Links 2001
Links relies on modes of play for its variety. There are over 40 types, from familiar stroke play to minor variations from various regions of the world. All are customizable, as is just about everything in the program. Links has always been a bit stingy with its packed-in courses, but this time out it gives us five actual course recreations, including Old St. Andrews and Prince on Kauai, plus a fantasy course they call Mesa Roja, which shows off the terrain building capabilities of the new course designer.
The Links virtual tour online is a more sophisticated operation than EA's, in that it slips you effortlessly into specific ongoing tournaments, some of which are populated by some real die hard and longtime Links fans. Some of these guys were clocking unbelievably good scores. Since much of the course graphics are loaded into temporary memory, Links didn't show the kinds of performance degradation that TWPGA did. The program lets newbies fall easily into multiplayer online contests.
Tiger Woods
TWPGA has about a dozen play types, but it likes to feature the inclusion of its Presidents Cup challenge, which pits you against international players. There are seven courses packed in, and EA has done a good job of providing expansion packs with a strong library of other courses.
As for online multiplay, the TWPGA site just announced that it was ready to accept players with the 2001 version. Getting online and joining a tournament is made painless by the game's good interface with the Internet. After registering with EA, you just pop in username and password to get a list of current contests. We found literally scores of people posting their individual and tournament results on the leaderboard, so there is no problem picking up a game. But since I'm a loner anyway, I liked the opportunity to play head-to-head against online models of PGA Tour players at specific courses and real tournies. The only downside was that playing online degraded game performance significantly. Many scenes became a jagged frame-per-second mess, speeding up and slowing down arbitrarily. According to the site itself, a patch was supposedly issued to allow TWPGA2001 to play on the service, but I never found one. Online play for this game still has “issues,” as they say.