Top 10 Golf Games

07. John Daly's ProStroke Golf

Okay if your first reaction to our Number 7 choice was 'Wait, John Daly has a golf game?!' we totally understand your confusion. But our reply to that question would be, well, yes, yes he does. And a very good one at that!

Bearing in mind that when Daly's ProStroke came along on PS3 it did so at a time when EA's Tiger Woods PGA series pretty much owned the genre. That being the case, when the wizards behind the game made the decision to create it they did so in competition with it.

In order to make it a contender on those terms, they had to come up with some sort of hook - and in the case of ProStroke Golf the hook that they decided to go with was to make it fully compatible with both the Dual Shock (standard) gamepad and the PlayStation Move controller - that being the motion-sensing controlled that allows you to play the game as if you were actually using clubs.

The thing about this game is that, ignoring the inclusion of the PS Move controller into the mix, the wizards behind it were not trying to reinvent the wheel in terms of a new take on golf simulation on games consoles - and so they succeeded at creating what is arguably a very good golf simulation game.

What that means is that the player is presented with challenging courses and a POV sort of approach that features a realistic golf course experience, from the sounds of nature (bugs, birds, and wind) to the sounds of humanity (crowd, overflying planes, you get the idea).

Oddly enough one of its creative and even entertaining features is the running commentary from a pair of arguably professional and observant golf commentators. These two blokes offer a sort of wisdom that is part restatement and part foresight, but what makes this odd is that this sort of thing is exactly what the player would not be hearing if they were playing golf in the sort of POV environment that we are playing in when we slot ProStroke Golf in our PS3.

Okay, those factors aside, we need to focus upon the Move for the moment...

While it might be thought of as something of a gimmick initially - especially when you stop to consider that the Xbox 360 version of the game was played on just the standard gamepad - what we discovered first in the preview we were given and then later, with the finished game itself, was that the Move for the PlayStation version was not a gimmick at all.

If the player is willing to put in a little time and effort learning how the Move works with respect to the game -and with the addition of a small piece of tape on the floor to help us keep track of where the imaginary ball is in the real world, the ability of the Move to sense things like a true swing and your wrist actions made for a pretty realistic interpretation of the swing and, if you ask us, that made all the difference in the world.

It is important to point out that ProStroke is not Tiger Woods PGA and never tries to be. Where TWPGA is a very polished pro-golfer experience, ProStroke is a rougher and perhaps more accessible take on the sport.

That said though, and while the game does lack some of the more polished elements, it includes robust and likable single and multi-player as well as online game play, so you can play with your mates both at home and online - and you can do that at half the price of the typical AAA title - which is reason enough for ProStroke to make our list.