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A.P.I Preview:	PRO 18
Developer:	Psygnosis	OPTIONS:	SCREENSHOTS: No.1   No.2   No.3
Distributor:	Psygnosis	Still to be finalised
Game Type:	Sports
Preview Date:	Feb 99

The Story So Far...

Pro 18 has been designed to appeal to actual golfers and interactive fans alike helping players develop and master their game in an immersive and realistic medium. The series will take the player on a truly global game of golf including a variety of well-known players and courses.

The Players and the Courses

Players included in Pro 18: World Tour Golf will be Tom Lehman, Colin Montgomerie, Ian Woosnam, Vijay Singh, Dottie Pepper, Laura Davies, Jesper Parnevik and Mark O'Meara. There are three courses: Royal County Down (Northern Ireland), The Lost City Golf Course (Sun City, South Africa) and Coeur D'Alene Resort and Golf Course (Idaho, U.S.A). All the players have all been professionally filmed at top class TV and movie facilities world-wide capturing their true play style and the courses have been modelled using new survey data techniques and generated in real time with state of the art photo-realistic rendering techniques. All the details you would expect to see in the real game are included: course features such as fluttering flags, weather and time of day effects. No other golf game has included such painstaking attention to recreating a realistic golfing experience.

TV presentation

The televised tournament style in which Pro 18: World Tour Golf is presented adds the excitement of live-action to the game. Expert and internationally renowned "BBC voice of golf," Peter Alliss, provides a critique of the play from the commentary box at the course while another stream of information is delivered by Bobby Clampett of CBS. With presentation sections by anchorman Jim Nelson (played by Rob Ross) and the benefits of TV-style playbacks and cuts you'll be forgiven for thinking you're watching the real thing.

The Game

In Pro 18: World Tour Golf you'll have the choice of going it alone or playing with the pros or even playing against other gamers across a network or a modem link. It's easy to get into the game as the interface is designed to take the best of the rest and add several new features. As well as the traditional three-click interfaces that computer golf players are already used to, Pro 18: World Tour Golf has a "Pro Swing" interface with a 4-point click control for higher level of realism and accuracy, completely new to the world of interactive golf. In order to turn pro in the game, you must use this interface. The Pro Swing interface coupled with brand new aiming and putting engines that expand the learning and playing curves to infinite levels, producing the ideal "easy to learn, difficult to master" footing, a feature that other golf products have not achieved.

The Pro 18 series is being developed for Psygnosis by Intelligent Games Ltd., a London based development house with established credentials in golf simulations including PGA European Tour and numerous golf course data disks for EA Sports.

Matthew Stibbe, managing director at Intelligent Games commented, "Pro 18 is a labor of love by a team of golf fanatics. They have combined their love of real world golf with a passion for computer games to make a game that is both authentic and great fun."