This is why my PC is better than my Saturn.
by AC - permalink
Since playing the demo of Tomb Raider: Anniversary last month, I'd been kicking around the idea of buying it via Steam. At $30, it seemed like a fair enough deal, and although I have a bunch of games already registered with Steam, I've never actually used Steam to buy anything new. But this afternoon I happened to run across a retail copy of the game for the same price while picking up a big fat sack of food for my dogs. Same game, but with cool box art, the game media on its own DVD, and not tied irrevocably to Steam? Sold.
So far, Tomb Raider: Anniversary looks like a good buy. As I said, it came on a single DVD, and that alone merits at least a half-dozen cool points. I'm still completely baffled by modern games -- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, for example -- that come packaged on four or five CD-ROMs when the vast majority of gamers have at least one DVD drive. Valve's Steam hardware survey proves this (scroll down to "Drive Type"). Anyway, installing TRA took a long, long time. Windows' task manager informed me that the TRA installer was updating my DirectX, which I had deliberately not updated, not yet anyway. Minus several cool points.
But once it was installed, TRA delivered. The game has run fast and smooth, no crashes, no hiccups of any kind. It's moderately tweakable in-game, but you'll want to force your desired level of anisotropic filtering hardware-side. Like the demo, it runs very well on my oldish hardware. I'm not big on the motion blur, but I like the depth-of-field effect, so I'm putting up with it for now, as you can't have one without the other. Gameplay-wise, it's the original Tomb Raider, so it's brilliant. The only sticking point is going to be combat, but there are three modes to chose from if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, and one of them should work for you. The game is still obviously designed for a controller, however, and I had to push the mouse sensitivity all the way up to "20."
I've barely started the game, but I'm glad I bought it. Tomb Raider is one of my all-time favorite Saturn games, and TRA looks to be a PC classic itself. I'll let you know after I've had some more time with it.
by AC - permalink
Since playing the demo of Tomb Raider: Anniversary last month, I'd been kicking around the idea of buying it via Steam. At $30, it seemed like a fair enough deal, and although I have a bunch of games already registered with Steam, I've never actually used Steam to buy anything new. But this afternoon I happened to run across a retail copy of the game for the same price while picking up a big fat sack of food for my dogs. Same game, but with cool box art, the game media on its own DVD, and not tied irrevocably to Steam? Sold.So far, Tomb Raider: Anniversary looks like a good buy. As I said, it came on a single DVD, and that alone merits at least a half-dozen cool points. I'm still completely baffled by modern games -- Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, for example -- that come packaged on four or five CD-ROMs when the vast majority of gamers have at least one DVD drive. Valve's Steam hardware survey proves this (scroll down to "Drive Type"). Anyway, installing TRA took a long, long time. Windows' task manager informed me that the TRA installer was updating my DirectX, which I had deliberately not updated, not yet anyway. Minus several cool points.
But once it was installed, TRA delivered. The game has run fast and smooth, no crashes, no hiccups of any kind. It's moderately tweakable in-game, but you'll want to force your desired level of anisotropic filtering hardware-side. Like the demo, it runs very well on my oldish hardware. I'm not big on the motion blur, but I like the depth-of-field effect, so I'm putting up with it for now, as you can't have one without the other. Gameplay-wise, it's the original Tomb Raider, so it's brilliant. The only sticking point is going to be combat, but there are three modes to chose from if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard, and one of them should work for you. The game is still obviously designed for a controller, however, and I had to push the mouse sensitivity all the way up to "20."
I've barely started the game, but I'm glad I bought it. Tomb Raider is one of my all-time favorite Saturn games, and TRA looks to be a PC classic itself. I'll let you know after I've had some more time with it.
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