Game review: ‘Tiger Woods’ will tee you off

Posted by Dennis Sellers Nov 15, 2007 at 6:42am

By Matt Sellers

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 is a disappointing golfing game for the Mac. Like Madden NFL 08 (also from Electronic Arts), it has promise, but has some Mac specific glitches that mar the overall enjoyment of the game.

If you’ve played previous versions of Tiger Woods PGA Tour on other platforms, you’ll notice several promising new features. The Shot Confidence feature uses factors from your previous rounds—such as club selection, lie, hole, and more—to determine your confidence heading into each shot. The higher your confidence meter, the greater your chances of hitting the perfect shot, which, in turn, will enhance your confidence meter the next time you play the hole.

The Career mode—for building your own golfer—is better than ever. The all-new FedEx Cup championship format lets you play a dream round at Westchester Country Club, TPC Boston, Cog Hill, and East Lake. Plus, you can take on the the greatest PGA TOUR and LPGA Tour pros, including Tiger Woods (of course), John Daly, and Vijay Singh, plus Annika Sorenstam, Natalie Gulbis, Christie Kerr, and Morgan Pressel.

The game has no announcers. For some that may be a problem, but I actually prefer it that way. I also like the random training events. An in-game calendar and notebook summarize your career path and objectives, which makes it simple to pick and choose which events you want to hit on the road to the championships.

The best aspect of the game is the Tiger Challenge mode. Available only to created golfers, it offers a variety of challenges. As players complete various challenges, they collect points and money (which can be used to modify their characters).

The game takes a while to master. Which would be fine if the graphics were better. They’re not bad, they’re just a little choppy and not what you’d expect in a 2008 game. Worse yet, the game is slow to load and hung on me several times (on Dad’s 24-inch Aluminum iMac).

Why does Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 sometimes lock up? The folks at EA say they’re aware of “a graphical issue that occurs with an iMac 7.1 that uses the ATI 2600 HD video card.” This is caused by a driver issue with the video card that, per EA, will be addressed in a system update by Apple later this month.

Then there’s the problem of graphics corruption. If you use a system that has less than 256MB of VRAM, you may experience graphical corruption if you set the Tree Texture Detail to maximum. To resolve this, try using a lower Tree Texture Detail setting.

For video cards with 256MB of video RAM, only the 1600×1200 resolution is available. Meanwhile, some video cards will experience graphical corruption while running in 1600×1200 resolution. If you experience any graphic anomalies while running the game in 1600×1200 resolution, EA recommends lowering your game resolution to resolve these issues.

If that’s not bad enough, on some NVIDIA 8600 and ATI X2600-based machines, graphical corruption and hard locks may occur at higher detail levels. In these instances, set the graphics quality to a lower setting and restart the game.

Finally, you should be aware that EA is making the title available by way of Transgaming Technologies Cider engine. TransGaming’s Cider engine allows publishers to extend their products to Mac users without having to recode or recompile their Windows-based software. That will help speed up the arrival of games to the Mac. However, games transported using the Cider engine will only run on Intel-based Macs. PowerPC systems need not apply.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 for Mac has an ESRB content rating of E for “Everyone.”

System requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later; an 1.83GHz or faster Intel Core Duo processor Mac; 1GB of RAM; 6GB free hard-disk space; a ATI X1600 series or later or NVIDIA GeForce 7300 or later video card; and a DVD-ROM drive. This game doesn’t support the GMA950 integrated graphics card. (Note: The game does not support the GMA950 integrated graphics card.)

Macsimum rating: 4 out of 10.

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