~PGA Tour Golf 486 

Review By Martin Keen
 

So this is the one. If he sinks this putt he wins the tournament and 
picks up a cheque for $450,000. Cue whispering Amercian commentator:
"This short putt should be straight in". Great - can't miss. He lines
up the putt, hits it perfectly, and... misses to the left. "I'll kill
that bloody commentator" he mutters!

Welcome to the wonderful world of PGA Tour Golf 486. Since the days of
the original game the lucky ones amongst us have ditched our 286 PCs 
with 5¬ inch disk drives for fancy new SVGA 32-bit machines with local
bus graphics and CD-Rom drives. And this game uses the hardware to
full effect.

Three beautifully digitised courses are on offer, and if you can't
make up your mind which one to choose then take a look at a full
motion video clip of it. You can play in a practice round, in one of
the tournaments against the rest of the PGA field, or in a game of
skins (where a gratuitous amount of money is put up for the lowest
score on each hole). 

Nine PGA Tour professionals are also featured in further depth. Each
has been fully digitised driving, chipping and putting. Miss a putt
and you might see Tom Kite throw his putter down in anger. Playing 
against these players is great fun, especially as they look so 
realistic. I've just been playing against Mark O'Meara who pipped 
Nick Faldo and Ian Woosnam to the post in a tournament at the weekend.
It was therefore exceptionally satisfying to beat him on the last 
hole!

The control method used to hit the ball is the same as pretty much any
modern golf game, and is effective. The game isn't easy but is fair to
the beginner if set to the lowest level.

The presentation of the entire game is absolutely superb from the 
digitised background music, to the soundbites of pros talking about
their greatest round and toughest hole.

But no review is complete with some critisms. There really are very 
few with this game. The commentator only says anything when your 
putting, it would have been nice to have ball-by-ball commentary. And 
of course they don't ALWAYS call you putts correctly. And occasionally 
the background music cuts up, as though a helicopter was passing 
overhead! Of course thats probably just an problem with my set-up but
I know I'm not the only one to suffer such a fault.

Basically if you have even the slighest interest in golf this is well
worth a look. After all it is, without doubt, the best PC golf
game ever - just don't listen to that stupid American commentator!


                Graphics        [* * * * *]
                Sound           [* * * * -]
                Playability     [* * * * -]
                Lastability     [* * * * *]

                Overall         [* * * * -]


Contact me by e-mail at: t_030f3_mk@southampton-institute.ac.uk

This Article Copyright 1995 of Martin Keen.
Written for Cheet Sheets Magazine.