That said, if it’s been an election cycle or two since your last tour of the links, there is plenty here to recommend the game. The graphics, while not stunning, continue to be quite pretty and courses, to the best of my knowledge, are nicely interpreted to the digital space. And there are plenty of them, including not only the usual standbys like St. Andrews, Pebble Beach and TPC Sawgrass, but also the likes of Westchester Country Club, TPC Boston and Harbor Town.

There are two touring mode options at your disposal. You can either start out as a raw, unskilled hack, playing with your buddies and leveling up your skills as you gain experience or you can create a pro-caliber golfer right from the start and play a PGA tour season, complete with the FedEx Cup Championship. The options at your disposal for designing your golfer are deep. If you can’t create a golfer in your image, you’re simply not trying hard enough. Although it would be nice if EA recognized that they can do far more with a PC interface than they can do with a console. Has no one there ever noticed that funky wheel in the middle of almost any mouse made in the last ten years? Have they not heard that modern display resolutions run up to and well beyond 1280x1024? Why do we have a menu system that looks like it would be more at home on a standard definition TV?

The golf itself can still be fun. Despite my complaints that ball physics haven’t been improved since EA finally figured out that slope has an impact on your shot, the physics aren’t bad and you can certainly get a lot of enjoyment batting the ball around using a game controller, TrueSwing (mouse) or traditional Tri-click methods. Regardless of the swing method, there’s a variety of ways to hit the ball in order to control your shot. Whether it’s the basic moving back or forward in your stance, hitting draws or fades, or hitting specialized shots like the flop or punch, there’s not much in golf that you won’t find modeled here. And if atmosphere is your thing, the commentary, well, the commentary bites, but crowd reactions at PGA events add a lot to the in-game atmosphere. There’s also a certain thrill to moving up the ranks of a PGA money list that includes the names of more than 20 golf pros.

Ultimately, though, the majority of PC golfers are people who have played past editions of this game, and for those people Tiger Woods 08 is a slap in the face. For $40 dollars EA needs to offer either a game with significant new features and gameplay, or a game whose existing features have seen considerable tuning and polish. This game offers neither. In fact, in a lot of ways the game is regressing as it becomes more and more of a console port that does less and less with the inherent advantages of the PC platform. How the Course Utilities, for working with the huge number of community-created custom courses available on the net, are missing from this game is a gaff beyond measure. EA needs to radically refocus their efforts with Tiger Woods 2009 or they should stop publishing this game for the PC altogether.