I've been playing around with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf 2006 for the PC and I have to say this looks like it will be an awesome game to put into an arcade cabinet or arcade pedestal cabinet. The game has so many more features than PGA Tour Golf Team Challenge (even with ALL ACCESS). There are many more game modes (including multiple custom modes, career mode, rival mode, Skins, Matchplay, Elimination, Team Challenge, etc.), additional commentary, and a HUGE list (HUNDREDS!!!!) of downloadable courses that are not even offered on the ALL ACCESS PASS arcade upgrade. We all know that PGA Tour Golf is basically a port of Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf but I never realized how much was left out of the arcade version. It obviously makes sense to dumb it down and take out much of the fluff in order for people to play quickly which intern allows more money to be plunked into the machine.
I was wondering how this game would interact with a trackball interface. I tried it with a smaller PC trackball mouse and it worked remarkably well. This game was designed to be used with a mouse or trackball using the "Trueswing" option. Also, 2 click and 3 click button options can be used for those that prefer the shot meter method and this could be easily implemented within an arcade setup as well.
For those of you that are having problems with your card reader and cannot create or save a golfer on your PGA Tour Golf, the PC version offers you a ton of options for customizing your own golfer and it will save your golfer to the hard drive without the use of a card or a working card reader. I find this to be convenient and is an awesome option for the career mode where you create your golfer and then have a calendar of events that you can choose to enter each month. You will receive money for your winnings, obtain sponsors, upgrade your equipment, and try to achieve your goal of taking Tiger Woods down as the number one golfer in the world. You can play up to 30 seasons in career mode!
I'm ordering a USB/PS2 interface Happ trackball for the PC on Monday. I have a tower computer ready to go and will be installing Windows XP service pack 3. I will be upgrading the ram and will be looking for a nice and affordable video card so that the game plays perfectly. Then I'm going to order another KADE Device (I've ordered a couple of these in the past for some projects and they are awesome) in order to take the PC keyboard hot key assignments for Tiger Woods 06 and map them to arcade buttons (flyby, move golfer left/right, replay, etc.). It will be fun to design a new control panel for this game and customize it for the new button layouts. Then I can build a pedestal or put it into an empty PGA Tour Golf cabinet (put a 29" Vizio Razor LCD in yours if you haven't already...it's STUNNING!) and I should be good to go!
I will continue to tinker with PGA Tour Golf but to be honest, if this PC version works as well in the end as I think it will I don't know that it would be necessary to try to add courses, golfers, etc to the arcade version any longer as the PC version seems to address and supersede all of those nagging issues. The final burden would be trying to achieve online play but I don't think that will be an option for us with these older versions with the EA servers taken offline and no other option to set up our own server that I know of.
I will be happy to keep everyone updated on this if there is any interest. I realize this is straying a little off topic and I don't want to derail my own thread so I may start another thread for this project. Any questions, suggestions, or concerns would be appreciated. I would rather complete this project correctly the first time versus finding out I made a major mistake after completion.
I hope that everyone is doing well and I look forward to any correspondence!