First of all you'll need to create yourself an avatar which can be decked out in a variety of clothes and accessories, and then you'll need to enter a lobby before you can find a match to play. The lobby takes the form of a Clubhouse with 10 floors and 10 rooms each, each room has a different theme, so, you've got a normal everyday kind of club house, then you've got a Western themed club house complete with swinging doors and sawdust on the floor, or you've got a Japanese restaurant or, well, you get the idea. Each lobby can contain 50 players where you can run round, chat and relax with your friends either with the PS3 virtual keyboard or a USB keyboard if you've got one plugged in. Other 'quick' expressions to say can be found by clicking your R2 button and picking from a list. (You may think this similar to PlayStation Home but Everybody's Golf did it first!)
From the lobby you can enter one of the many Tournaments that are taking place. Some of the tournaments have different conditions similar to the offline challenges, some will only allow you to play with a certain character or class of character, others will only allow you to play at a fast pace and so on, however you can't compete in a tournament if you haven't first unlocked the course in the single player mode. Should you win one of these tournaments then you'll be awarded with a special trophy (not to be confused with PlayStation Network Trophies which this game doesn't have) which your character will hold for a few days while you claim bragging rights over your friends. Winning some tournaments will award you a special item or accessory for your character, nothing major but it allows for some unique avatars to be created should you be lucky enough to win. Of course, you don't need to enter a tournament; you can simply join one of the many games that another player has set up to his own desire, or you can create your own.
It should also be mentioned that the voice chat in this game is practically none existent, and to be fair that is sort of understandable. The tournaments allow for 50 players all to compete against each other, so, you can imagine the debacle if all of them tried to speak at the same time. The other online modes with the exception of Match play allow for up to 8 at a time and I don't quite see the reason why it isn't allowed in this mode but I'm sure there must be one. However, in Match mode which is only for two players you can chat away to your heart's content but it still remains a feature you've to activate each and every time you start a new match.
There is some downloadable content available for when you think you've done everything there is to do in the game, and trust me there is a lot if you're going after maxing out all the stats for each character. The DLC takes the form of extra characters and courses which are quite reasonably priced, but, as with most downloadable content you can't help but wonder why you should be paying for things that should have been on the disc in the first place, especially given the multitude of characters and courses that were included on the earlier reiteration of the game on the PlayStation 2.
Overall this is a very fun and frustrating game to play, just like the real thing. The game series has acquired its own status in the annals of gaming history and has had a cult following from the very first version back on the PlayStation 1, it's one of those games that very rarely shows up in the bargain bins simply because once people get a hold of the game they don't want to lose it, it offers great value for money and is a game that most people find themselves going back to time and time again.
Golf isn't a game that's been done to death on the console market so there isn't a great deal to choose from, but, if you've played any of the others and found them lacking that certain something, then I highly recommend you try this one. Don't be put off by the cutesy nature of the game, take a chance on it, there is a downloadable demo on the PSN which offers you the chance to play through 3 holes if you're not sure, but if you're looking for a golf game that you don't have to buy each year then you could do a lot worse than pick this title up. You'd have a fairway to go to beat it.
