Genre: Sports
Publisher: Oxygen Interactive
Developer: Gusto Games
Release Date: March 8, 2007

Golf games have been around seemingly since the dawn of gaming. I can remember playing my brother's copy of Golf on our original Game Boy and wondering what the heck par was and why I got fewer points for winning than losing. Nowadays I'm a bit more educated, and my handheld of choice is a little more advanced. Rather than watching a hat with a golf club putting around the completely flat fairway, I'm treated to long, sprawling 3-D shots of country clubs and polygonal imitations of golf's finest. The funny thing is, the whole experience feels just as devoid of life as it did back on the less-than-8-bit handhelds of yore, no matter how many professionals lend their voices or faces to the game.

Prostroke Golf: World Tour 2007 pretty accurately captures the feel of televised golf, although it mixes in a touch of personal frustration. Not only do you have to sit and watch your character (and his opponents) think out their shots for at least 20 seconds every time, but you also get to be personally devastated when a stray gust of wind knocks the ball off course, or a ball falls limply to the ground as it's caught up in a tree branch.

The title is a port of a PC, PS2 and Xbox game from 2006, making the season a little dated. The career mode spans from 2006 to 2011, however, so it's not really all that late to the party here in 2008. The player is invited to create a white male character who will compete alongside the legends and try to climb his way to the top of the money bracket by the end of five years. As indicated, the character creation system is pretty bare and not a highlight in any way. You get about eight character models and two options for most of the customizable gear, with no other options for changing the body shape or skin color. Fortunately, you can just whizz through it and start the show.

Prostroke Golf has several options of play available right from the outset. If you just want an instant round of unqualified golf, you can select Quickplay mode and get on with it. You can choose some basic qualifiers — the kind of round it will be, weather and location — but otherwise, you can jump right into things. If you want a little more control over your game, you have to load up your character's stats and "play a round." When choosing this method of play, you can select everything, including up to four opponents who can either be fellow humans using your PSP or an AI of your choice. Playing in Tournament mode is a bit more time-consuming of an event, but it will help your character gain reputation for his Career mode and will really pit you against a wide range of opponents. Up to 68 can compete alongside you in a tournament, but you'll only ever see one of your opponents playing directly against you.

The focus of the game is the PSG Career mode, where you can earn money and respect, which in turn allow you to attend more prestigious tournaments. You can schedule smaller challenge events on your own to boost your renown, but the ultimate goal is to conquer the big bad PSG tourneys and go head-to-head with the pros. Only the hardest challenges score the big bucks.

First, though, you might click one option down and go into training to learn the ins and outs of the greens. Here you'll learn how to drive and putt, with all of the intricacies. You can learn how to pull off a drop shot, and even what it takes to dig yourself out of the bunker. It's actually a very thorough tutorial, which is good because anything but a straightforward drive is insanely complex.

A quick rundown of the swing would include lining up the shot with the analog nub, choosing your club, gauging the amount of power you need in your swing, and then pressing X to go into hitting mode. This is where it gets complicated. You see, you're given a bar with zero to 100 percent. When you hold down the R button, a slider will run up from zero, and you have to then press and hold the L button when it reaches the amount of power you want to put into your swing. You then release the R button and let the slider run down the percentages. You must then try as hard as you can to line it up at zero percent.

Are you still with me? Good, because it gets more complex. You can hold down the R button as much as you want to slightly boost the swing's power. This decreases the "sweet spot" around zero percent, however, and makes you exponentially more likely to miss your swing entirely and slice it. Because it messes with your timing and concentration already, this makes holding the R button practically pointless. But this is only the first in your list of useless swing modifications.

You can also adjust your feet to change the direction of the put, or use the analog nub to change where you're going to be hitting the ball. This could theoretically let you pull off some astounding, physics-defying, bullet-curving stunts. Sadly, this is also incredibly botched. As soon as you start messing with your stance and where the ball is going to be hit, all the percentage estimates become completely useless, and your ball could fall just about anywhere. As soon as you have to hit a trick shot, a feat the expert computer can pull off handily, it all becomes a guessing game of where your golf ball will land. How much will it roll? Maybe a little. You can't really tell. Will it fly over that tree or hit the branches? Who can say? Only a straight shot hit at 100 percent is really a sure thing, and even then, it can go almost anywhere according to the lie of the land — which you can't really tell from the provided aerial view.

Even the putting is frustratingly impossible to read. You're given a grid with green, yellow or red to it to indicate severity of slope, and a few falling dots to indicate the direction of the tilting ground, but it's all just an estimate. Unlike Hot Shots Golf, you won't get an illustration of just where the ball will be along the route. You simply have to hope for the best and pray you don't mess up the timing on the putting swing by hitting it too hard.

It's really baffling why Prostroke Golf allows you to do such cool tricks but makes them the most impractical things you could do. You'd have to practice for days to accurately guess at how each swing modification affects where your ball will land, and it would take weeks or months to get them all down in combination. You might as well just sink a few hundred dollars into a club set and go out golfing instead.

It would certainly be a lot prettier. The PSP is only able to pull off so much in the way of character modeling and background animations. Each course looks like it's part of a larger world, so that's a bit of an accomplishment, but the trees and grass are flat, 2-D objects in a fully 3-D world. While it's not awful, it's nowhere near the level of quality you'd expect from a current generation PSP title. The characters are also fairly standard, but they're given no facial animations. Whenever they line up their shots, instead of looking like they're intensely concentrated, they look like slowly processing robots stiffly adding up numbers in their heads. Their eyes don't move, their foreheads don't wrinkle, and they never say a word.

To make up for that, you'll hear Prostroke Golf's paid announcers Ian Baker-Finch, Alan Green and Sam Torrence before and after every shot. They'll make blithe comments about how that shot was "not so bad," "really only in the short stuff" or "pretty much on the fairway" to the point where you'll want to throttle them just so you won't have to be patronized again. The music is bad, but it's fortunately only present during transitions, so most of the time you get to hear recorded sounds of nature, with birds tweeting away merrily in the background. It's really pretty standard fare for a golf game.

The course editor sinks even lower than the rest of the game by being completely broken and extremely unintuitive to use. While you can edit any available course and add obstacles, hills, textures or anything else you can think of, it's not good for more than making improbable mini-golf-style courses with pitfalls and trees all along the route. Making a fine adjustment is nearly impossible from the default aerial view, and you can't change the camera in the more zoomed-in golfer's view of the course, so it's patently impossible to put a tiny bit of texture and curve onto the green. Just about the only easy thing to do with the editor is take large swatches of fairway and turn them into deep holes or impossible mountains. It's good for a laugh, but not much more.

And finally, you can take on your friends in your custom maps, or in a regular round of golf at a country club. It's definitely less expensive than going out and doing it for real, but considering how crippled the gameplay can be, it's not really worth it. If you're up for it, you and another golf enthusiast can play by sharing your PSP or using ad-hoc mode to play it locally on multiple PSPs. In this age of high energy costs, though, it's impractical and a bit pointless. If you're going to golf together in the same room, learn to share.

Overall, Prostroke Golf: World Tour 2007 isn't a bad game, although it's below average when it comes to golf. It gets so caught up in trying to faithfully recreate the sport that it forgets what it means to have fun in a portable video game. It offers a lot of playability for the golf faithful, but almost nothing for everyone else. There are better games, both golf-related and otherwise, on which to spend 20 to 30 bucks.

Score: 6.0/10