Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09's new Club Tuner lets you fiddle the design and physics of your club set to favor performance or ease of use. Fire this up, and you'll appear on a driving range, then choose a driver, wood, iron, or wedge.

Take a dozen or so of your best swings with your chosen club, then pop open the tuning menu to modify its power, draw and fade on the ball, adjust loft and spin amounts, or apply bias to correct bad hooks or slices. Hank weighs in afterward, too, suggesting settings based on your playing style, though it's usually better to ignore him and suss things out for yourself.

Aside from the game's practice drills, the Club Tuner is probably the most helpful corrective tool the series has ever seen, and one that delivers immediate and substantial results on the fairway.

Between the recycled minigames, challenges, and PGA Tour events, you'll fritter away plenty of time browsing the pro shop to purchase shirts, hats, gloves, shoes, and of course better clubs to improve your power, accuracy, short game, and putting. You can purchase these using either your earned GamerNet points, or alternatively this year, actual Microsoft Points, which of course cost real money. While micropayments such as these may be the future, they still feel like a cheat here, and not nearly as satisfying as pulling together your own prize loot to buy those SQ Sumo 5900 drivers and X-Forged Vintage wedges.

The clever new Simultaneous Play feature allows up to four players to run a stroke play game without waiting for each player to take his or her shot.

It's essentially virtual golf's version of "we-go", as opposed to the traditional "you go, then I go," an innovation that speeds up activities by eliminating redundancy. In other words, it's just like playing solo, except that individual progress is tracked and displayed in real time through different colour-coded ball-flight arcs as your opponents play down the fairway. Once everyone has completed a hole, the next one begins, and players that finish early can watch opponents polish off their drives in spectator mode.

We're still a ways off from photo-realistic courses, but Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09 tweaks the lighting and player models to make this the best-looking game of digital golf on a TV screen yet. Oceans and streams ripple in the sun, which in turn casts a golden haze over courses and sends sunbeams out of notably sharper skies with more natural clouds. The only distracting visual, considering how much time you spend in these games eyeballing the edges of fairways, is the "improved" spectator animation on the sidelines.

Someone forgot to mix this up, so you'll get dozens of people right next to each other gesticulating at precisely the same time, crossing their arms or clapping like synchronised puppets.