After recently playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 for the Wii, we asked several questions of Wes Culver, lead designer of the game on that platform. In our brief interview, he discussed specific changes between the Wii game and the title on other systems, and he also described how the Wii's horsepower stacks up against the other consoles.

What are the differences between Tiger Woods on the Wii and the other platforms?

So the difference between the Wii and the other platforms is obviously the control. All the gameplay controls have been totally redone to take advantage of the Wii Remote. If you want to, you can even go back and plug in the Nunchuk to get the analog swing. You can do that, and you play it as you would on the PS2 or the Xbox 360. But everything from the swing, the draw and fades, the spin -- all that sutff has been mapped to the Wii Remote, one way or another.

Wii Sports scored a spot among our favorite games of 2006 because of its innovation and motion-tastic controls. But we'd still rather play in-depth, stand-alone versions of the pack-in sports; Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07 is one of the first to answer the stand-alone challenge. I recently got to swing Tiger's virtual driver -- and putter -- with the Wii game, schedule for mid-March release.

Wii Sports Golf has grown on me as I've played it more. But the bundled title has many drawbacks, like quirky club control, lack of slice sensing, and an inability to spin the ball. As I would expect from EA's stand-alone title, Tiger Woods bests Wii Sports in all of those areas -- with a few caveats. While I only got a short session with Tiger Woods and I'm only casually a golf game fan, I'm looking forward to a golf game for the first time since, well, ever.

Today, Tycho at Penny Arcade briefly goes over the unnecessarily complicated matchmaking process in Tiger Woods 07. The steps include:

"1. Consent To Be Invited

In any other Goddamn Live game, you're done. In Tiger, one must then

2. Endorse The Invitation
3. Yield Wholly To The Concept Of Inviting
4. Surrender To The Invitation Beam.

And then, finally,

5. Lift Your Voice In Supplication To Raoul Invitatio, 'He Who Maketh The Match'"

Most of our readers probably know that EA maintains its own servers. This was required by them years ago before they would allow their games on Xbox Live. Why do they need their own servers? It makes it easier to spy on you of course. Personally, I don't deal with EA's matchmaking very often, as I don't really own any of their games -- and probably won't until Burnout 5, or possibly Army of Two. So, X360F asks you, is matchmaking in Tiger really that bad?

We swear, we don't just come to work wondering how we can hate on EA. Honestly, we don't, but we couldn't help pointing something out. There's a new batch of downloadable content for Tiger Woods 07. Sure, everyone loves downloadable content, but this new "content" stinks.

Unlock Golfer:-200 points
Pro Shop – 300 points
Maxed out Player – 200 points
Unlock Courses – 200 points

As a quick explanation, all of these downloads unlock content in the game. The thing is, it unlocks content in the game that you can unlock just by playing it. What it comes down to is that EA is basically charging us for cheat codes. You want every single golfer in the game, but you don't want to unlock them yourself? That'll be $2.50. Maybe you'd like to have every item in the Pro Shop. No problem: $3.75. Can't be bothered to raise your golfer's stats? Easy, we'll max him out for $2.50. And of course, what good is a maxed out golfer if he can't play on those pesky locked courses. We'll just unlock those for another $2.50.

Now, we're not going to completely condemn this. Many people have complained that they don't have time to unlock things in their games. All they want is to be able to play with their friends, using all the same content. That's all well and good, but we can't help feeling that things like this are chipping away at the soul of gaming. Seriously, why play the game at all if you're just going to strip it of all accomplishment? Put simply, it's bullsh*t. And probably a goldmine for EA. God help us all if Konami charges us for "the code" when Contra hits XBLA.