Plus, the dumbass guide to troubleshooting.
by AC - permalink
The gaming press was all a-titter when Crystal Dynamics took over the Tomb Raider franchise not too long ago, probably because they couldn't possibly make things any worse. I didn't think much about it at all, since the only Tomb Raider game I really liked was the first port of the first one, and it was pretty unlikely that a change in developers would do anything to resurrect an eleven-year-old Saturn game.
CD first produced TR Legend, which got decent reviews for being better than the last half-dozen TR releases, but it was short and had unnecessarily high system requirements, so I passed. But now out of nowhere I find the demo for a new game called Tomb Raider Anniversary on Steam, and took my pessimistic view of how CD would treat the origins of the franchise and kicked it in the ass. This demo is fucking awesome.
Anniversary is a sort of reimagining of the first game, with a few more modern gameplay additions and a reworked camera system. For a die hard TR1 fan, it has its pros and its cons, but overall it looks fantastic. The original stuck with a rigid behind-the-character camera that occasionally pulled directly back during gameplay. You could always take direct control of the camera, however, to look around. Anniversary gives you constant control of the camera via the mouse, but frequently moves the perspective around to help you out during various gameplay sequences. It feels console-oriented, and can be frustrating at times, as the directional controls change when the camera wheels around. But it works most of the time.
Movement controls have been streamlined from the original, which used all nine of the Saturn controller's buttons. The jump and crouch keys are now context-sensitive and multi-functional, and elements like drop-to-hang and climb now happen automatically. The new grappling hook is easy enough to use. Really, I can sum up the new control scheme by saying I got the hang of it in about 15 minutes with no documentation at all.
What I was most concerned about when I realized what this game was attempting to do was the music. Tomb Raider 1 has some of my all-time favorite game music, and the major themes are present, if slightly reworked, in the demo. The graphics, obviously, have been significantly enhanced and look great, thanks mostly to performance. These are not state-of-the-art visuals, but more toned-down, high-framerate fair, with great animation and a few flairs, like motion blur and bloom. It runs startlingly well on my 16-month-old hardware, and that performance is probably going to be the tipping point to get me to buy this game when it becomes available on the 5th.
One other note tonight: I ran into a really nasty Far Cry bug where the game would reboot my PC as soon as it finished loading a map that kept getting more and more frequent until I finally fixed it by installing the latest (1.4 cumulative) patch. It also seems to have fixed that hideous rainbow-colored shadows bug that's been a problem in some maps since I first installed the game. I should point out that "Install the most recent patch, dumbass," is troubleshooting step #1, and I didn't try it for weeks. For whatever reason, I thought I had Far Cry all patched up, but it seems to have been running OTB all this time. Oh well, lesson learned.
by AC - permalink
The gaming press was all a-titter when Crystal Dynamics took over the Tomb Raider franchise not too long ago, probably because they couldn't possibly make things any worse. I didn't think much about it at all, since the only Tomb Raider game I really liked was the first port of the first one, and it was pretty unlikely that a change in developers would do anything to resurrect an eleven-year-old Saturn game.
CD first produced TR Legend, which got decent reviews for being better than the last half-dozen TR releases, but it was short and had unnecessarily high system requirements, so I passed. But now out of nowhere I find the demo for a new game called Tomb Raider Anniversary on Steam, and took my pessimistic view of how CD would treat the origins of the franchise and kicked it in the ass. This demo is fucking awesome.
Anniversary is a sort of reimagining of the first game, with a few more modern gameplay additions and a reworked camera system. For a die hard TR1 fan, it has its pros and its cons, but overall it looks fantastic. The original stuck with a rigid behind-the-character camera that occasionally pulled directly back during gameplay. You could always take direct control of the camera, however, to look around. Anniversary gives you constant control of the camera via the mouse, but frequently moves the perspective around to help you out during various gameplay sequences. It feels console-oriented, and can be frustrating at times, as the directional controls change when the camera wheels around. But it works most of the time.
Movement controls have been streamlined from the original, which used all nine of the Saturn controller's buttons. The jump and crouch keys are now context-sensitive and multi-functional, and elements like drop-to-hang and climb now happen automatically. The new grappling hook is easy enough to use. Really, I can sum up the new control scheme by saying I got the hang of it in about 15 minutes with no documentation at all.
What I was most concerned about when I realized what this game was attempting to do was the music. Tomb Raider 1 has some of my all-time favorite game music, and the major themes are present, if slightly reworked, in the demo. The graphics, obviously, have been significantly enhanced and look great, thanks mostly to performance. These are not state-of-the-art visuals, but more toned-down, high-framerate fair, with great animation and a few flairs, like motion blur and bloom. It runs startlingly well on my 16-month-old hardware, and that performance is probably going to be the tipping point to get me to buy this game when it becomes available on the 5th.
One other note tonight: I ran into a really nasty Far Cry bug where the game would reboot my PC as soon as it finished loading a map that kept getting more and more frequent until I finally fixed it by installing the latest (1.4 cumulative) patch. It also seems to have fixed that hideous rainbow-colored shadows bug that's been a problem in some maps since I first installed the game. I should point out that "Install the most recent patch, dumbass," is troubleshooting step #1, and I didn't try it for weeks. For whatever reason, I thought I had Far Cry all patched up, but it seems to have been running OTB all this time. Oh well, lesson learned.
No comments:
Post a Comment