Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is perfect for those long 45 minute subway rides home, on days when your boss has read you the riot act and threatened you with demotion and dismissal and insulted your haircut and your taste in clothes and generally ripped you a new one.

The game is friendly and unchallenging, and it is full of nice green lawns and bright blue skies. Occasionally it congratulates you for making a nice shot, just to remind you that you are completely super as a person all on your own, no matter what your thuggish employer says. It is good for your self-esteem.

Regular readers will note that this is the second review of a hand-held golf video game in as many weeks. There is good reason for that. First, it is totally golf season. Aside from baseball and the Lance-and-Sheryl show and the occasional update about manhole covers and bus routes in Greece, the only sports news we get at this time of year is all about smacking little balls around on gigantic fields of grass. It is time for Phil Mickelson and Retief Goosen and Todd Hamilton. So it is OK to overdo the golf a little. How else are we to wile away these rainy summer days? Shooting aliens?

Ordinarily this would also be time for Tiger Woods, but he has not won a major tournament since 2002, so nobody is paying him any attention. He is over. He is yesterday's man. The good news for him is that being yesterday's man is no barrier to an ongoing and lucrative portfolio of endorsement contracts. All of which is a long way of saying that even if your star is fading, you can still get your picture on a video game box.

The game you read about last week, Mario Golf Advance Tour, was a fun bit of golf smothered in a ridiculous frosting of role-playing and adventure elements. Basically it set about annoying you as aggressively as any game could, and occasionally it relented and let you hit the ball. It piled inane complexity upon inane complexity. It wanted to take over your life with pages full of numbers and endless rounds of "leveling up."

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is completely unlike that. It is a game for people who don't like to read manuals. You switch it on, you decide whether you are Tiger Woods or John Daly, you play a round on the Old Course at St. Andrews, and you finish four under par.

"Gee," you think to yourself, "that was smooth and comfortable. I wonder if I can do that again?" Yes you can, as it turns out. Round in and round out, you are brilliant with your driver and outstanding in your short game. You score low. You begin screwing around with your club selection just for the hell of it. Your scores stay low. You feel proud of yourself. You feel invincible.

Now, all this sounds a lot like an easy, unchallenging distraction. Where, you ask, is the fun in that? That is a good question. The truth is that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 is not fun in the classic video game sense of posing a challenge and daring you to overcome it. It is more like Minesweeper in Windows 95. Neither all that tough nor all that engaging, it still keeps your thumbs busy and your brain mostly disengaged from the traumas of the day. It is a distraction. It is a neat thing to do while you ride across town. It is a trifle, but a benign trifle.

When John Daly makes a birdie putt in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004, he strikes a funny little pose with his leg, canting one knee out at an angle to make a pointy-toed figure four. It makes him look all fruity, which is amusingly out of character. When he bogeys a hole, he raises his putter up over his head, as if he is about to throw it into the trees. When he makes par, he does not have a corresponding animation sequence; he is simply and suddenly not there on the green. That is OK. He is probably just off having a cigarette and a sandwich.

This is the game's central message. It is time for a break. Take a load off.