We hip young people used to think of golf as a game where guys wearing plaid pants spent minutes at a time staring into the distance as if they were trying to remember where they’d left their keys. Then Tiger Woods came along and golf became cool, dude. That makes True Swing Golf something of a relic. It offers no frills and no attitude — just a finely calibrated golfing experience that begins and ends on the virtual links. Turns out that’s not so bad after all.

The purported truth of the game’s swing comes from the Nintendo DS’s stylus. After selecting your club and the ideal flight path, you draw back the on-screen clubhead and try to swipe it through the center of the ball. There’s more to the process than you might expect. The ball has a glowing red center representing the sweet spot; the distance and the accuracy of your shot depend upon your hitting it. The mechanics of the swing share much in common with the trackball in Golden Tee, except it’s harder to show off your True Swing skills in front of a bunch of hipsters at the Silhouette.

Developer T&E Soft takes advantage of the DS’s unique design in one other useful way. At the beginning of each hole, both screens pan from the tee to the hole. The bottom screen shows the bird’s-eye game view; the top screen provides a 3-D ground-level perspective. Comparing the two allows you to identify obstacles and ground elevation and map out the best route to the green before you pick your club. It’s a subtle feature that turns out to be invaluable.

In fact, most of what True Swing Golf gets right is in the little details. You can choose to swing from the bottom of the screen to the top, right to left, or left to right. After playing game after game whose intractable interfaces felt like some kind of karmic punishment, I was nearly moved to write T&E Soft a treacly thank-you letter for allowing me that small bit of customization. Putting is a similar joy; with the push of a button you can see the break of the green and the eventual path of your ball from three different angles.

The bigger picture is where the game suffers. It’s almost clinical in its presentation. Although you can select whether your golfer is cool or excitable, seeing the same celebratory gestures over and over gets a little stale. Despite some sporadic crowd noise and a scoreboard that suggests you’re playing each championship match against 29 other pros, nothing within the game makes you feel you’re anything but a lone golfer on an empty course. Despite the presence of a trick-shot meter, which affords you the ability to power up a given swing, the stakes simply aren’t there.

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Things change a little bit when you’re playing for bragging rights. True Swing Golf has a couple of multi-player modes, with support for as many as four players. Only one person needs to have the gamepak inserted; the others can download a limited version through the wireless connection. The game is easy enough to learn that a neophyte has a reasonable chance to make par the first time around, so a competitive match is never farther away than the nearest DS.