Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08

Beyond such small changes, however, the challenge facing the Tiburon team was to come up with headline features that gamers would actually care about - the kind of thing you put on the back of the box, possibly with an exclamation mark next to it. On that front, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 has a few interesting tricks up its sleeve. Three, to be precise.

First up is the smallest of the new features, but arguably the most immediately striking - Photo Game Face. Tiger has always been noted for allowing players to vastly customise the look of their golfer, tweaking all manner of facial statistics to create a unique look. This year's major upgrade to the system is the ability to import high detail photographs of yourself (or take them with the Xbox Vision or Eye Toy cameras) and make a face directly out of those pictures.

This is no simple system that stretches the picture over a dummy head, with ghoulish results, though. Photo Game Face asks the player to place a number of reference points on the picture, and creates a fully 3D, fully animated facial model from them. You can even import a profile picture to make sure that your nose and chin shapes are just right. The final results are uncannily accurate; a little judicious tweaking and players can, apparently, look just as good as the pro-golfers in the game do.

Speaking of tweaking, you can fiddle with the photo-generated face as much as you like, just as you would with a traditional Game Face. There are even presets which will let people change the ethnicity and even the gender of their face - with the game being clever enough to tweak bone structure and musculature as well as skin tones to give a rather spookily realistic look to these morphed faces.

The whole point of this exercise is that aside from putting yourself in the game, you can also put yourself in other people's games through the multiplayer modes on offer - essentially creating an online identity that's actually got your features. Which, helpfully, leads us on to the next of EA Tiburon's big innovations - arguably the biggest of the lot, in fact.

Online gaming is a big deal in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08, and while the usual assortment of multiplayer modes will be available, the feature taking the limelight is something called EA Sports GamerNet. This is a unified system which will basically act like a combination of downloadable replays, user-defined challenges and time-shifted multiplayer, and could well set the standard for how games of this type work in the future.

Erase and Rewind

The basic idea is this; every single thing you do in the game, every single shot you take, is recorded. All of the data for those shots (think of it a bit like telemetry data - all of the various variables which go into making a shot) is kept on the console for the duration of your session, and at any point you can opt to clip out a piece of your performance which you thought was particularly good (or just interesting or funny) and post it online.

So far, so normal; the clips are stored online in something called the EA Sports Locker, and you can download other people's clips from their lockers, too. The interesting part comes with the ability to set up "challenges" in those clips. Essentially, the game lets you specify exactly what it was about the clip that was good - and challenge other players to do better.

Those win conditions are incredibly flexible. If you've uploaded an entire 18-hole match, it might well be that you want someone to simply beat your score on that course - which allows for time-shifted multiplayer, since it means that your friends can download your performance, watch it as much as they like, and then try to beat it. When they do, the system will let you know - and they, of course, can upload their own performance for you to try and go one better.

Alternatively, you might have clipped out a single hole where a bad shot managed to bounce off trees four times - the win condition here could be to beat the number of bounces. An extremely long drive could simply set a win condition of beating the distance while staying on the fairway. And so on.

It's exactly the kind of feature which suits an essentially turn-based sports game like Tiger Woods, and if it works as advertised, it could well nurture an incredibly active user-generated content scene for the game, with new challenges popping up on a regular basis. Of course, since you can replay the original shots used to create the challenges to your heart's content, the whole thing also performs as an excellent trainer for the game, allowing mediocre players to analyse the tactics used by far better players and learn from them.

It's not just the GamerNet system which is recording everything you do in Tiger Woods 08, though. The third major, headline feature in the game is something called Shot Confidence, which draws on the same database of information - a recording of everything you've ever done in the game, down to the sort of lie you're in, the club in your hand, the weather conditions and so on.

Building Confidence

Using those statistics, Shot Confidence works out where the strengths and weaknesses of your game are down to a fine-grained level - whether you're crap under pressure in tournaments, say, or if you panic a bit whenever a shot goes near water. In-game, this information is expressed with a "confidence" and "risk" meter for each shot you take, and visual cues that indicate whether the shot you're lining up is one you're "confident" at taking.

At a most basic level, this lets you work out exactly what you need to be working on to get better at the game. It also gives a small (but presumably noticeable) performance boost when you're in a situation where your stats say you're very confident - and even the in-game commentators will make note of how you've performed in various situations in the past.

Of course, for more advanced players there's the option of opening a massive, eye-popping page of statistics and graphics - this is, after all, a game from the guys who brought the world Madden. Goedde makes clear that the team expects most players never to even look at this screen; but it's there if you want it, and its data is used in much more user-friendly ways throughout the game.

As headline features go, the three being focused on in Tiger Woods '08 represent a pretty good haul for a mature franchise. Crucially, they sound equally interesting for long-term veterans of the series and for new converts, which is a tough balance to strike.

However, perhaps the toughest task facing the developers in Tiburon isn't to be found on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 at all. The team is also working on the second iteration of the radically different Tiger Woods game on the Wii - which we'll be taking a look at in another feature.