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Tiger Woods makes its second appearance on the PSP. This is somewhat awkward since the PSP has only been in the market for about seven months. Tiger Woods PGA Tour for PSP was an awesome version of the game for the newly launched portable. It included insane load times that were pretty annoying. This is fixed in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06. It also adds a few other things but it is evident that the load times were the main thing EA Sports was looking to fix.
The game’s single player mode is the Rivals mode that combines the Legend Tour and Legend Challenges. In this mode, you’ll compete in a number of challenges, head-to-head games, and full tournaments. A new challenge type is called putting frenzy, where you’re given a short amount of time to get as many shots as possible. You’ll be playing a number of real-life gold professionals and eventually get to take on Tiger Woods. The game includes a number of courses, both fantasy and real-world. The expected courses like Pebble Beach and St. Andrews are only two among the 12 courses found in the game. Many of these are new to this version of Tiger Woods, making the game more compelling if you already picked up Tiger for PSP in March.
Some of the changes found in the console versions of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 can be found in the PSP version of the game. These include the addition of a power meter to more easily tell the power of the swing, the putting grid which easily lets you see the green and can tell you the ideal way to get the ball in the hole, and the removal of the caddie tip that essentially explicitly told you how to get the ball in the hole.
The game’s visuals are pretty solid. The game looks very close to the console versions of the face. The courses look excellent with plenty of details. The player models aren’t quite as detailed as the console versions but still look and animate great. The created players also look excellent and have much detail thanks to the extensive Gameface tool. With it, you can create players and adjust pretty much everything including height to something like ear shape. The inclusion of era-specific clothing in the create-a-player tool makes for some crazy looking yet widely amusing characters. The load times were horrible in the previous version of Tiger Woods for PSP, and this has been greatly improved for this iteration.
The game’s audio is top-notch, as expected. The sounds of golf are accurately recreated in the game. The soundtrack is provided by EA Pocket Trax. You’ll hear artists like David Holmes and Dave Matthews among the many other artists.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06 addresses the main gripe with the previous portable entry, adds a number of new courses, and includes some of the recent changes found in the console version of the game. Though this may not be enough to recommend an upgrade if you already own the first PSP Tiger Woods, newcomers that skipped the previous game should find a lot to like here. -- Jake Wilson, PGNx Media
---- Oct 24, 2005
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