Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003

On the plus side, the graphics are stunning. Game has great features. Gameplay is also good.

On the minus side, this game cheats like nothing I have seen before. I realized a long time ago that certain video games, especially sports games, tend to cheat, and I've accepted this.

If you enjoy hitting a strait 10 foot putt on what appears to be a perfectly flat green, only to have the ball veer off at the last second causing you to miss the putt by an inch, then this game is for you. If you enjoy having your 5 wood shots, that normally travel 200+ yards, go considerably shorter when you have to hit over a body of water; again, this is the game for you.

All that being said, for $10 it's a pretty darn good game.


Always the go to game   September 14, 2003
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

I was never much of a golf fan myself,but i rented this game not really expecting too much and boy was i surprised.First off this game is very easy to learn in a matter of a couple hours and it always presents new and interesting challenges.I have bought several games here on Amazon.com and have never been as pleased with the replay factor of any of them quite like this one.I would recieve my games ordered from amazon and play them for about an hour and always ended up putting TW2003 back in before the night was up.This game is WELL worth the money for the replay factor alone.I must say though the graphics are really not as good as i had hoped they would be and it does have a few glitches now and then but nothing that makes it any less fun or any less playable.The PC version of this game is not as fun but the graphics are way better.Overall i gave this game four stars just for the graphics alone cause everything else is pretty good,well with the exception of the annoying slow-motion heartbeat,but it's a must have in my opinion.


Bad GUI, very restrictive configuration.   August 18, 2003
 1 out of 3 found this review helpful

I don't have any problems running this on my system and my system is not top of the line. My issues are in the way they restrict your options regarding swing type.

Most likely you play career mode in this game. Well when you create your golfer for career mode, you have to pick a swing type (TrueSwing, 2-click or 3-click) and stick with it the entire career. You can't change it. There is no reason for this.

Also, You can pick your swing-type in a menu like you would expect, the one time choice is literally hidden in the middle of a tutorial. Awful.

Also, the other primary mode in the game is PGA Tour mode. I haven't yet found a way to get your carrer mode golfer over to PGA Tour mode. I don't think it can be done.

Lastly, there are 5 'attributes' to your carrer mode golfer. What some of the attributes mean I couldn't tell you because there is no description of them in the manual.

Also undocumented are the rules for games in career mode. I played a match play event, and won after the 3rd hold. Huh? I was expecting a full 18 hole set. But my complaint isn't the number of holes, it's the lack of information so you don't know what's going on.

This had the potential to be an incredible game but some extremely stupid things like those listed above that would be SO SIMPLE to fix kept this from being a good game.


Review of the PC version   August 14, 2003
 7 out of 7 found this review helpful

This is a landmark video golf game that should appeal to every golf fanatic and novice. It offers every type of gameplay conceivable: stroke, alternate shot, match play, Stableford, skin game, skill shot competition, four ball, etc. You can play in "career mode", where you start as a rookie, compete in calendar events, improve your equipments, and improve to pro, champion, and master status. You can play in "season mode", where you create a new player (male or female) with the abilities of your choosing, and compete in an editable list of events. You can also, of course, just play a single match where you choose the course, the number of holes, and the opponent(s). You can also play some "side competitions" to earn some quick money. You can also hit the practice range, or take some golfing lessons as well.

The game keeps good statistics of your player -- number of holes played, driving distance and accuracy, number of chip-ins, aces, pars, birdies, and bogeys, money earned, all-around ranking, round-by-round scores of each event, etc. Statistics of virtual players are kept only when you choose them as your opponents before each round. Your statistics in everything you participated in, whether in season mode, single match, or side events, are consolidated.

One unique feature in the game is its use of "TrueSwing" motion to simulate the club swinging motion. You simply move your mouse backward to backswing, then move it forward to swing. In my opinion, this is an infinitely more intuitive, more realistic, more controllable, and more exciting method of simulating the swinging motion than the traditional 3-click or 2-click methods (included in the game also) used in older golf games. The effectiveness of the swing depends on the straightness, steadiness, and speed of your mouse swing. To hit a fade or a draw shot (a curve ball), you need to move the mouse in a diagonal, yet still straight and steady, line. TrueSwing offers 5 difficulty settings: "Amateur" and "Pro" settings give you a bigger margin of error, while "Tour", "Champion", and "Master" settings require you to move the mouse in an almost perfectly straight line.

Many standard features are present as well. On each hole, you can see caddie's advice. You can view a hole "fly-by". Before each shot, the computer makes a club selection for you (which is sometimes a poor choice). You can see a "shot target" view that shows you the ball's projected destination -- which may be cheating, but the projections are not always accurate. You are shown the wind speed and direction. If the ball is in the hazard, you are told whether it is in light rough, deep rough, light sand, etc. You can see an overhead view of the hole, and access several camera angles. If you like your last shot, you can save it to be replayed later. Also, the computer automatically saves whatever good shot that you hit. Unfortunately, the last shot of each hole cannot be saved (a bug?), unless the computer saves it automatically for you.

The game comes with 12 courses, with a nice variety of geography, difficulties, and scenic qualities. It also comes with a course designer. And you can download courses designed by other users on the web.

The game's graphics look very realistic. There are many 3D-rendered objects as well as some judicious use of 2D sprites. Human players look very life-like; many real-life PGA Tour players are rendered in various degree of realism -- Singh, Garcia, Montgomery, O'Meara, Furyk, etc., and of course, Woods. Spectators don't look or behave very convincingly, however. This game was released a year ago, and it runs pretty smoothly on my Pentium 4 2.4 GHz with a GeForce4 video card at 1280x1024x32 resolution. There is a demo version of this game (which can be downloaded at many PC games web sites, such as gamesdomain.com) that you can try to see if your PC can run it. But the upcoming 2004 version, to be released later this year, will surely require new hardware that will take advantage of DirectX 9.0, which enables much more realistic-looking graphics to be created.