By Heather McDaniel
I am Tiger Woods. Well, OK, not quite. I can't play golf like him, I don't have the money he does, and I don't do Nike commercials. But I am Tiger Woods. So how could I be Tiger Woods? The answer is easy: by playing Tiger Woods Golf for Palm Connected Organizers.
"To play this fun game, you need a whopping 500K of free space on your device."
After playing the game for a few days, I wasn't able to stop myself from playing. This is a cool game. At times, it's as frustrating as the real thing, but so much fun.
Getting started
Before you get started, you should make sure that your PC and Palm device meet the requirements to run Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf. To play, you need a Pentium-based PC with 133 MHz, 8 MB of RAM that runs Windows 95 or 98. If you're a Mac user, make sure it's at least a PowerPC and you're using system 7.5.3 or higher. Your Palm device can be a Palm Professional, Palm III, Palm IIIx, or Palm VII with 500k available.
The fact that you need 500k of space on your device can be a big drawback, especially if you have a Palm Professional without the Palm III upgrade.
To get started, load the CD into your drive. If you follow the instructions, you shouldn't have any problems. After you load the courses onto your Palm Desktop, HotSync your PC and Palm device.
Once you do that, tap the "Tiger" icon on your Palm device. You'll have to register the game before you can play the full version. If you choose not to register, you're stuck with a one-hole demo.
To register, go online to one of the URLs provided in the instruction booklet. Then enter the certificate number and User ID.
After you enter the numbers, you'll be given another code to unlock the game. Pay careful attention to the code. It's long and easy to screw up. When I registered the game, I had to do it a couple of times because I missed a letter or number while entering the long code.
You can start the game by tapping the "Tiger" icon in your applications menu. This'll take you to the Pro Shop, which is shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
To start playing the game, you'll have to go through the Pro Shop.
Your only choice will be Start New Game. Tap it, and you will see the Game Select screen, illustrated in Figure B. The Game Select screen give you three options: Stroke Play, Tournament, and Fast Play.
FIGURE B
Tiger Woods PGA Golf lets you play in three different modes.
Stroke Play lets you start at any hole and play through the eighteenth. This is an ideal option to practice. One great feature of Stroke Play is that you can take your shots over if you hit a bad shot (I prefer not to call it a mulligan because it sounds like I'm cheating). Fast Play lets you choose a course and play in a single-player match as Tiger Woods. The reason why game play is so fast in Fast Play mode is because the golfer's animations are turned off. Finally, there's Tournament Mode. Tournament Mode is just that -- a tournament where up to four players compete against each other. The players can be human or computer-controlled.
