Daryl Welsh
Group Program Manager
Microsoft Game Studios - SLC (Links, Amped, Top Spin)

There is a new course download available now for all Links 2004 users (with Xbox Live). This course, ‘The O.M. Director’s Cut,’ is a special edition release of our fantasy course ‘Ocean Mills Country Club.’ It will be available world-wide at the same time at no charge.

This course was not part of our original release schedule and it will not affect the plans we have in place for the new courses coming out in the coming months. Over the last 5 months we’ve found that Links 2004 has a great community of players that meet and communicate at the Links-2004 forum on Xbox.com and they have been asking for a more challenging course. Well we’ve heard that feedback loud and clear and took the opportunity while working on this most recent Auto-Update to deliver a course that meets the need expressed by the community.

The goal we gave our course designers was to take the most challenging course in our lineup and make it even more difficult to score par or better without leaving the bounds of what is possible on a real life course. In our own play-testing we have all struggled to shoot par and we feel our designers hit their goal right on the mark.

In this ‘Director’s Cut’ release of Ocean Mill our designers have:

1) Moved and enlarged many of the bunkers on the course. You’ll find big nasty bunkers right where your drives use to land in some spots.

2) The fairways have been narrowed and the routings have been moved so players must plan for the optimal shot angles into the green for their approach shots.

3) We have spent a lot of effort to adjust the rough around the course. If you land in the rough you’ll probably cringe now, as we’ve made it very penal to hit out of the rough with this course.

4) We’ve also adjusted the slope of the greens and fairways. These have been significantly altered and keeping the ball on the fairway will be a challenge on some holes (especially hole #5). Learn to keep the ball below the hole on the greens if you want avoid 4 putts.

5) On top of all the above we’ve added almost 500 yards to the length of the course when played from the championship tees making some Par-5’s a true risk-reward when going for it in 2, in addition to requiring longer clubs for the approach shot on the Par-4’s.

This is by far the most challenging course the Links team has put out in 10+ years. We hope everyone enjoys this new course. The Links Development Team thanks each of you all for your continued support of our game.

This course is planned to be available on XSN Sports to start creating tournaments within 72 hrs (by 3/5/04).