PGA Championship Golf 1999 Edition
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
The only thing more gratifying than playing a great game is playing one when you expected to be disappointed.
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Such is the case with PGA Championship 1999Edition--the latest entry in a series that has matured to become a serious contender in the highly competitive computer golf market.
After Sierra Sports dropped the ball a few months back with the football fiasco (plus many other prematurely released, bug-ridden sports titles), it's going to have to win back the trust of the gamers. PGA Championship is a fine place to start.
Desktop golfers will instantly fall for Sierra's improved TrueSwing option as the most intuitive and comfortable way of controlling the play. The rendered golfer onscreen moves and swings in synch with the movement of the mouse. (A new horizontal TrueSwing option and the classic tri-click method are also provided.)
Seven courses are bundled with the game--many of them quite challenging. They include the Royal Birkdale Golf Club (site of the '98 British Open), the Sahalee Country Club (site of the '98 PGA Championship), and Florida's popular Black Diamond Ranch. I can personally attest to the accurate look of these courses as I was at last year's PGA Championship at Sahalee, and my buddy's house backs onto the second hole at Black Diamond.
For those who prefer to create their own holes, PGA Championship ships with a course editor. It's by far the easiest to use out of all current golf games, including Activision's stellar Jack Nicklaus 6: Golden Bear Challenge.
Graphically, PGA Championship isn't quite on a par with Access Software's Links LS 1999 Edition or Jack Nicklaus 6, but it looks good nonetheless. The supple animated player consists of more than 20,000 polygons, and the 3D courses look fairly realistic, too, with lush trees, flags flowing in the wind, and water reflections.
More importantly, the load times are fast--comparable to those in EA Sports' Tiger Woods '99.
Another noteworthy feature with PGA Championship is the seamless online play. Simply connect to your ISP, launch the game, and choose the Internet button to access a number of multiplayer games played over Won.Net. In my testing, many different kinds of games were available via a Battle.Net-like chat lounge. The head-to-head gameplay itself was fast and fairly lag-free, even on a dial-up modem.
Then again, the audio narration and crowd reaction is often inconsistent with what's happening on the course. In one instance, I heard the Golf Channel's Mark Lye add "this looks good�nice one!" but the ball was already at a complete stop and had missed the hole by a long shot. Another time, the crowd cheered wildly when I hit the ball into the trees.
Other minor quibbles include exaggerated post-shot player animations (in one scene, he looked like he was having a heart attack), and it would've been nice to have customizable picture-in-picture ball cams during the play, instead of having to choose just one view for the main window.
However, all said, PGA Championship 1999 Edition is a fresh and fun golf game for both casual PC golfers and seasoned aficionados. It's hard to go back to the tri-click swing after mastering the efficient TrueSwing method. And replayability abounds in the seven courses and 12 types of games, the editor is easy to use, and Internet play is solid.
And along with the reasonable $29.95 price tag is a coupon for a free, albeit slightly older, Sierra Sports title.
Now, that's a swing in the right direction for Sierra.
