Quick look at Tomb Raider: Underworld for PS2

Well, I figured I should write about some games, considering a third of my pathway is games design. I don't actually play games like Tomb Raider (I prefer RPGs more than anything), but my mum's been playing Tomb Raider since about TR2's release and has finished them all except for Underworld, which was released a week or two ago on PS2, a couple of months after the current gen releases.

From what I've seen so far, it's really not looking that good. I thought the later release date would give them time to make sure it worked right with an older console, but I should've guessed that wouldn't be the case. One main thing I noticed is loading times. The loading screens (that are dressed as information screens) take up to 30 seconds to get to the game once you've been killed, but it's the ingame loading that's really weird. I got a couple of videos just to show the two ways scenery loads while playing the game.




The scenery doesn't load until about 10-15 seconds after you first see it, so you end up walking in midair. If you hadn't been there before, it'd really throw you off (and personally I really hate glitches where you go through/can see through scenery).




If the scenery doesn't load late, this happens. You get stuck for about 5 secs like the game's frozen.

And this isn't a nitpick, but I found this amusing.



She kinda floats down the stairs. I cut it 'cause there was a load if messing about between the two clips.

I can't really get a good video of the camera, but once again, it's always looking for Lara's 'best' side rather than going to any angle that'd actually help. She can scale walls at angles now, but that makes movements fidgety and a lot of the time it takes a few tries to get her heading in the right direction.

That's what I've seen so far. Probably seems like I'm nitpicking, but it's stuff like that that I'd expect to be at least nearly polished out when the game's released.