive. *Edit – I found that holding down triangle does do a flyover, however, you have now control of speed, angle or distance. It goes up slowly like a drown and moves forward slowly to your ball. You can’t go past, you can’t change the angle. Still mostly useless except taking in the sights. Also found you can switch to the blue shot arc with L1.
You can see the zoom effect in this clip-
As I played the game more, it became addictive. I was frustrated many times, but I would look at some of the results and think, well it’s kind of more realistic. I’ve got good enough at hot shots that I regularly can shoot -21 on the easier courses. So is -6 or -7 more realistic? Probably? Likely I’m just not very good at the game yet. It’s hard to say. *Edit – Yeah, a few hours later I’m already regularly shooting -10 to -15 for 18 holes… So by the end of the tournaments I’m easily doubling the runner-up. The last event, I nearly tripled the next under par score. I was -52 and the next was like -18. But that brings up another gripe, the scores flash quickly and then seem to disappear forever. I think they have a tour mode that turns off the shot lines, but you have to use the hokey analog swing. We’ll see…
After playing for a while, I looked up how to play 18 and not 6 and it turns out to be an option in the career menu before you start a game, so that’s nice. While I was searching the web for that info, I came across a few interesting items about the game and franchise. Before the game I was playing they called it Tiger Woods PGA tour, but when his real-life golf game started to slip, they signed McIlroy. However, the McIlroy game bombed so hard EA straight up abandoned the franchise. However, I read claims they are giving it another go in 2022. Meanwhile a company called 2k, who I think is responsible for the 2k sports franchises, released a golf game called Golf Club? I even have it on my PS4 somehow (late night purchase?), but have never played it. Anyway, they signed Tiger Woods to a deal to make him the face of their evolving golf game.
I checked out the latest 2K golf game and… hmm. I don’t know. The character model looked fine but the crowds were cut outs that didn’t do anything. Like, the soundtrack added clapping, meanwhile the audience was just… there, frozen. Kind of bizarre.
So back to the game. It feels like it could be so good. If you could zoom like Hot Shots and get putt reads and then putt like Hot Shots, it would be an awesome game. I want to feel like I know the course and the zoom skip just wrecks the feel of the course. Plus having difficult-to-skip animations after each shot is annoying. Often, the animations don’t even match up to the shot. So, EA, just leave the shot animations out till the hole is finished!
I am going to play it more, but it needs work.
