Everybody's Golf: World Tour
SonyPlayStation 3
2 stars (out of 5)
Let me explain something about sports video games. They fall into three distinct tiers.
The first consists of games based on sports that translate beautifully to the small screen and are terrifically fun to play.
Football is the runaway leader of this group - possibly because it's so simple - followed by basketball, ice hockey and tennis.
Secondly, there are sports games that have their moments, are quite often fun but are also often terribly frustrating.
Think American football, rugby, baseball and Olympic-style events.
And then there is golf.
Now, I don't play golf and I can't sit down and watch it on TV for hours, so maybe I'm a bit biased.
But nothing has altered my long-held opinion that no sport has less translation power from real life to video games than golf.
It's finicky, frustrating and drawn-out. Just like it is in real life, you might say.
All the glossy-looking Tiger Woods Pro Tour games in the world can't convince me that I should waste my limited gaming time hacking a little white ball around a pretty golf course.
Everybody's Golf, which first showed up a few years back, tried to appeal to a broader market with a cartoon-based approach and a friendlier control system, and it did a reasonable job.
Now, it reaches the new generation of consoles.
Heavy on the Japanese anime, and the sickly-sweet touches that genre often includes, Everybody's Golf: World Tour tries hard to make golf more than just a good walk spoiled but just doesn't hit the spot.
There is no Tiger, no Phil, no John Daly; just a collection of naff characters with overdrawn features and grating voices. And obviously there is no Augusta National or Pebble Beach.
There are a limited number of modes, but plenty of new characters and gear to unlock.
The gameplay is a weird mix. Full-blown realism is out - you get things like a chirpy voice saying "Nice shot", and the characters are obviously not your typical groomed golfers - but there are also very few novelty touches.
It might have been better to resist any attempt at making this a golf game and just focus on making it fun.
You still have to get your swing just right and you still find it incredibly hard to shoot below par, and that's just not fun.
