Ernie Els Golf 2008

Ernie Els Golf 2008 is strangley lacklustre for a game appearing in the later stages of 2008. Compared with older titles like Gameloft's Pro Golf 3D with Vijay Singh and EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour, it looks basic, with sponge-print backdrops and a conspicuous lack of polygons.

Despite appearances, however, it contains most modern golfing conveniences. It allows you to vary your shot type between Punch, Bunker, Backspin, and Chip at the press of a button; it contains a talking-head-filled career mode in which supportive rivals make friendly or mocking remarks about you; and, most contemporaneously of all, it allows you to use the Zeemote JS1 Bluetooth controller.

I'll come back to that later. First, the gameplay. As is the norm, the entire game takes place out of the Club House, a glorified menu screen containing a information on matches to play, a trophy cabinet, statistics concerning your career, a log book, and a pro shop, where your automatically-upgraded clubs and balls are displayed.

Ernie Els Golf 2008 isn't just any old golf game, though. It doesn't give you a range of courses and let you play a range of different types of golf on them whenever you feel like it. Instead, it gives you a single course and makes you play a sequence of 12 pre-arranged matches, in a set order, come hell or high water.

After entering the game for the first time, you receive a message from Ernie Els at the reception screen of the Club House. "I hear you're new to the club. Fancy a quick few holes to get used to the course?"

Of course you do. You have no choice. This truncated opening round of stroke-play golf is designed to introduce you to the basics, so now's as good a time as any to take a look.

Before taking a shot, you have a range of information at your disposal. The direction of the shot is indicated by a red line, drawn across an overhead map at the top of the screen, and you can adjust this line with '4' and '6'. To the right of the map is a wind marker, telling you what direction the wind is blowing in and how fast. Along the bottom is displayed the club you currently have in your hand, together with the distance it can hit a ball if optimally swung, and you can scroll through these with '2' and '8'. There's also the option to vary the type of shot you're playing (Push, etc) by pressing '*'.

Ernie Els Golf 2008 automatically chooses your club for you, but you can change it if you prefer. When the wind's in your face, for instance, you might want to choose a club that hits a greater distance, although getting the power right under these circumstances generally requires more skill and judgement than just going with the computer's choices.

To take a shot, you line your golfer up and then press '5' to bring up the swing-o-meter, before pressing it again to start the swing. Once the red bar reaches the top, you press '5' a third time to send it back again, and a final time at the bottom to take the swing. Any deviation from the absolute bottom of the circle will either hook or slice the ball, and of course you can use this to your advantage when trying to manoeuvre the ball around trees and the like.

Putting takes place on a chequered green, and from the chequers you can (just about) deduce the shape of the surface, which allows you to make adjustments in the direction of your shot to steer the ball home. Clunk – in it goes.

Right, back to the club house. After each successful round, you get invited to another event by the players at the club. Sometimes this means stroke-play, and sometimes it means match-play. What it always means, though, is that you have to finish your round under a certain number of strokes to proceed, which can be immensely frustrating, particularly since you can't go back and replay a previous round that you preferred. You're stuck with each event, and each event alone, until you finish it properly.

Once you've completed the game you can go back and play all of the events whenever you like, but even this feels restrictive compared to most golf games. It would have been nice to have the choice of playing a round of any type whenever, rather than constantly revisiting the same staged scenarios. This restrictiveness isn't fatal, but it niggles.

Still, Ernie Els Golf 2008 affords variety of a kind to a select few in that you can either play with the mobile keypad, in the way I've described, or using the Zeemote JS1 Bluetooth controller.

If you're lucky enough to have one, it works like this: you move the red line left and right using the analogue stick, and bring up the swing-o-meter by pressing either A or B, while C lets you choose your shot type. To swing, you draw the analogue stick back and the red swing bar climbs up the meter. Then you push the stick forward to swing. Any deviation left or right hooks or slices the ball, but it's pretty easy to push it through straight.

It works very well, proving that the golf and the JS1 make perfect partners. Unfortunately, Ernie Els Golf 2008 – with its single course, dowdy visuals, and overly-prescriptive career mode – may not be the best game to showcase this happy union.