tiger woods pga tour 08 gameplay

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Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08

A golf swing without confidence is like a boxer with a glass jaw. You can look good, you can have a pretty practice swing, but one nasty shot can send you reeling.

EA has brought the mental element of gameplay to Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08. In addition to more responsive Wii Remote controls, the new links game sports a Shot Confidence feature. Shot Confidence uses factors from your previous rounds of golf, remembering such things as club selection, ball lie and hole type, to determine how confident you will be heading into a particular shot.

If you have shown a tendency to hit the ball well in short blasts out of the sand, you’ll be more confident heading into a sand shot with the tournament on the line. Along those same lines, if you keep hitting the ball into trees as you try to draw into a dogleg left, your confidence will be lower when faced with the same shot in the future.

Learning from your mistakes, correcting your swings and taking advantage of your strengths will benefit you greatly in your quest for the new FedEx Cup Championship, the new highlight of the PGA Tour season.

Similar to Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 07, Tiger 08 lets you swing the Wii Remote as if it were a real golf club. Using the controller’s motion sensing capabilities, the game measures the straightness of your shot, in addition to the shot power, based on how you swing the Wii Remote. 

• Build a golfer from the ground up in the most in-depth Career mode ever. Go from an inexperienced rookie to a crafty PGA TOUR veteran on your way to becoming the world's most dominant golfer.
• Experience the all-new FedEx Cup championship format by playing a dream round at Westchester Country Club, TPC Boston, Cog Hill and East Lake.
• The game features some of the top PGA Tour and LPGA Tour pros, including Tiger Woods, John Daly and Vijay Singh from the PGA and Annika Sorenstam, Natalie Gulbis, Christie Kerr and Morgan Pressel from the LPGA.

This description was provided by the publisher.

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© 2007 Electronic Arts Inc. EA, EA SPORTS and the EA SPORTS logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All Rights Reserved. The mark 'TIGERWOODS' and the TW Logo are trademarks of ETW Corp. and may not be used, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of ETW Corp. The name, likeness and other attributes of Tiger Woods reproduced on this product are trademarks, copyrighted designs and/or other forms of intellectual property that are the exclusive property of ETW Corp. or Tiger Woods and may not be used, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of ETW Corp. or Tiger Woods. PGA TOUR, PGA TOUR and Swinging Golfer design are trademarks of PGA TOUR, INC. and used by permission. All other sponsored products, company names, brand names, trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

• Screenshots

• 2007 ( Windows )
• 2007 ( PlayStation 2 )
• 2007 ( Xbox 360 )
• 2007 ( PlayStation 3 )
• 2007 ( Wii )
• 2007 ( Macintosh )
• Electronic Arts, Inc.
• EA Salt Lake
• #262 on PlayStation 3
• #278 on Xbox 360
• #304 on Wii
• #934 on PlayStation 2
• #2,764 on Windows
• EA Sports: 08 Collection (2008)
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 (2007 on PSP)

Description official description

The 2008 edition in the Tiger Woods PGA series introduces enhancements and improvements to the previous version without major graphical or gameplay changes. There are new courses (Xbox 360/PS3: 5 new, 16 in total - PS2: 6 new, 18 in total) and different licensed professional golf players to choose from (21 on the Xbox 360/PS3 - 23 on the PS2/Wii).

The Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Windows versions allow players to import photos to create in-game faces on the characters based on custom images, using the Xbox Live Vision camera, PlayStation EyeToy, PlayStation Eye or a webcam. Further customizations include clothing, hair or eye color and more. The initial statistics can be improved by completing challenges based on power or putting precision. They can also be raised by performing well in the PGA Tour, taking into account skill shots and not just the overall ranking. Players can unlock additional golfers and spend their winnings in the shop on new equipment.

The game incorporates the FedExCup championship format (a collection of tournaments) with rounds of golf at Westchester Country Club, TPC Boston, Cog Hill, and East Lake. The putt preview has been improved, allowing the player to simulate the ball's path once per individual spot, taking into accounts elements such as power, speed and elevation. On the Xbox 360 and the PS3, shots are not performed using the analog stick, but with the 3-point timed principle for start, power and accuracy. Shot Confidence is a new addition, keeping track of the player's performance on certain courses, for specific puts and using certain clubs. Great performances raise the confidence, which translates into experience and better performance on specific courses. Low confidence leads to lower accuracy, a pumping heartbeat, and rumbling controls on the Wii.

The multiplayer (up to 4 players) has been expanded with GamerNet, where players can create and play custom challenges with their scores posted online (Xbox 360/PS3/Windows).

On the Wii, players can shake the controls to taunt the opponents with 4 different moves, to throw them off. It can be used to influence air conditions, spin, or adds audio distractions. The controls are available in 3 modes: Full Swing (wii remote), Sitting Swing (new, waggle the wii remote) or the classic controls using the nunchuck for analog play. In Full Swing, twisting the wii remote adds hooks and slices prior to shots. Also exclusive to the Wii is a Miniputt mode.

• EA Classics releases
• EA Sports games
• Electronic Arts PGA Tour Golf series
• Games pulled from digital storefronts
• Licensed title: Athletes
• PGA licensees
• Portability Engine: Cider
• Technology: FaceGen
• Tiger Woods PGA series

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• Tiger Burns Bright An Apple Games article about the Macintosh version of PGA Tour 08 (October, 2007).
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Official game website
• X360A achievement guide X360A's achievement guide for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08.

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Game added by Sciere .

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Game added September 18, 2007. Last modified April 22, 2024.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Review

Tiger Woods 08 is a good game, but it stumbles a bit this year thanks to some unnecessary changes and some new features that don't work well or don't work at all.

By Aaron Thomas on August 29, 2007 at 5:22PM PDT

The Tiger Woods series has long stood atop the charts as the best-selling golf franchise year in and year out. There's typically very little to distinguish one year's version from the next, but the games have always played well, and, judging by the sales numbers, people have been happy with the incremental upgrades. But even those expecting minimal improvements are likely to be disappointed with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08. There are some new features, but many of them don't work. Also, there are a fair amount of frustrating bugs (particularly in the Xbox 360 version) that give the game a rushed feel. Even the game's most noteworthy feature, the analog swing, doesn't work as well as in previous years.

TW 08's game modes are almost exactly the same as last year's. New to the PS3 and 360 is bingo, bango, bongo, a head-to-head mode where you are awarded "bingo" for being the first on the green, "bango" for being the closest to the pin when you reach the green, and "bongo" for having the best score. It's OK, but as the lone new play mode it's underwhelming. Online play is largely unchanged--even the lag issues and glitches are back for another go. Career mode hasn't seen a whole lot of change, but what is different is better. You can now choose how long you want standard and major tournaments to be, which is nice for anyone who doesn't want to go through four rounds on the same course for one tournament. Thanks to the addition of Westchester, TPC Boston, Cog Hill, and East Lake, all FedEx Cup courses are in the game. Throw in Harbour Town and there are now 16 courses--a healthy amount, but still far fewer than in the last-gen versions. There are 21 professional golfers in the game, eight of which are new: JB Holmes, Justin Rose, Camilo Villegas, Cristie Kerr, Morgan Pressel, Paul Casey, Paula Creamer, and Natalie Gulbis. Of the amateur golfers, many, like Pops Masterson, are returning favorites, but there are also some new faces, such as soccer player Wayne Rooney, to play with and against.

Once again you start your career as either a rookie Tiger Woods or a created golfer with limited skills. You can improve your skills a little by performing well in events, but you'll want to take the skills challenges, which are largely unchanged, to improve them quickly. The idea is to simulate a golfer getting better by practicing and gaining experience, but it feels artificial thanks to the level caps, which are the same for each skill and go up only when you beat certain tasks in the Tiger challenge. Not only do all golfers end up playing the same (because you tend to level their skills up evenly), but the process is cumbersome--especially if you play the series every year. Because your golfer will stink to start off, you won't stand a chance at winning a tournament event. Making you play with such a lousy golfer feels like a contrived, last-ditch effort to make the game challenging. Speaking of artificial challenges, the CPU's tendency to go from making miracle shots to blowing absurdly short putts depending on how close the match is seems more pronounced than ever.

Because your golfer isn't much better than the average weekend hacker, you'll spend your time playing the Tiger Challenge until you've gotten the skills and the equipment to take on the tour. Rather than consisting only of 9- and 18-hole challenges against other golfers like last year, the challenges are typically shorter and more varied. There are long drive contests, par-3 challenges, and challenges from the rough and sand. It's certainly more interesting than before, but the sheer number of events means that the challenges still become tedious because there isn't all that much variety to them.

A few changes have been made to how the game plays on the course--some good and some not so good. The best addition is the return of the "3 button press" mechanic from early in the series. At any point in the round, you can push the right analog stick in and the meter comes up. You press one button to start the swing, press it again to set the power, and press it a third time to determine accuracy. This works well, which is a good thing considering what EA did to the analog swing. It's extremely sensitive, so the slightest push to the left or right will send your ball sailing into the rough, or, quite frequently, out of bounds. The sensitive stick is most problematic on the Xbox 360, but it's still an issue on the PS3, just to a lesser degree. This is an issue even when using a golfer like Tiger Woods, but it's a huge problem when starting out with a created golfer--they'll hit the ball everywhere and don't have the power to make up for mistakes.

Another change, this time for the better, is how you add a draw or fade to your shot. You just tap a button to instantly teleport to the landing zone (you can hold it down to slowly zoom), and then add a fade to the shot by pressing left bumper or L1 to move the target to the left, or add a draw by pressing right bumper or R1 to move the target to the right. This works great and really pays dividends when you're hitting off the back tees and are forced to make more creative shots. Putting has gone largely untouched, but now you can check your aim and power by pressing a button to zoom out above the green to see the path the ball will travel. You can't make any adjustments while using this view and you can use it only once per shot--but it still makes putting too easy. It's no problem at all to drain 50-foot putts; in fact, you'll do it so often you'll come to expect to make them nearly every time.

And then there are the problems from last year that simply went unaddressed. There's still a crowd lining the course and they're still standing way too close, often getting in the way of shots that just missed the fairway or green. You can fast-forward while the ball is in the air, but you can't skip your opponent's turns and you can't turn off their practice swings or celebrations. Yeah, we got it, Pops is old and grumpy--can we skip his theatrics next year, please? Whether it's because of the bad lighting, lack of shadows, poor textures, camera angles, or a combination of all four, it can be difficult to read the slope of the green without the help of the putting grid. This makes chipping onto the green more frustrating than it should be, because the ball will just roll right off the green or back toward you because of an unseen change in elevation. On its own it's not a huge problem, but when you combine it with your golfer being terrible to start off and the touchy swing controls, it's just another way to lose a few strokes a round.

The biggest new gameplay feature, or at least the most hyped feature, is the EA Sports Gamernet. This allows you to save your best, worst, or weirdest shots and share them with the world. Not only can you share them, but you can turn them into challenges for other players to attempt. This is a neat idea, but one that's underwhelming in practice. For starters, as of this writing it doesn't work properly on the Xbox 360; you can make challenges, but you get an error when you try to make a highlight. But the biggest problem is the challenges aren't all that fun. It is nice to be able to play a round and then upload it for a friend to play, but unless you've been challenged by a friend there's little reason to try to bounce the ball off of a building and then onto the fairway, or to spend a half hour trying to drain a 113-foot putt.

Once again the great create-a-character mode is back, but this year you can make your likeness more realistic than ever thanks to the photo game face mode. Using the Xbox Vision Camera (which also works with the PS3), the EyeToy, a USB camera, or pictures uploaded to a Web site, you can create a 3D model of your melon for the game. At least, that's the idea--too bad it doesn't work very well. None of the digital cameras we tried worked, nor did the Web site where you upload photos. The Vision Camera worked OK, but the results were hit or miss. This seemed due mostly to the limited customization you can perform once the face is rendered. There are plenty of options, but the inability to change skin color or add eyebrows results in some odd-colored heads with no discernable brows.

And that's the big problem with Tiger Woods 08; it feels like a good idea that wasn't seen through to completion. There's too much here that simply doesn't work, particularly in the Xbox 360 version. The 360 crashes in the same place during the Tiger Challenge, making it impossible to finish, and you can't upload highlights to the EA server. Both the PS3 and 360 versions have periodic lag, glitches, and freezing issues when played online; the game face upload site doesn't work; and the single-player suffers from glitches like golfers vanishing, taking drops when they weren't supposed to, and a way-too-sensitive analog swing.

Tiger Woods 08's graphics are virtually indistinguishable from Tiger Woods 07's. For the most part the golfers look like their real-life counterparts. Each player has a unique swing, which is good, but they look lousy in motion. Players will warp from one position to another when preparing to address the ball; sometimes they don't appear to hit the ball at all; and there are frequently hitches in their swing. When the camera is still the courses look great, but when it starts panning around or following the ball the frame rate takes a bit of a hit and the grass looks lousy. Other objects, like rocks and many trees in the distance, look downright awful, moving or not. Even with the addition of more-dramatic camera angles for your opponent's shots (which often are horrible), the presentation is dry and in sore need of an upgrade--and that includes the commentary.

People who worry about yearly releases diluting the quality of games have plenty of ammo in the form of Tiger Woods 08. The changes to the gameplay are minimal, and some of them make the game worse. There are only five new courses, and many new features don't feel fleshed out, don't work well, or flat-out don't work. The PlayStation 3 version is the one to go with if you have the choice. It's a good game with fewer issues than the 360. Xbox 360 owners should just stick with Tiger Woods 07.

• Leave Blank
• More courses and golfers than last year
• Game face is a lot of fun, when it works
• New draw and fade mechanic works well
• Analog swing is too touchy
• Many features don't work well, if at all
• Doesn't play as well as last year

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Aaron Thomas

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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Review

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Golf is often seen as one of the “dull” sports, but still manages to pull in huge viewing figures and attract legions of fans. Part of its appeal as a spectator sport is seeing how effortless the pros make the incredibly hard game look, while playing it as an amateur brings about equal parts frustration and achievement. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 manages to capture that sense of frustration while also giving you a chance to improve your skills in ways just not possible in real life, but also serves as a way to while away hours and hours of time.

Fans of the Tiger Woods series will no doubt have played the previous next-gen efforts from EA and will have some idea of what to expect improvements wise this year. As ever Tiger 08 is more of an evolution than revolution, with the core gameplay mechanics of last year’s game simply being built upon and added to.

At its core you have the same analogue stick True Swing system and the True Aiming system that made last year’s effort so great. The True Aiming system, which gives your shot placement a degree of uncertainty (the landing area decreases as your player improves) has been bolstered by the new Shot Confidence system. As the name suggests, your player’s confidence has an effect on the size of the landing zone marker. This is shown by a red ring outside the standard aiming circle and appears during pressure shots such as hitting over a bunker or over water. The game tracks your performance in these areas, giving your player the resemblance of a memory.

Also making its debut this year is a new Fade and Draw system, which makes playing these shots a hell of a lot easier. You line up your shot as normal, but then press the LB and RB buttons to move the landing zone to the left or right while your golfer’s aim remains in place. The final big addition is the Putt Preview, which shows you how your current aim and strength settings will play out. This preview can only be used once per putt, so unless you’ve lined up the shot perfectly first time, you’re going to have to make some adjustments without seeing a preview of the end result. Putt Preview is disabled on the hardest difficulty setting, so players who want no help at all are also catered for.

These changes make the golf in Tiger 08 the best it’s ever been and the content to play with is also excellent. We’ve got 16 courses this year (four more than last year), a lengthy Tiger Challenge mode and a PGA Tour career to work through. Add in a load of mini-games and standard golf modes and there’s enough content to last for months. Simply starting a new character and playing through until you’ve maxed him or her out will take weeks and it’s great to see your skills improve and to win your first event.

Online too is packed with content. As well as the standard online game modes, this year’s game includes what is arguably the greatest addition to a golf title since the analogue swing system. Called GamerNet, this new feature allows you to save performances and shots to post online and challenge the community with. Say, for example, you’re in the rough, with a tree in the way of the green. If you manage to hit the ball off the greenside crowd stand, onto the green and into the hole, in a moment that none of your friends would believe, you needn’t worry; simply save the shot for everyone to see. To make a real challenge out of it, you can set certain parameters, like where the ball must first land, meaning you can pretty much ask players to exactly replicate your shot.

What this means is that there’s a ton of user generated content online; so much that it’s unlikely you’ll ever get through all of it. To make playing these challenges more than simple fun, you earn points for success and you can make use of the new Game Face technology to give your golfer your own appearance, giving you a little piece of fame. While the Game Face technology isn’t quite perfect it’s by far the best character creation tool I’ve ever used, with the number of hair styles and facial hair options being the only reason I wasn’t able to make a brilliant virtual replica of myself.

With all this praise there has to be some problems, and sadly they’re bigger than they should be. During the Tiger Challenge there are two challenges where the game will lock up, forcing you to restart the console. You can get around this by performing some system maintenance on your Xbox 360, but it’s something that should never have made it past the QA department. Multiplayer gaming is also problematic, with numerous single-system games ending early due to the game screen going completely black. Online play seems less troublesome, but on occasion the game does end abruptly due to connection issues.

Given that this is now the third Tiger Woods game to hit next-gen systems I was expecting great things visually, but sadly it’s a bit of a mixed bag. At times the game looks gorgeous, with superb lighting and beautiful views, but it’s rare that some graphical blemish isn’t in shot. Aliasing rears its ugly head so almost every edge in the game is rough, the frame rate bogs down fairly often and certain objects in the environment just look plain ugly – the crowd being one of the biggest offenders. Much of the music is also worthy of the mute button, and the commentary soon starts to grate after you’ve heard the same lines numerous times. And finally, the game seems to save all the time and takes an age to do so. We’ve seen games with near transparent save systems in the past, so having to wait after every challenge (no matter how small) becomes a little tedious.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 would have been without doubt the best game in the series for years had it not been for the high number of bugs and uneven graphical presentation. For the simple fact that the bugs can be worked around (and a patch is apparently coming very soon) it’s not enough to completely ruin the game and therefore is a title that anyone with even a passing interest in golf should seriously consider. Hopefully next year EA will finally be able to put all the pieces together without something breaking.

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Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

The links effect.

Is it that time of year already? The time when another Tiger Woods golf game ambles onto the fairway of life, prompting us all to chuckle at how it's the same as the last one and who buys these things and blah blah blah? Such cynicism is understandable, given the rather lazy port which heralded the series' next-gen debut with PGA Tour 06. Last year's update improved on that uninspiring start (not a difficult task) and, inevitably, this latest variation offers an even more tweaked and buffed experience.

But is it enough to entice the suspicious multitudes into making a purchase? The answer: probably.

Gameplay, for once, has undergone some obvious changes. The biggest additions to the game - the much vaunted GamerNet and Game Photo Face functions - are sort of sitting off to the side of the main game itself, so let's do a quick recap of the mostly positive enhancements made to the actual gameplay before we tackle those features.

The most sweeping change in this regard is the one that you probably won't notice until you've created your own golfer and played with them for a while. As with 07, all new golfers are rubbish. I mean, really. They're embarrassing. Fudging putts, hooking drives and generally making you wonder if your fingers have been replaced with sausages filled with wool. Tackling the PGA tournaments with such a golfer is a waste of time, so you're forced instead to spend your time in the additional game modes - especially Tiger Challenge - to build up your skills.

Whereas the tradition in previous games was to allow you to earn and allocate points to increase your different skills, this time EA has taken a more organic route to self-improvement. Your skills are automatically enhanced whenever you play well so, even if you lose a round, provided you were getting better at, say, driving then your skill in that area goes up regardless. It's a long and often arduous process, and one that will inevitably frustrate many. It's also refreshingly realistic, meaning you have to approach the game as you would in real life.

If you want to improve your putting, you need to practice putting. And keep practising. Play, play, play. The more you play the better you get, and while it'll be a lengthy wait before you can challenge the pros, it also eliminates the super-golfer syndrome that kicked in during previous Tiger Woods games, where shrewd upgrading could turn a wannabe into a champ far too quickly. If you're hitting good shots here it's because you're good at those shots, not because you bribed the game into making them easier.

This is all backed up by the new Shot Confidence system, which constantly monitors how you perform with different clubs, strokes and conditions and gives you a skill boost should you find yourself in a situation that matches your natural aptitude. It's always there, silently judging like an ex-girlfriend, and while the hardcore players can summon up the related stats to see where practice is needed, it's perfectly possible to just leave it ticking away, adding an almost invisible but notable element of human chemistry to the cold physics calculations.

Also of noteworthy newness is the return of the 3-Click feature, an absolute boon for those who struggle with the analogue stick system for taking shots. It's the tried and trusted method of hitting balls in golf games - click once to start the meter, click again to set the power, again on the way back for direction. A prod of the right stick switches between the systems whenever you need, so you can use the stick for a powerful drive, then swap to a 3-Click shot for added accuracy for a medium shot onto the green, and then back to the stick for putting. Or whatever combination works for you. Given that judging power levels on the stick can be something of an arcane art, being able to choose on the fly is most welcome.

Additionally, the left and right bumpers are now used to draw and fade your shots - sort of like curling a shot past the keeper in FIFA. Especially handy for negotiating dogleg fairways, or shaving past a hazard, you can now dictate the curve of your shot by shunting your target circle before lifting the club, an idiot-proof visual system far more reliable than trusting in your thumb to do the work on the swing itself. Spin can be added to the ball in the air, which - yes - is rather unrealistic but it reduces the pre-stroke clutter to a minimum and keeps you engaged once you let fly.

Also new is the Putt Preview, which overlays the trajectory of your putt over a topographic grid of the green before you commit. Another traditional feature of golf games past, it's just enough help without making things stupidly easy. Unavailable in the higher rankings, and only available once per hole even in basic play, you can't aim during the preview - only see what would happen if you took the shot now. For make-or-break long putts, it's a valuable safety net. There's also a new game mode (the amusingly titled Bingo Bango Bongo, in which points are scored for being first to the green, closest to the hole and for winning the hole) but, for a series so often derided for its lack of innovation, I'd say that's a decent amount of evolution on display.