World Golf Tour is a recently released, browser-based golfing game that quite remarkably manages to provide HD-quality game-play that’s built entirely for the Adobe Flash 9 plugin installed in most recent web browsers.

The controls are easy to get a hang of plus the scenery is gorgeous and photo-realistic. The golfer himself could use a little work though. I reckon they should have thrown the impressive CG Emily in there instead.

The game already seems to have built up quite a community, with 217,000 contributors already registered on the forums. Once you’ve practiced a bit, you can compete in tournaments to win real cash and prizes, or if you’re more socially minded, you can try out their multiplayer feature that enables chat and game-play with your mates around the world.

One word of warning though, this game is quite CPU intensive. In order to achieve any kind of accuracy, you may need to close some other processes you have running to ensure smooth game-play. Also, Opera doesn’t seem to be compatible with the game, but you should have no problems on recent versions of Firefox or IE.

If you’re into golfing games, give it a try. The fact that WGT is free, looks great and works in a web browser I found very appealing. Add to that the interaction with a large user-base and you can’t help but get drawn in. Ah, takes me back to my AoE days.

Sources:
World Golf Tour and WGT Forums