- Interactive cut scenes: this Quick Timer Event crap needs to go. It's the single poorest game play mechanic in all gaming history. The point is, humanity knows this since Dragon's Lair. But those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. QTE's reduce the gamer to a trained lab-monkey who needs to push a button when the red light flashes to get his next cookie. Personally I'm slightly offended by this shit. Why did we suffer through millions of years of evolution when a chimpanzee could do the exact same job??
- Some of the boss fights require heavy guesswork. At one time I even had to look for a walk-through in the intertubes because I was stuck. That's just poor. I don't want to trial-and-error my way through the game, I want to have logical clues presented how to proceed next, please. In contrast, most of the in-game puzzles are very well done and logical, but may require some serious hand-eye-coordination.
3 Jun 2007
Tomb Raiding
Being a veteran home computer and PC gamer I was never really interested in the Tomb Raider games. But a lack of good new 360 games in April and May, the fact that I heard good things about Tomb Raider Legends and the unbeatable price tag of 20 Euro (new) seduced me to give ol' Lara a try. And I must say I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. The graphics are relatively simple but next-genish-enough (nice dynamic lighting and shadowing, although overall the game is a bit dark). The character designs differ a lot in quality. Lara is well done, but most of the other story characters ... not so much. I like the fact that Crystal Dynamics went with a clear comic style for the characters instead of going the realistic route or some mishmash style. And Lara's British accent is simply hot, thank the gods they didn't choose one of those typical American mickey mouse voices. The game feels best when climbing around in the levels, controlling Lara is very intuitive and the animations are very well done and connect to each other nicely. But where's light, there's also shadow:
