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My colleagues here at Wewp! Sports often playfully tease me for the length of some of my reviews – some of them have reached “War and Peace” word counts. Well, here’s a change: If you want to read a review of EA Sports’ new Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 2000, simply enter the Wewp! review archives, or click on this link for my Nov. 26, 1999 review of Electronic Arts’ CyberTiger.

That’s right, folks: EA Sports actually had the marketing moxie – I prefer to call it gall -- to release essentially identical games less than two months apart. Sure, Sony did the same thing essentially with Gran Turismo 2, but at least that game was released more than two years after the original. We’re talking less than two months here, as CyberTiger was released Oct. 27 and Tiger Woods 2000 Dec. 24.

So keen observers probably will notice that my scores in the various categories of this game are nearly identical to those in my review of CyberTiger. After all, the games are just about the same. And neither is as good as the Gran Turismo-like king of PlayStation golf, Hot Shots Golf.

The similarities between CyberTiger and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 2000 start with gameplay. Like CyberTiger, Tiger Woods 2000 plays a fun game of golf from tee to green. But the putting interface is bad, hindering the enjoyment of the game.

Hitting a shot from the fairway or green is pretty basic. The computer will select a club for you, and you either use the analog or digital swing control to strike the ball after accounting for wind and course hazards. But like CyberTiger, Tiger Woods 2000 allows players to impart spin on the ball while it’s in the air. This “Tiger Control” gives players a bit too much control of their shots, allowing the ball to home in on the hole like a heat-seeking missile. I know the PGA Tour’s slogan is “These Guys Are Good,” but I shouldn’t be able to shoot consistent rounds in the 70’s on the pro skill level the first few times I pick up the game. Thankfully, “Tiger Control” can be turned off. Still, there is hardly any learning curve in this game, which is fine for the arcade-style CyberTiger but not for a purported sim like Tiger Woods 2000.

Once on the green, Tiger Woods 2000 sinks downhill badly even if the player faces an uphill putt. Just like in CyberTiger, players press the triangle button to active the contour-measurement system. In CyberTiger, these contours were greatly exaggerated in grotesque fashion. The contours aren’t as severe in Tiger Woods 2000, but the greens are still just as hard to read. The elegant vertical-line contour interface used in Hot Shots Golf, with longer lines representing steeper contours, still sets the standard for green reading in PlayStation golf. Even the grid system used in EA Sports’ PGA TOUR 98 was much better than the green-reading system used in Tiger Woods 2000.

While Tiger Woods 2000 may have many gameplay flaws, at least those can be spread out over a superb variety of gameplay modes. This title is very, very deep, which is becoming the standard for EA Sports. Modes include Stroke, Tournament Mode, Practice, Range, Foursomes, Four Ball, Shootout and Skins. Up to four human players can compete in these modes as one of five PGA Tour pros, Tiger Woods, Justin Leonard, Brad Faxon, Lee Janzen and Mark O’Meara. There’s also the new Tour mode in which players compete in five consecutive tournaments on five courses, trying to hit the top of the money list. This is a fun addition.

Five courses are available: Poppy Hills, Badlands, The Canyons, Summerlin and Sawgrass. There’s nothing wrong with five courses, but the fact that they’re all TPC layouts shows a lack of variety. Once again, a licensing deal robs gamers of variety. It would have been great to see a few classic courses included, such as Pebble Beach, Augusta, Pinehurst, Winged Foot, Merion or the links course at Shinnecock Hills.

The only other weakness in the longevity department is the create-a-player mode. It’s basically a fancy term for renaming one of the five existing PGA TOUR pros available in the game. It would have been cool if EA Sports let players choose the appearance, clothing and gameplay characteristics of the player and had them start out on the Nike Tour, working their way through Q School and earning their PGA Tour card. Starting a player on the Nike Tour also would have dovetailed well with EA’s marketing mentality, as Nike is the megabucks sponsor of Tiger Woods.

Players have two methods in which to hit the ball, digital and analog. Both are modeled well, and both are identical to those used in CyberTiger. It’s simply a matter of taste.

The digital swing meter is a three-click system with a circular meter. The player clicks once to start the back swing, once to stop the back swing and a final time to strike the ball. Hook and slice are determined by how much a player misses a red “sweet spot” sector at the end of the swing. The swing meter moves at a steady cadence when players don’t let the back swing move into the a red “overswing” zone. But once a player overswings, the rush toward striking the ball is fast. That’s realistic and adds to the challenge. The only difference between this digital swing meter and the one used in CyberTiger is that Tiger Woods 2000 doesn’t have a dotted line placed across the meter to suggest where the player should stop the backswing to achieve the proper flight distance of the ball. I guess this is how EA Sports’ tries to distinguish Tiger Woods 2000 as a sim from CyberTiger. Sorry, guys, you need to do more than that.

The analog swing meter is one of the few challenging aspects of this game. Players pull back on the left analog stick to start the back swing, waiting until a numerical meter reaches the desired power percentage of the shot. Then the player presses the left stick forward. The accuracy of the shot is determined by how straight the stick was pressed forward. While I didn’t think the difficult analog swing really fit well in the arcadish CyberTiger, it’s a welcome addition and one of the few challenges in Tiger Woods 2000.

Graphically, Tiger Woods 2000 looks the same as CyberTiger. In other words, pretty mediocre. Players look very good, with creases in their clothing. But the courses are a mixed bag graphically. Fairways look good, with the vertical mowing patterns evident on the smooth surfaces. And players take up realistic divots on shots, and approach shots leave realistic marks in the green upon landing. But the roughs and sand traps are pixelated messes, and there is no discernable difference in height between the edge of the rough and the lip of a sand trap. Tree foliage also is extremely pixelated when viewed up close, and all of the backgrounds in the game are two-dimensional.

Tiger Woods 2000 also has the awkward changes in camera angles during shots and the small vapor trailing the ball on landing, just like CyberTiger.

EA Sports was smart to keep the ambient golf sounds of CyberTiger in Tiger Woods 2000. They’re superb. You’ll hear such varied sounds as jets and prop planes flying overhead, birds chirping, a chain saw in the distance, dogs barking and crowds cheering either on your hole or adjacent holes. The “ping” sound heard when a metal driver smacks into the ball on the tee also is spot-on. The only negative ambient sound is the “dive-bomb” whistle heard as each shot approaches the ground. That sound fit well in the arcadish CyberTiger, but it doesn’t work in a sim.

But unfortunately, Tiger Woods’ ridiculous commentary is back in this game, too. He utters the same dopey phrases as in CyberTiger, such as “That’s what I’m talking about” and “That’ll play.” The timing of the sound also is skewed. In one instance, Lee Janzen dropped a birdie putt, and Tiger said, “That’s the birdie I’ve been looking for.” Golf may be a gentlemanly game, but I don’t think any player wants their competitor to score better on a hole. Tiger’s chatter is nearly incessant, made after each shot by both human and computer players. Thankfully, Tiger can be turned off. Players can turn on hip-hop music to play in the background, which is totally out of place in a golf game. Stick to the excellent ambient sounds.

On the surface, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 2000 is a decent game. It plays a solid round of golf, but its lack of difficulty provides too little of a challenge. That’s a shame, because tough gameplay combined with the many modes of play could have created a golf game that rivals the best links game, Hot Shots Golf. But this game, just like CyberTiger, falls short.

Taking a deeper look, the release of Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 2000 is somewhat disturbing. This game is so similar to CyberTiger in nearly every aspect of play that it's almost insulting that EA Sports is packaging it as something new, asking video golf fans to fork out $80 in less than two months for the “newest and greatest” Tiger Woods games. This reminds me of a similar EA ploy in 1998, when the release of World Cup 98 followed the release of the similar FIFA 98: Road to the World Cup by about six months. Releasing similar titles within six months is dubious; releasing nearly identical titles within seven weeks is a crass marketing exercise. Hopefully savvy gamers won’t fall for it.