Saturday 16 April 2011

"Get in the hole...bitch"

I’m shite at sports, it’s a personal tragedy and one that I’ll never overcome, I’ve not played every sport (just how do you get into pole vaulting) but I’m pretty sure I’ll be terrible at all of them. I might never get to sleep with a team-mate’s wife or swear into a camera and I’ve made peace with that, because I can do it all on an Xbox.

In reality I don’t care much for sports but boy do I love them in video game form. It doesn’t even matter which sport it is, I used to play the likes of Fifa 96, Troy Aikman NFL Football, NBA Jam and NHL 96 for hours as a kid, and while my interest in sports has waned somewhat, I’m still playing their virtual incarnations like a zombie.

As opposed to most other games, there’s always a new version every single year, promising to be better than the last. The squads will be updated, as will the shiny new kits, there might be NEW ANIMATIONS! And that’s all you really get, and for most Fifa fans, that’s all they want, change is bad. Wayne Rooney has graced the cover since 2007 and the only difference is that he’s got progressively uglier.

EA Sports love to throw a gimmick at the rest of us, if David Beckham’s new haircut didn’t persuade us to buy the new game then 360 dribbling will! Or 360 passing! Next year it will 360 heading, like the shitting Exorcist, NEW PROJECTILE VOMITING! When you do eventually buy the latest version you’re left disappointed that they’ve removed all the things you liked about last year’s game.

I like to think I’m better than this, I won’t be fooled by the promise of a brand new game every year, only to hold a near identical copy of the game I only bought 12 months ago, so what I do, I buy them every 48 months, in which I hold a near identical copy of the game I only bought 48 months ago.

Having bought Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 on the *gulp* Nintendo Wii, it was time to buy the latest version, and this time on a console where I didn’t have to swing my arms like a mentalist. Because Tiger Woods “did all that sex” a few years ago, EA Sports have chosen not to have his face on the cover, instead choosing to have The Masters emblazoned all over it, with the tiny words Tiger Woods PGA Tour 12 underneath.

Unsurprisingly, this year’s version is all up in the air over The Masters, which for people uninterested in golf (me included) is a golf tournament, and as I have gathered, quite a fancy one. It’s extremely refreshing to have a different menu screen to the one EA Sports has stuck with for all of its games for the past five years.

I like golf games because they’re hypnotically addictive, which is strange because I’m just doing the same thing over and over. I’m definitely not going to have to gun down a terrorist or jump in a helicopter, I’m not even going to get in a golf cart, I’m just going to hit a ball down a field. It shouldn’t be fun, shooting Nazi’s in the face is fun, murdering in renaissance Italy is fun, golf? Fun? Why yes it is.

Sinking a long putt to get an eagle is incredibly satisfying, and for a guy who craves a false sense of achievement, it will be dangerous when I finally get a hole in one, “you coming to work today?”, “Fuck your job, I got a hole in one!”. Tiger Woods will (probably) appeal to any gamers who are “completionists“ because there’s a lot to do. Pretty much everything is unlocked through challenges, you complete a challenge and you have another more difficult one to complete, which is a much more entertaining way of getting Xbox achievements than collecting feathers.

Despite all the fun and japes, there is something substantially annoying about Tiger Woods 12, and it’s not the lack of sex. There are a total of 34 courses, though you only get 16 of these when you buy the game, the rest being available to purchase online. This might be acceptable if it didn’t interfere with the game, but you are constantly reminded that there are events you cannot play until you buy the courses. It might be acceptable if the courses were reasonably priced, but they’re not. It might be acceptable if these courses were produced after the release, but they weren’t. They could have been in the game, but EA Cunts have cynically decided to make us pay for part of a game we have already paid for.

This is nothing new, but it’s a trend that is becoming more and more common as publishers know they can withhold content from a game, sell it separately, and millions of morons will buy it. The publishers are dicks for doing for it, but the people out there enabling them are the real cunts. Tiger Woods 12 may be fun but it’s an insight into the terrible dystopia of video games that has yet to come.