Well, it's the end of the line for the Final Round of the Defunct Games Golf Club. Thank you, everyone, for joining me for this four-year tour of retro golf games. It seems appropriate that I would end the series with the legendary Tiger Woods. Tiger's career may be on the low end these days, but he was THE golf champion of the 90s and 2000s. It only made sense that EA would get Tiger as spokesman for their PGA Tour franchise starting with the 1999 edition. I've played most of the games with Tiger's name on them, and almost all of them are among the greatest sports games ever made with the 2005 edition standing as one of the true pinnacles of the series.
After playing so many golf games that were painfully limited on content, here's one that truly gave players their money's worth. Even leaving out the now-nonfunctional online and Real Time Event modes, there's still enough to keep you busy for months. There's a ten-year-long season mode, multiple challenge modes where you square off with legends and then-current champions, and multiple free-play modes with Stableford, Battle Golf, and Skillzone challenges joining the usual staples. There are fourteen courses available on a basic level, but that number greatly increases when you factor in Dream 18 and Tigerproofing which allows players to pick and choose their favorite holes to form a new course and even alter the holes by shrinking the fairways, making the bunkers deeper, and several other ways. Best of all, the character creator that was introduced in the 2004 edition saw its options just explode in this one. Hundreds of clothing options (some of which provide stat boosts), sliders for almost every aspect of your golfer's look, and even the ability to custom-build the golf swing combine to make it nearly impossible for two golfers to look alike. Best of all, everything players do earns cash for stat boosts and new equipment where most games only do that for the career mode.
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The gameplay on the links found the perfect mix of simple accessibility and pro-level depth. The analog swing can be a bit overly sensitive leading to a few unintentional fades, but it doesn't happen often enough to be a problem. While hammering the black button for spin control is quite useful, hammering the white button for the power boost tends to throw of my shots too easily. The visuals are still fantastic even now though the color schemes can sometimes make it hard to tell the fairway from the rough on a couple of the courses. The two-man commentary provided by Gary McCord and David Feherty never stops being entertaining; they're much more sarcastic than the usual stuffy PGA announcers.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2005 still stands, not just as one of the best games in EA's golf franchise, but as one of the best golf games of all time. In a time when sports games keep chopping out features to make room for microtransactions, it's refreshing to go back to a time when they went out of their way to provide maximum value for the money. Only a couple of small issues keep this game from sharing the "A+" that I gave
Outlaw Golf 2, but I still gladly recommend this one for anyone even mildly interested in golf. Tiger easily aced the hole this time.
