Following on from the success of Perfect Ace last summer, International Golf Pro is Oxygen Interactive’s second sports title, founded on the same firm principles of ease-of-play and accessibility. Set to retail at £14.99 in the UK and due for release in good time for the British Masters and the Open, this is an easy-to-play but realistic sim. Designed to give sports fans and gamers alike a challenging, satisfying game of golf - whatever the weather outside. Fully featured, with a choice of international courses, differentiated players and competition styles, International Golf Pro is a game to rival many a full-price sim but with an affordable price-tag.

“We’re delighted with the way that this game has come along,” enthused Jim Scott, MD of Oxygen Interactive, “We did well with Perfect Ace, and a lot of retailers made good money from that along with us. This shows that we can deliver the same quality again - for the gamer and the retailer - with other sports, and maybe with other genres.”

International Golf Pro: Q&A.

Q: What made Oxygen decide to produce a golf game?

Kevin Hassall: There were two reasons, really. The first was purely personal for us - most of us are keen golfers, so there’s an emotional kick from being able to release a game we can be proud of based on a sport that we love. More pragmatically, after the success of our tennis game, Perfect Ace, last year, we wanted to find another sport that we could treat in the same way - make it straight-forward, fun and true to the real game, without over-complicating it.

Q: So how have you approached the sport in the game?

Kevin Hassall: We’ve kept the focus on the individual rounds of golf, rather than complicating it with complex competitions or practice modes. The idea is that if you have half an hour you can enjoy the mental challenge of a round of golf, either playing against the computer or against a friend, match-play or stroke-play. There are plenty of games-obsessed teenagers, who’ll play games for eight hours straight, but we aren’t making this for them - this is for real people with real lives and a love of golf.

Q: So how is the game actually played?

Kevin Hassall: We’ve modeled a selection of courses to play on, and golfers to represent you in the game. Once in the game, you select your club, control the power of the swing, and the hook and slice. After that the game will calculate all the physics affecting the flight of the ball, and you see the result. Like real golf it’s about choosing your approach to the hole and controlling the shot. On-screen you see the golfer swing, and the ball fly, and hear the crowd’s reactions to your shot.

Q: So the player is represented in the game by a character?

Kevin Hassall: Of course, you can see your character in the game: there is a variety to choose from, and all of the animations are motion-captured. But the characters are there as representations of the player only - we didn’t want to set up a game where the characters themselves got in the way of the player’s enjoyment of the game.

Q: How does “motion capture” work?

Kevin Hassall: Motion capture works like this: you take a golfer, put him in a suit, which is covered with transmitters or lights, and then set up sensors or cameras around him. As he swings with each club the movements are captured, digitally, by “watching” the exact paths traced by the transmitters or lights. What we then do is to take this data, and use this as the basis of the characters’ movements in the game. Obviously we can’t just play the movements back: the program modifies the movements to compensate for the power of the shot, whether the character stands on the slope or on the flat, and so on. The result is a fluid, realistic set of movements wherever and however the ball is being played.

Q: How does International Golf Pro stand up against other golf games on the market?

Kevin Hassall: Every game is very different. Some are really, really complicated - I know I found myself getting agitated with one because it took me about fifteen minutes just to get to play a round, for example. A lot are quite cartoon-like in their graphics. We didn’t want to go down either route. If you’re interested in golf then you want the game to play and feel as if it’s real, not to look or feel like something that children might watch on the Cartoon Network. Likewise, most people don’t have hours and hours to devote to practicing a game - it’s meant to be fun. Really that’s the point. It’s realistic, easy to get into, and at fifteen pounds it’s less than half the price of many games - which is a unique: there’s no other game like that out there.

About Oxygen Interactive.

Oxygen Interactive is a computer games publisher formed in 2002 by the Play X Europe Group, headed by Industry Veteran and Play X MD Jim Scott to maximise his 16 years of industry knowledge.

Headquartered in Northamptonshire, UK, Oxygen Interactive has recruited a pool of industry talent from both publishing and development backgrounds. Now, under the slogan “More to Play, Less to Pay”, it is building a portfolio of high-quality PS2 titles at affordable prices, focusing on popular sports and concepts. It’s last PS2 release, Perfect Ace spent 4 weeks in the UK Top 20 and found success across Europe.