Format: Advance
Genre: Sports
Developer: Digital Eclipse
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Not to be confused with Tiger Woods PGA Tour, this is Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004! Yeah, basically the same name but a completely different game. Let me tell ya though, this one is a ball buster. The other TW Golf game was only about 3 hours long but this one took me a solid 25 hours! Between the loading times, the resets, and the sheer amount of holes in the game... it just piled up. There are 2 modes in this game 'Tournament' and 'Scenario'. I only went through tournament mode myself because scenario looked like a sort of "Special Challenge" thing. In this game, everything is rendered in three dimensions, HOWEVER, 90% of the time you are forced to see things from a top-down view. This can cause quite a lot of issues when dealing with mountains, gaps, or hills that you simply cannot see. Furthermore, the game has problems with very large bodies of water. All of the holes that have huge lakes in them had increased loading times that range from 2 seconds to 7 seconds. That means messing up on one of the lake holes can be severely time increasing. Back to tournament mode, there are 8 courses in the game, as well as the finale EA Crown tournament. I went through ALL of them only to discover that there's no friggin credits for beating them!!! It's one of THOSE games where you ARE FORCED to use the options menu credits if you want to see any credits. When you start the game you have to make a profile and can pick any character except one. That one character is a special crossover for those that connect to the gamecube. Each character has their own stats and buy winning tournaments or doing special things you can get money. Money is used to upgrade stats so you don't stink link a newbie. Eventually when you maxout all 3 of your stats to Master level, money becomes worthless. The 3 stats correlate to the 3 elements of the game: Power, Control, and Putting. Power determines how far you can smack the ball. Control refers to how much spin you can put on it. Finally Putting umm.. probably does something with putting. It might control how far you can put. I wasn't paying attention to putting at all. Now each course in tournament (except the first one) has a total of 18 holes each. We're talking full course golfing here this time... but oh it gets better. You see, the devs were bright enough to say.. "hey, we don't gots enough golf in our game, let's add days to it!" and walla! now you get to play the same dang course multiple times in each tournament! After the first couple courses the concept of "Days" are introduced which means playing through each course multiple times. The final tournament is a 4-day course. the EA Crown tournament is a 12-day 3-course tournament. You can probably understand my gripe now with golfing after having gone through that. This game also features 2 interesting elements aside from everything mentioned: "Trophies" and "Eagle Hunt". Eagle Hunt is a sort of collect-a-thon feature of the game where each of the par 5 courses are marked by a special flag. If you get an eagle on these courses, it marks it down on the Eagle Hunt screen. It's kind of a neat sort of thing. Trophies are more or less a sort of achievement system. There are a good number of achievements like "getting a hole in one" or "get 1st place in all tournaments", stuff like that. Completing a trophy will net you some extra money to help upgrade your stats. This can be very vital early on to help ease the pain of not having good power to hit the ball. Aside from being unable to see hills and limited height visibility, the game isn't particularly bad in what it does. It's more or less average with a lot of staying power for a golf game. I do have a number of gripes with various elements of the game. Inconsistant Music is one of them, as well as the fact that it's nigh-impossible to get a hole-in-one. Some courses have lots of wind on them as well, you have to manually adjust for that. The wind is also hard-coded randomized and cannot be turned off. It'd be a fun game if not for the loading times and the forced top-down view.

Hot Tips: Height Matters, Not all shots should be Max% power, some holes have shortcuts.

All in All, This game got a solid 7.0 for it's lengthy staying power. Camera Issues, Height Discrepencies, Menu Credits, BULLSHITMOFOBOUNCEROLLMECHANICS, Putting starts always-off, RNG Wind, CERTAIN HOLES suck, Water delays load times, too long of a game.