Links 2004

Sam works diligently on his handicap...

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This is the perfect time of year to settle down with a good golf game. While the wind tears down the trees and the real golfers enter the hypothermia challenge the savvy golfer will drop themselves in front of the telly and fire up their console of choice. If that choice means an Xbox then Microsoft have the latest incarnation of the long-running Links series to tempt you into those gaudy slacks and up to the tee.

All the staples of the genre are here. From a comprehensive and varied career mode through a good selection of single challenges via a very meaty and online-enabled multiplayer section Links 2004 has plenty for you to do. While it may not be as all-encompassing as Tiger Woods - featuring less endorsements and certainly less player creation variety - Links 2004 successfully achieves a feel all of its own which is none the weaker without the presence of the rampant consumer-culture accoutrements. Links has been a series which defines itself more by the nature of the golf on offer than the presentational bells and whistles which so characterise EA's efforts. Saying that, Links 2004 is a great looker and the menu screens, while not all singing and dancing, are both nice to look at and easier to navigate than a canal.

The career mode allows you to take control of a new player or one of the real-life pros on offer. You can select your look form the initial offerings and then tweak up the levels of your performance bars. Putting, power, control and recovery all cost money to upgrade, money which can first be earned by completing the concise tutorial which will give you all the knowledge you need to take to the fairways. I pottered around with some of the challenges so I could unlock some of the better equipment and raise my abilities and took on a few of the contests to add more of the same. But I spent most of my time playing the multiplayer game against my flatmate and enjoyed it immensely.

Loading times for the courses are initially hefty but once the course is in memory there's no more waiting so games can progress at whatever pace the player desires, although, like all golf games since the dawn of time, it refuses to allow you to skip past the animations of the CPU players. I await the day when they can be dispensed of altogether for after a while they slow golf games down and to be honest, a simple score at the end of the hole is all that concerns you. When playing online we get a glimpse of how it should be done in the future. Players take their shots concurrently with the other player's drives and chips displayed as coloured lines that draw the flights of the ball in real-time. This moves things along perfectly and allows for matches to be played in very short time-spans. Which leaves more time for more golf, a good thing indeed when you find yourself playing a golf game.

You can choose from a number of different playing styles yet probably only the traditionalists stick with the old 3-click method. The true swing really gives a good feeling for the real game. Indeed my best shots were the ones where I tried to imagine the analogue stick as the club and the movement of my thumb as analogous to the level swing of a real player. Raising the difficulty makes precision all that more important as a little deviation to the side will see your ball bothering the fishes or irritating the nesting birds. The helpful swing indicators gradually disappear as you try the harder levels, making the game more of an art form then the Simple-Simon style gameplay that is revealed by sticking to the easier settings. Driving can be a rather hit and miss affair with balls careening off in wildly unexpected directions long after you felt you had mastered the swing system. Occasionally annoying, but by no means fatal.