Strolling around some of my usual haunts I happened upon a headline for new X-Box game shots. In order to get a feel for what the competition would bring (I swear I wasn't looking for trouble) I decided to check out these screens for Simon & Schuster's Outlaw Golf.

At first glance I really didn't notice anything for the first couple of shots. I'm beginning to get a feel for the X-Box "look" though I think... a sort of grey-ishness to many things. It seems to want to have everything be metallic somehow. Don't know how else to describe it.

The curiousity began to flow though when I hit the fourth shot, the one of the guy hitting the ball out of the bunker. Odd, there's fire coming off of that... sort of that cheesy plug-in kind of fire.... Oh, I thought, too willing to believe the bad. So I moved on. Hrm, seems to be a lot of motion blur and you know, in a game it would look kind of funny with it all over everything in every frame... Yeah, so a little suspicious but I'll give the benefit of the doubt.

Now let's hit the overlays though. Bring up the first shot and the last shot, both are ones that display some course information. Odd, the people in both shots are in different places and yet all information given about the course, distance to the tee, wind direction and speed... is the same. Funny too that the gauge in the upper right corner with the face of the smaller person is also identical. Funniest yet, in the first shot the person who just sent his ball flying (I'm assuming by their poses, yet if he just finished with his stroke why is the trajectory help still there?) he's holding some sort of iron, yet the club shown says he's using his driver and by the picture very apparently a wood... which is also imagery shared with the last picture.

I'm sure there's more to be found if one will sit and pick but it appears that another X-Box game is sending out things called 'screen shots' that are not that unless the game comes with a PhotoShop editor for you to retouch all of your favorite moments with.

Update: From PGC reader 'baker' comes a little additional fun to chew on:

Hey man. I just wanted to point out what's probably the most blatantly fake thing. Look at the map in the first picture. There's two things wrong with it. First, it shows the red dot where the guy would be teeing of from. Now, I'm not a golfer, but I'm guessing the tee off is not from where the picture shows the 2 dudes standing. Now this brought me to the 2nd finding. See that big lake in front of you? Don't you think that should/would most likely show up on the the map for the course? I would...

As always your fellow readers are on the ball, thanks for the additional grist for the mill.