Tomb Raider Legend

[Art Blade]

Enjoy matey :)

[fragger]

Cheers :)

OK, have to ask - who's the girl in your avatar? (You know who the one in mine is...) She's got blue hair but she ain't no Marge Simpson :-()

[Art Blade]

Mine is just some "logo" taken from the X² game, out of several logos you can pick for your in-game computer avatar which is displayed when you check your personal stats. :)

[fragger]

I see :)

I'm enjoying Anniversary more than Legend, it's a more immersive game and is way more puzzle-oriented. The more I see of it the more I realise that the graphics are quite an improvement over the previous game and the level design has had more thought put into it. It's not exactly an open world game but there is scope for exploration and players who take the trouble to poke around and keep their eyes peeled will be rewarded. I especially like Croft Manor in this one, the place is all one big puzzle and is a pretty much a game in itself.

Combat is per the standard TR self-targeting format but is challenging, and Lara can pack a few different types of guns. There are no soldiers or mercs in this game (unlike the hordes in Legend) so Lara has no melee moves, but she does have a special one called an "Adrenaline Dodge". If pulled off successfully the game will go into a brief slow-mo and if you're on the ball with your timing you can nail most charging wild animals with a single headshot. It takes practice but it looks good when it comes together. As I expected, there was a Lost Valley section and I had to deal with a T-Rex which was freaking tough, even after I found the trick to putting him down.

I was a little unfair before calling this game a remake, it's more of a re-imagining and it's been handled extremely well. It's also looking like it will be a somewhat longer game than Legend and like that game there is a Replay Mission option which allows you to go back and find stuff you missed. I thought I was doing well and finding most of the goodies but I later discovered that I'd only actually uncovered about half the secrets so far. Gotta look harder...

Here's some pics:

A stretch, a yawn, and a spelunk – Lara's favourite way to start the day.

(You can't really tell from the pic, but there's dust and mist drifting around in here - it looks great)

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This should look cool above the mantelpiece:

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Doesn't everyone have a hedge maze in their backyard? I could do with a map – or a chainsaw...

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Found one! A map, that is.

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[Art Blade]

lol, reminds me of Hitman, he once had to find a way into a villa using a secret entrance that was hidden in a hedge maze  ^-^

[fragger]

Aw man... not this again...

I'm halfway through the game and I've gotten into a boss fight that has stopped me in my tracks. There are these two big stone centaurs that come to life, there's nowhere to hide or take cover from them and I'm having a bitch of a time getting the better of them. I tried for over an hour last night and couldn't figure out how to deal with them at all (evidently one can't just repeatedly shoot them until they expire from a surfeit of bullets) and once my exasperation tolerance had been etched away I went online in search of the required methodology. I found it, and much to my chagrin it entails yet another of those ultra-demanding, keyboard-pounding, tie-your-fingers-in-knots high-dexterity affairs which would be difficult enough if it wasn't compounded by the unforgiving checkpoint saving system - i.e. get someway toward succeeding, die, and have to go all the way back to the start of the fight again. No saving partway through, no dispatching one centaur then saving before trying to deal with the other one. Make a slip a good way into the fight and it's all the way back to the start, baby.

I really like this game, the puzzles are challenging and thought-provoking, but these boss fights SUCK. They're not fun, they're studies in frustration. If I could save my progress during these insane battles as per the older games it might be tolerable, but to spend significant dollops of my time trying to get somewhere only to have to do the whole thing over from scratch just because I made a mispress during a moment of frenzied keyboard-bashing is not conducive to gaming joy. Whoever decided on a checkpoint saving system for this game should be taken out and shot and not be given the choice of being saved beforehand >:D

I can't see myself finishing this game because I don't want to spend a fruitless night trying to get past this boss fight, and as with Legend I can't get to the cheat codes because I need to do a time trial of a level I haven't yet reached, and I can't reach that level because I can't get past the place where I'm stuck and need the cheat code. Damn.

[Art Blade]

sounds quite annoying  ???? :( However, good luck  :-X

And yes, let's nail the bastards to a barn door and set them alight  >:D

[Fiach]

Well, the games iirc were originally heavily consolised designs, I cant begin to imagine how you would cope with some of the moves on a M/KB control scheme. On saying that, I always thought Anniversary to be a difficult game and I actually use a bloody controller .

Its a shame that you cant continue, is there no level skip code, there used to be on the earlier games, But I think it involved some serious gymnastics to achieve it.

[fragger]

You're probably right Fiach, a controller may make a world of difference.

I had another go at it earlier on, and bloody hell, I didn't make much of a dent in it ::) My keyboard, yes - the fight, no.

There's a scene in the original Terminator film where Big Arnie goes into a gun shop to stock up on weapons and he's asking the guy behind the counter for all these different types of guns: "The 12-guage autoloader... The .45 long-slide with laser sighting..." Then, just before he asks for an Uzi 9 millimetre, he asks for a "... phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range..." The guy responds with, "Hey, just what you see, pal!"

Shotguns and pistols be buggered - I really want that plasmatic rifle :-() >:((

I copied a walkthrough from the net for dealing with those centaurs and when I pasted it into Word, it was like three pages long ??? Aaargh... I think I'll go back to Africa and shoot some @#$%& mercs. It's not their fault, but stuff 'em - I need to vent and they're easier to take down than those four-legged trogs...

[JRD]

As I read Fiach's comment I recall the gymnastics to cheat in TR games... it was truly acrobatic! Something like jump bacward twice, roll, left, roll right then a another couple jumps in that direction and so on and so forth... one had to find a wide area to do the tricks to enable the cheats.   :D

I don't quite understand this "I can't get to the cheat codes because I need to do a time trial of a level I haven't yet reached, and I can't reach that level because I can't get past the place where I'm stuck and need the cheat code" thing. As if there's a point in the game where cheating is allowed but if you didn't get to this point yet then cheating isn't allowed!  ????  THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED CHEATING for crying out loud!! 

Are you sure you searched the right places on the web for cheating codes, fragger? Kids nowadays can dig up amazing things from games... there must be a way!!!!!

[fragger]

I agree totally mate, it's like "No, you can't cheat here until you've earned the right to!" It's as though they're trying to force some kind of highfalutin moralistic lesson about the evils of cheating down my throat. Hello...? It's a single player game! Who the frig gives?

Regarding the gymnastic tricks in the old games, well, if only it was still that easy to enable the cheats... I remember that too and it would be a darn sight easier to get access to the cheats that way compared to what you have to go through now. I've looked and looked online, but the cheats seem to be hard-coded into the game the way they are and if there's another way to get at them I've yet to find it. I hate how "they" basically try to force you to earn your cheat codes, like you're some kind of unscrupulous slimebag for wanting to skip over a ludicrously difficult part of their game in order to enjoy the rest of it. But if they want me to give up on their game and drop out halfway through without seeing what else they have created in the course of rescuing me from the moral bankruptcy that would surely ensue from committing the unspeakable sin of cheating in a single-player video game, then hey, I can do that, and thanks for saving me from myself. Seeing the second half of the game would have been nice but I reckon I can get over it.

Oddly enough, the site where I found the walkthrough usually has saved games for download that let you dodge those pesky boss fights but there doesn't seem to be one for this part of this game. Not there, anyway. Maybe there's one elsewhere - I'll look when I have the inclination.

Or maybe this would simply be a good time to have a go at Duke Nukem Forever... after I've offed a few of the aforementioned mercs in Africa of course.

[Fiach]

You could try this...

http://tombraiders.net/stella/downloads/TR1install.html

Its basically a way to get an enhanced version of TR(PC) to run on current gen PC's.

So, if you can get a copy of the original PC game and install it in conjunction with this, maybe you could have the best of both worlds, TR1 with Cheats.

[fragger]

Interesting idea Fiach :-X As it turns out, I do still have all the old TR games. I remembered they were all in a CD storage cabinet, and when I went to check I also found that I still had Quake II, the original Duke Nukem, Commandos, Crusader: No Remorse, Crusader: No Regret, Civilization II, Alpha Centauri, Sid Meier's Gettysburg, No One lives Forever, Jane's WWII Fighters, Links '98, Descent, Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, MoH: Spearhead, Unreal Tournament, Flight Unlimited II, Grand Prix 3... a trove of games from yesteryear. What a blast :-()

[Fiach]

Some great games, I really liked No one lives forever, very funny game, I only played Descent 3, But I did play a similar game called Forsaken, which I had on PC PS1 and N64, because I loved it so much.

Some nice memories there! :)

[fragger]

Actually, it was Descent 3 in my cabinet, not the original Descent. Lots of fun, I remember flying around in some of those vertigo-inducing levels :) And yeah, No One Lives Forever was very entertaining and had some good laughs in it :-X Apparently there was a sequel but I never got around to it.

[fragger]

I found a saved game online that let me skip over those flipping centaurs. Call me a wuss if you like, but – well, yeah, OK, I am. But do I care? No! Because now I can get on with my favourite part of TR – puzzle solving! I hated to give up on a game that I was enjoying so much just because of one stupid thing. But having said that, if there was now only some way to circumvent the checkpoint saving system, I'd really be one happy little spelunker. I reached this part where I had to spend about a minute manoeuvring a big stone block into the proper position before using it to begin climbing up and around a whole lot of walls and ledges, and right at the end of all that there was a very tricky timed grapple swing-and-jump. If I missed this jump I would fall to my death, get reloaded at the previous checkpoint and go through the whole performance all over again. Guess what - I kept missing it! It took about a dozen goes before I finally got it right :D If I could only have saved on the last ledge before the grapple-jump, I could have saved about a quarter of an hour of my life... but because of the checkpoint system I couldn't, so I didn't

On further reflection, I guess my gripe isn't so much with the checkpoints per se as it is with where they've been placed, as in the example above. Some of them are not reached until after I've had to get through a long sequence of tricky routines followed by some really unforgiving move (i.e. one where if I mess up I die) that results in me having to repeat the entire lengthy, tricky sequence if I fail. That can get monotonous after a number of cocked-up attempts (the requisite knuckle-dislocating keyboard ballet doesn't help). A few times I've gotten cranky enough that I've had to quit the game, do something else for a while, then come back to it and try again. That's not a good way to game.

But all that aside, I'm now into the third act, Egypt (after Peru and Greece). Almost right off the bat I'm into this amazingly intricate multi-part teaser that's just an awesome bit of puzzle creation. Anniversary is better value than Legend not just in terms of puzzle conceptualization but also in game duration - already I've put in about twice the hours as I did in Legend and I'm nowhere near the end yet. After Egypt there is yet another act (Atlantis) and I think I'm only about a quarter of the way through the current act.

Impressions thus far: A few of the checkpoint locations and that crazy-making centaur fight are the only things that have marred the game for me - otherwise it's great fun, has clever puzzles, looks superb and has great sound. When stacked up against all the TR goodness that Anniversary has to offer, the few gripes I have with it don't detract much. This game should be great fun for any TR fan - just find and DL a saved game from the net when you get to the bit with the centaurs if you want to save yourself a lot of cussing...

Here's a few more pics:

Girls and their pillar fights...

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Lara has to watch her step in places:

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Let the games begin!

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Somewhere in – or should I say under - Greece

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Into Egypt:

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This is the resting place of Pharoah Nuff (nyuk nyuk nyuk)

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Now that's a pair of doors!

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[JRD]

I'm glad you have that sorted out, mate!  :-X

Legend seems very nice indeed... very TR!!

I found this video of a level I've been through last night in Assassins Creed Revelations. While doing that I couldn't stop thinking about Tomb Raider. Watch it and you'll see why!  ;D

Assassin's Creed: Revelations GALATA TOWER 100% Synchronization Masyaf Key

AC is not really like that but at some specific levels you have to go through areas like that cave or an old church or a temple etc in order to find something special. In AC:R you are looking for Masyaf Keys, which you find at the end of the level, but it can be a treasure or a seal for instance, that will give you special armor. Masyaf Keys will allow Ezio to relieve Altair's (AC1 character) memories and dig out his ancestor's experience... pretty cool in fact!  8)