When O-Games and Gusto Games approached me a while back asking me if I would endorse their next golfing game, I was a little hesitant. I’m not much of a videogame person myself (although my kids love them), and I didn’t want to put my name on something that I couldn’t be proud of. But after talking to everyone there, getting a sense of their passion and knowledge of the sport, and seeing what they were able to make by checking out their previous game, ProStroke Golf World Tour 2007, I was definitely interested. That game introduced an all-new mechanic called “ProStroke Mode” that took you into a first person perspective when you addressed the ball and made your swing. It was nothing like I had ever seen before in any other golf game and made a lot of sense. And once they told me about Sony’s new PlayStation Move control system and how it would work with my game and with ProStroke Mode, I was sold.

The great thing about John Daly’s ProStroke Golf and the PlayStation Move is that it actually gets you up off the couch and swinging like you would with a real club. It may sound like the Wii, but after getting my hands on the game and playing it with the PlayStation Move controller, it’s so much more sophisticated and sensitive, it’s unbelievable. Your full swing is taken into account, and shaping your shots for draws and fades is as simple as adjusting your stance and closing or opening your wrists with the Move motion controller. You can also do other basic golf adjustments, such as tweaking your aim to account for wind, change the ball position in your stance for different loft…basically everything I do on the course, you can do right from your Move controller, and you get to look at your ball, the club head, your lie just like you do in real golf.

To start, you should check out the tutorials that will not only explain the basic fundamentals of how to play the game, but also the basic fundamentals of real life golf shot-making. I laid down the voiceovers with the folks at O-Games to make sure that the principles laid out in the game could be applied by aspiring golfers to take with them to the course or the driving range. Golf is a great game, something I’ve devoted most of my life to, and if John Daly’s ProStroke Golf can cause a few people out there to go and play for real, I’ll be a happy man.

There’s a lot more to talk about with the game – the great narration by Sam Torrance and Peter Kessler, the great mix of fictional and world-famous courses such as Mystic Rock and the Belfry, my very own line of Loudmouth clothes being featured in the game – but I’ll leave that to the developers over at Gusto Games. Thanks for taking the time to read this blog post, and don’t forget to pick up John Daly’s ProStroke Golf this week on the PS3 from Walmart, Best Buy, GameStop and other great stores, and have the most realistic golfing experience without leaving your house!

That’s where PlayStation and the Move motion controller came in. But let’s start with a bit of background to the problem.

Video games have always had a problem translating the swing, a fluid, analog motion, into something a gamer can work with. Three-click systems create a disconnect between the player and their avatar; they’re never really taking the shot. In fact, all they’re doing is setting up what will happen BEFORE their golfer takes a swing. Using an analog stick bridged a gap, but it’s still nothing like actually swinging a club. Golf games have been crying out for a way of letting gamers actually feel like they’re swinging a club and PlayStation Move has become that solution.

From booming drives off the tee to delicate approach chips, Move has allowed us to see actual golf swings translated directly into the game. If your swing pulls to the right, that’s what will happen. If you don’t swing hard enough, you’ll drop short. The level of accuracy we can achieve just wouldn’t have been possible without the swing information we can pull from the Move. It allows a player to take direct control of the club and combining it with ‘ProStroke View’ then puts them right into the game.

‘ProStroke View’ is something that’s been around at Gusto since the original ProStroke Golf: World Tour 2007. Looking down the club is just the most natural thing in the world to anyone who’s played golf before. It’s where you can see the path of the club as it swings, connects and follows through. When we first got hold of the prototype for Move, it was almost as if it had been made with the ProStroke system in mind. The two concepts were just so compatible! Of course, then we actually had to pair the software to this new hardware. We’ve worked with multiple iterations of the peripheral since then, tweaking and refining the system to get the most out of it. We’re almost there!

We’ve had plenty of positive feedback from the game’s outing to E3 this year. Gamers who picked it up loved the feeling of control it gave them and some of them even said it was the closest they’d come to feeling like they were actually swinging a club. High praise! Probably the biggest boost for us, however, was getting John himself to play with it. Having a professional golfer pick up your game and within moments being able to drive a ball 300 yards down the centre of the fairway, using the same type of motion he’d use on a real course, is pretty incredible.

Who’d have thought that in the world of golf video games it’d be a tiny white ball that solved the swing problem?