ddtrane wrote:On an unrelated note, I have never played golf in real life, how does this game compare, or how close does it come?
From a complete duffer (my BEST day on a local course I've played dozens of times in my life would be a mid-80s, while my worst day can easily be 110), I find it to have the closest mental approach to the game that I've seen in video game golf. What I haven't figured out yet is whether that's because I don't quite understand the systems at work and the controls, or whether it's what the game is REALLY doing.
The tempo creating scenarios where you pull and push/lose distance on a shot is brilliant, as it adds some variation to it. The distance markers giving you "carry distance" instead of club distance is another stroke of genius. That alone is something that creates a lot of mental work to each round. If I had the capability to intentionally add draw and fade to a shot, I can only imagine it would be similar to this. I mean, if my first golf coach was telling me the truth, I use less hips for a fade and more wrists for a draw, but putting that all together in a swing isn't something I'm good enough at doing to be consistent with. But with TGC, if you try to do some of that, you have to be razor-sharp on your swing tempo and accuracy on anything above standard clubs, or you'll get a shot that looks remarkably similar to a real life attempt by a hacker.
But the biggest part where I feel it's eerily similar to real life golf is on the greens. Now this is because half of the time I want to throw something, because I think they're too slick and I have never in my life stood 8 feet from a cup, on a downhill putt, and rolled it 20 feet past the pin. I know how far to push a ball to get a gentle roll. With TGC2, I cannot figure out the pace to be consistent yet, and part of it would be user-created courses each having different settings, and part of it the bizarre putting physics.
The place where the game is very different is in the sand and the rough. I can rip my hybrids out of some pretty deep rough with ease, but in this game, I have to go to a mid-to-short iron just to get it to carry out to get any distance. The bunkers don't allow you to really come through the ball, it's almost like you're going under the ball and blasting it out of a half-buried lie.
But as far as thought process goes out on the course...do I really think I can carry that hazard, or do I want to go for the center of the green and hope for a 2-putt, how can I leave this shot to give me a better angle for the next shot...it really does an amazing job of making you work through the same processes you do on the real course. If only they had a "walk or drive a cart to your next shot" mode, I'd be all over that, because you learn an awful lot about a course on that walk.
