What golf is:
- Waking up at 5.00AM in the morning so you can get a tee time ahead of a pack of badly dressed weekend warriors.
- Biting your tongue when some octogenarian tells you not to tee off the members tees.
- Capping off a miserable performance by smashing your final shot through the side window of some poor sod’s Barina.
- Watching a mate crumple to the ground after being hit by a ball (and feeling guilty relief because he was ahead at the time).
- Checking out girls you normally wouldn’t because well… it’s a girl playing golf.


What golf isn’t:
- A succession of near perfect shots.
- Averaging par or better
- Sincere sportsmanship
- Cheerful, shiny, happy and upbeat

On the basis of real world criteria therefore, Everybody’s Golf: World Tour surely must fail. Mild frustration is about as far as its chirpy, colourful players will reach, a far cry from say… hurling your recalcitrant three wood down the fairway in disgust.

Just like previous Everybody’s Golf games however, under a seemingly frothy exterior lurks a damn fine game. And as far as the PlayStation 3 goes, it’s one of the best sports games you can get, twee presentation or not.

The potential showstopper here is the way the game looks. It’s very Japanese – big eyes in bigger heads, blinding smiles and all enthusiasm. If EG:WT was punctuation, it’d be an exclamation mark. Or maybe two. It’s in-your-face enough that some people will not even get past the box. And that’s a shame as there’s more than enough in the bag to keep you coming back for more.

Just how it got to be so good is a strange journey. It certainly isn’t through variety. Six courses is your lot, and if you’re looking for Augusta or St Andrews, you’re not paying attention. They look great, but the courses are fictitious. Not exactly a blow if you’re not a golfer. Ditto the playable characters, who look great but again, aren’t caricatures of real people (although that would rock).

The control scheme too isn’t anything new. There’s the normal three click method – once to start the swing, again to select power, and a third for accuracy. Then there’s advanced mode – which is the same three click method, except you watch where the sick is and with a few cues, are expected to nail the timing yourself. Click once to commence the backswing, click again when club is as far back as you want (which also governs power), then clock again at the point of impact. Initially you’ll be spraying balls all over the shop, but within an hour or so you’ll be enjoying the ability to hit the ball reasonably straight and long. And while “advanced” mode really is just a more literal interpretation of the trusty old swing bars that have featured in virtually every golf video game since forever, it’s definitely a step up in the realism stakes.

There’s also plenty to do online, although I’ve personally had middling success in terms of getting a game together. And when I have, I’ve had my ass handed to me, but that’s another story. There’s no voice chat, so you’ll be having to limit your abuse feedback to a (small) text bar. Unless lightning strikes and a whole stack of punters start descending online via their PS3s, it’s probably best to view this version of Everybody’s Golf as a positive initial step online. It’s not the level of online support, it’s more of a population thing – at this stage in the PS3’s online evolution you’re much more likely to find all your mates playing Gran Turismo 5: Prologue.

If I was to take a straw poll of my golf playing mates, I’d say the smiley happy veneer coating Everybody’s Golf: World Tour would be viewed with fear and disdain and regarded as a bit of a joke. Take those same people and plunk them in a middle of a game, and the result will be remarkably different. There’s definitely a valid skills-dependent challenge in here. And besides, you should never spurn a game whose visuals allows you to pick up a quick dollar or two by gambling with your pre-teen relatives. Yes, the game could benefit from a motion-based control method of the sort toyed with by the mighty Tiger but even with a very dated approach to swinging, this is still absolutely worth your dosh if you’re a golf gamer crying out for a decent hit on PlayStation 3.