It really does not happen often, especially in sports games, but Tiger Woods Golf 09 was more impressive in the sound department instead of the graphics department.

Don’t get me wrong, the graphics in the game are not bad; but at the same time they are nothing that impressive either. Since I’m already ranting on about the graphics, I might as well continue on the subject.

I am very much aware that sporting games are limited to real world environments encountered in that particular sport. While every football field is 100 yards, while every singe tennis court measures the same length and width, and then there’s hockey, basketball and even soccer. They are all well defined sports with well defined boundaries; but that is not the case with golf. Each golf hole is unique and each location is unique with the holes that they present. Yes, there are a lot of similarities between golfing locations; for example, everywhere where golf is played the ball must be sunk into the hole, there’s a rough, a fairway and the green. But each location is unique. Tiger Woods Golf 09 did not really pay attention to that factor. While the layout of each location is different, the game seems to have used for the most part the same colors and same rendered objects for most of the game’s locations. Every tree on every hole seems to look the same, every fairway has the same color each time, etc. I’m not a golfer, but even with my limited golfing experience I’ve noticed that no two country-clubs have the same shade of green for their fairways. And if that’s not enough, in several of the locations, there is flickering on the background homes. Flickering in a game that can’t be patched is very unprofessional, and if me playing the game for several hours was able to notice that, the programmers and the beta testers should have known about this problem months before the game’s release. Odds are that they knew; odds are that they knew and didn’t care. It’s not like the competition in the golfing game world is extreme.

But it was the sound that impressed me, and the reason for that was its simplicity. While the game features some music, it is the commentary that brings authenticity to the game. And take a well spoken commentary, add it to the slow-moving sport, and you have an almost identical setting as watching golf on television. As for the rest of the sound, it is done very well also; not that it is hard to do golf sounds. There’s the sound of the clubs hitting the ball, the sound of the cheering (sometimes booing) crowd, the sound of the sinking ball into the hole. Every once in a while when your hand twitches and you take a bad shot, the sound of the ball hitting a tree trunk or branches is present. I know it’s only golf and there’s no explosions, no gunfire, no twisted character plots acted out by overpaid actors, but for being a golf game, I have to say that the sound is pretty much perfect.