If you’re like most sports fans, you haven’t watched that much golf since June, when Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open — and then announced he was getting knee surgery and was done playing for the rest of 2008. Since then, the PGA Tour has suffered from the absence of its most glamorous celebrity.
But while we may not be watching golf, that doesn’t mean we aren’t playing it. Even if you don’t have an entire day to spend on the links, or if you can’t afford the clubs and the greens fees, you can still squeeze in 18 holes in about half an hour. And it’s all thanks to video golf.
Golf games have been around almost from the start of the video-game era, but over the last decade or so, EA Sports’ “Tiger Woods” series has been atop the leaderboard. This year’s edition has a bigger selling point: It’s the only way you can see Woods play before 2009.
_”Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09″ (EA Sports, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, $59.99; Wii, $49.99; PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, $39.99): Woods isn’t the only familiar face in his namesake game: You’ll also compete against pros like Vijay Singh and Annika Sorenstam. But the one guy you’ll really see a lot of is Woods’ coach Hank Haney, who pops up after every round with exercises to improve various aspects of your game. Haney is a welcome addition, and I found that his drills actually did improve my overall performance.
The big improvement in “PGA Tour 09” is in the mechanics of swinging your club. The analog controls in last year’s edition made it too difficult to gauge the power and accuracy of your shots. This time, EA has added on-screen indicators to give you a better idea, before you make the shot, of…