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Gameplay
Sound
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Graphics
Value
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Reader Reviews
6 reviews. Average Rating: 5
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Publisher:  Genre: Sports
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Mac OS X: Any Version Mac OS Classic: Not Supported
CPU: G4 @ 1200 MHz RAM: 256 MB DVD-ROM Graphics: 32 MB VRAM |
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Graphics
Graphics
in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 merit an excellent score. Player models
are extremely lifelike, sporting fluid and realistic movements, and
every character can also display a wide range of facial expressions,
allowing the characters to react to their shots in very lifelike ways.
Despair at a terrible drives and victorious, fist-pumping celebrations
after great putts are all a normal part of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005.
Each course looks extremely attractive for the most part, with great
looking tree and grass models that blow in the wind and reflective
water that simulates real life very well. On some wide-angle shots, the
course can occasionally look somewhat flat due to the fact that the
grass and trees cannot be rendered at that distance without killing
performance, but the experience during actual gameplay makes up for
this minor shortcoming. Attention to detail is apparent throughout the
game—even the golf balls are detailed enough to read the logo on the
ball as it rolls towards the cup.
One minor graphical glitch
in the game cropped up from time to time, which could be triggered by
repeatedly hitting the escape key to skip the numerous cinematics that
the game displays after each shot. By pressing the escape key at just
the right moment (or wrong moment, depending on your point of view),
the golfer onscreen can momentarily sprout a variety of strange
polygonal appendages. At other times, this glitch can cause the
golfer's club to magically appear around their knees while their hands
are still grasping an invisible club three feet above the real one.
While these strange effects only happen for a split second, it occurs
often enough to be worthy of mention.
Finally, the menu system in
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 is at least partially rendered in 3D, and is
run at a resolution of 640x480. This combination generates a large
amount of jagged lines, and I definitely recommend using some form of
anti-aliasing if you can to smoothen things out. You may also find that
anti-aliasing helps to straighten out the putting grid that the game
displays to help you read greens.
Sound
Golf
is a quiet game, so it should come as no surprise that the sounds that
you hear will be nowhere near as diverse as in other games. However,
the sound that does crop up is very well done. As an honor caddie for
the past six years, I'm very familiar with the sounds of golf, and was
pleased to be able to instantly recognize the distinct difference in
sound between a ball being struck on the heel or toe of the club (which
changes depending on which club you use). Every sound that you hear in
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 is very close to the real thing, except for
the crackle of a ball punching through leaves and the sharp crack of a
ball hitting a tree (which you hopefully will be trying to avoid in the
first place).
An interesting thing to note is that the
narrators have much more dialog than they reveal in the first half of
the game. Apparently, dialog is released as time goes on in the game,
because the commentators began to use new lines for the same shots as
the game went on. After doing a quick search into the game's data
files, I discovered that the narrators have about 3,300 unique lines of
dialog, and by my estimate, I had only heard about a third of those
lines in about 25-30 hours of gameplay. Another explanation for this is
that if you are a good golfer, you will tend to hear repeated dialog. I
almost regret not hitting some truly awful shots, as the banter between
David Feherty and Gary McCord that I discovered was extremely amusing!
Performance
Performance
in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 is variable. On my test system (described
below), I was able to maintain a perfectly fluid framerate at a
resolution of 1600x1200 with all of the in-game settings maximized,
except grass and trees, which were turned off (or as low as possible).
Sadly,
setting the variety of grass and tree settings too high could quickly
bring my G5 to its knees. With all settings set to maximum, my G5
reached an all-time low of less than 5 FPS (independent of resolution)
when heavy grass and trees were visible, which I suspect could be a
problem with Apple's OpenGL implementation that requires the CPU to do
the heavy lifting instead of the graphics card. Low framerates can be
disastrous in tournament play since it makes swinging a club
unpredictable, and tend to cause occasional audio glitches.
While
these performance problems are probably not the game's fault, disabling
the high quality grass and trees in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 really
affects the look of the game, as you can see here:
Note
that I manually enabled the reflective water in the high quality
version, and this is independent of the tree and grass settings.
Hopefully
these problems will be resolved (or at least explained) in the near
future. In the meantime, it appears that this game is definitely
CPU-bound, and users with anything less than the fastest dual processor
G4 systems need to be careful when considering this title.
Desktop Test System:
Dual 2.0 GHz Powermac G5
2 GB RAM
ATI Radeon X800XT (256MB)
Mac OS X 10.4.2
Stability
Stability
was outstanding. Throughout the entire time I played the game (about
25-30 hours), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 never crashed.
Conclusion
Tiger
Woods PGA Tour 2005 is a very entertaining game that will appeal to
anyone who has even a minor interest in golf, and is the first A-list
sports game to arrive on the Mac platform in some time. Most of the
game is wrapped up in the experience of creating a character, and
watching as he or she progresses from a lowly amateur to a professional
golf legend who can challenge Tiger Woods both in skill and in
earnings. The exciting tournament mode and the other innovative modes
of play that this game offers are very enjoyable, and are helped along
by great graphics, amusing commentary, and cinematic camera angles. If
you enjoy sports, or simply need relief from an endless supply of
action games, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 should be your first choice.
Pros
• Beautiful course layout—famous courses like Pebble Beach look almost exactly as they should
• Intuitive controls and support for console gamers makes it easy to jump right into the action without opening a manual
• Excellent graphics, including dynamic tree and grass help make each golf course come alive
• Dynamic commentary puts you in the middle of the action
• Incredibly customizable characters make it possible to create almost anything (human) on two legs
• Motion-capture assisted animations and facial expressions beat most other new games
• Rock solid stability
Cons
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An extremely long title that should drive reviewers and gamers
crazy—the acronym, "TWPGAT2k5" is an amazing piece of alphabet soup
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Variable performance when viewing grass and trees may force users to do
without the most impressive effects the game has to offer
• Some feedback by the commentators and gallery may be occasionally unrealistic or unhelpful
• Multiplayer options are limited to LAN and direct-IP play
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