Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 [PS2]

With its intuitive and flexible analog swing system, the Tiger Woods series dominates golf gaming on all platforms. This new entry will do nothing to change that, although players of earlier games may find some of the additions rather strange. Still, new multiplayer features, difficulty levels, and a much-improved single-player game mean Tiger Woods 2005 remains on top of its game.

Bewildering is the only word to describe the variety of character customization opportunities Tiger Woods gives players. You're free to tweak your face, body, stance, and clothing into just about any configuration you can imagine -- although recreating a real-life face turns out to be more difficult than you might think. Our attempts to produce a golfing Britney Spears resulted in a bony, haggard apparition who we'd rather use as a golf club than a golf partner.

The pro shop features hundreds more golfing-type outfits this year. It's hard to know how they can keep coming up with more variations on the polo shirt and dress pants theme, but apparently they've managed. In fairness, if you do well on the green you'll be offered financial incentives to wear clothing from a specific brand, so there is reason to plough through the numerous options more than once.

On the gameplay side, Tiger 2005 includes yet more possibilities to customize your shots. More experienced golfers will appreciate the ability to move the ball forward or back in your stance, which affects its trajectory and rolling distance. Stand back for a higher lob shot, and forward for a ball that'll roll further after landing.

Less welcome is a new addition, called "Tiger Vision." It can be used a few times per round when putting, and essentially means that your next putt is guaranteed to hit the mark, regardless of whether you're 10 inches or a hundred feet from the hole. Tiger might be a fine golfer, but this is going too far. Do yourself a favor and turn it off. It's bad enough that in standard difficulty the caddy tells you exactly where to aim a putt.

The career mode has also seen a few changes, and definitely for the better. It's centered on playing tournaments (on real courses, including nine new ones) to earn money to spend on upgrading your golfer, so you can take on pros like the eponymous Tiger. Plenty of shorter challenges are on offer too, and the game uses a real-time calendar to bring you special events on particular days of the year.

Thanks to its generally forgiving gameplay mechanics, Tiger 2005 remains a fairly easy game to pick up and play. Early into the game you'll unlock the new "tour difficulty," which tightens up the requirements for a straight swing, disables the easy-putting features, and won't let you spin a ball played from the rough. In other words, it turns it into a game where novices won't be scoring 20 under par on their second round.

Finally, as you play through the career mode, you earn tokens to unlock the game's courses for more customization: "Tiger Proofing," as the game puts it. You can adjust the width of the fairways, the height of the grass, the bumpiness of the putting green -- or just paint everything mauve and emblazon every course feature with an unsuitable logo.

Substantive changes to the layout of the holes are not possible, but with a little imagination you can significantly alter the way a hole plays. Once you're done Tiger Proofing a bunch of holes, you can assemble them into a Dream 18 course. Then you can take it online, and subject the world to your creation.

Speaking of online play, 2005 is the first in the series to support Xbox Live, thanks to EA's change of heart on the subject earlier this year. Regular tournaments and leaderboard features are promised, and early indications are that it's all running smoothly. Multiplayer has always been the best way to play golf games, and Tiger 2005 is just as much fun as you'd expect.

Should you buy Tiger Woods 2005? Most of the additions do bring to mind a vision of EA clutching at straws as it tries to find new features to bullet-point on the back of the box. For Xbox Live fans and non-owners of 2004, it's an easy choice -it's by far the most playable and best featured golf game around.

Devotees of the series will probably find tour difficulty the most attractive option, and while it does improve the game, it could be hard to justify a purchase based on that alone. EA deserves credit for leaving most of the core elements -- the elements that everyone loved so much about 2004 -- well alone. Tiger Woods 2005 is a birdie to 2004's eagle, but that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the best sports games out there.