20 first minutes of Tomb Raider Legend

snoopers
Thursday, April 13, 2006 | 11:10 PM
31 comments

Xbox 360 PS2 Xbox

Here are the twenty first minutes of ol'gen Tomb Raider Legend, covering the first level of the game. Needless to say, this level is a tutorial, so don't be surprised if the level design and the puzzles seems flat, and don't be afraid by the contextual help appearing every five minute to tell you what to do. It is a tutorial, a tutorial, it is (even if it's true the game is not that hard anyway). Having said these little things, enjoy the show !
Update: Video of Croft mansion added.
Update2: Video of X360 version in low definition and some parts in 720p added.

Commented on 2006-04-07 13:28:13

It's the same level as in the demo for those who dont know (except with more). Got this game myself yesterday, having a blast with it and the graphics are really nice on the 360 version.

In reply to

Snoopers

Commented on 2006-04-07 13:30:59 In reply to twoism

With alot more, yeah (cinematics, and some new places).

In reply to

andreicecold

Commented on 2006-04-07 14:41:21

Snoopers im at work but id like to know how you did the bit with the spiked polls that turn around. I was stuck there this morning.

In reply to

Jollipop

Commented on 2006-04-07 15:34:45

LOL i was looking at this and wondered why it didn't look as good as the demo on the Marketplace..

Got a bit confussed..

360 version looks so much nicer than the xbox version even though it is a port ...

In reply to

andreicecold

Commented on 2006-04-07 15:56:14

Now after seeing the vid....wow the 360 version does look nice

In reply to

SimonM7

Commented on 2006-04-07 16:54:15

Eurogamer's review suggests that the framerate is quite bad in the 360 version at 720p after all. It's weird, but somehow it's more disappointing when a game runs well in 480p and chugs in HD resolutions than if it's just a choppy mess alltogether like Oblivion. HD era my nuts.

Oh well, I've been looking forward to this ever since I heard Crystal D would be developing it, and I thought the demo was right brilliant so I'll prolly be picking this up at some point regardless.

In reply to

Joergen

Commented on 2006-04-07 23:41:15

Damn I knew there must be a catch with this game = useless at HD.

I was hoping they were just capable like Rare were with Kameo to push steady 30fps at HD even with great visuals. Guess not.

ed. I tried it with the VGA cables and indeed it chugs from 30 to 15 fps about 20% of the time. Close but no cigar what comes to polishing up the frames.

Personally I wouldhave sacrificed some of that uber-AA soft-focus nonsense that masks out the shader-heavy parallax mapping and opt for more frames, some angle dependent AF and crisper pixels.

I've seen worse but its sad that they would get it so close to perfect 30 and then just not care to optimize further.

Also all the fonts, start-up logo graphics and menu graphics are 480p upscales which is I believe the first time on the 360 that I've seen non-720p menus at 720p.

In reply to

Slabs

Commented on 2006-04-08 00:24:30

The game plays very nicely, I picked it up today for the regular XBox.

In reply to

yougotslayed

Commented on 2006-04-08 04:38:17

All 360 games are internaly rendered at 720p and then converted accordingly to your settings. Any frame-rate issues you are haveing are from something else like V-sinc, a fragmented HDD, or a scratched disk. Keep in mind that CRT TV's have a natural ghosteing effect that makes frame-drops less notisable so it might still be happening with out you being able to percieve it.

In reply to

BlimBlim

Commented on 2006-04-08 21:00:54 In reply to yougotslayed

Posted by yougotslayed

No. No. Did I mention no?
Games are free to use any framebuffer resolution they want. It may be easier for developers to render everything to a 1280x720 framebuffer and then scale it down to whatever they want, but they are not required to at all. They can very well use a 852x480 framebuffer for 480p widescreen and a 640x480 one for 4:3.

In reply to

GriftGFX

Commented on 2006-04-08 21:03:19 In reply to yougotslayed

Posted by yougotslayed

I'm not sure if TRL renders at 480p internally or not, but it's already been proven that not all games use 720p natively--PGR3 is rendered @ 600p and scaled up..FFXI is rendered @ 480p and scaled too, isn't it?

It is a little dissapointing that there's a noticable difference between the performance of two different resolutions on a $port$..not a terrible framerate, but I hope it's not an indication of the future..games averaging LESS than 30fps is pretty sad.

Fun game tho.

In reply to

spacemanjupiter

Commented on 2006-04-14 00:00:37

if the framerate problems are true, then that is just sad as hell... this so called 'next generation' is anything but, so far. i'll tell you when the next generation really starts, and it's not with the 360 or PS3. The PC will decide when it starts. In a few months time...
V-sinc, fragmented hdd's or scratched discs are not going to cause all these fps drops, sorry. From my experience, V-sync has always provided not only a more consistent framerate, but actual higher framerates in the PC games i've experienced on my system. And anyway, textures are loaded into memory and everything else that would truly cause fps drops are either buffered or added on the fly. It's simply either poor programming, or the hardware just can't handle it.

In reply to

Snoopers

Commented on 2006-04-14 00:02:12 In reply to spacemanjupiter

Posted by spacemanjupiter

if the framerate problems are true, then that is just sad as hell...

Well, now you can check with our 720p video...

In reply to

Sheps

Commented on 2006-04-14 00:46:33

I remeber a day when there was only like a gun fight once or twice in the whole game.

the emphasis needs to be back on finding stuff and solving puzzles rather then gun fights, im disapointed.

Also is it just me or is the voice acting somewhat lacking, majorly

In reply to

SimonM7

Commented on 2006-04-14 01:53:50

Well, between me and you it's just you. Lara and whomever she's speaking to on her com have some excellent exchanges of dialogue that are genuinely delightful to hear, and even funny when - and get this - they're supposed to be!

Actually, on a whole, the gunfights don't outweigh the platforming bits at all. This is still a very faithful Tomb Raider game, even though the battles here feel just as tacked on as the ones in Prince of Persia - and prolly are for the same reason, to please the godsmack kids. It's perhaps just a wee bit disappointing that they've sort of nibbled at some new gunplay mechanics, but they're throwaway things that don't really make much of a difference at all. Instead it seems to draw attention to the gunplay and get it slammed for not being deep enough. Oh well.

In reply to

Ezekiel_Xz

Commented on 2006-04-14 02:43:06

its amazing how bad low res games look. I have been playing on oblivion for like 2 weeks, now ive done all the achievments and as many sidequests as possible. So im pretty much oblivioned out. I never got round to playing kingdom hearts on the ps2 so I put it in my ps2 fire the game up. And my god its horrible, just horrible. The text seems blurry, crappy and borderline unreadable, the textures are washed out. Im sure its a wonderful game, but I just cant go from the wonderful hi res 360 back to standard def gaming. Its just horrible.

In reply to

buzzfunk

Commented on 2006-04-14 05:43:49

I still dont know if i should get the pc ver or 360. Anyone?

In reply to

satoshi

Commented on 2006-04-14 13:34:10

still not impressed....

In reply to

privatejohn

Commented on 2006-04-14 13:56:10

Just wondering, how do you guys record hi-def video? What equipment you need? Cost?

In reply to

futromurzyna

Commented on 2006-04-14 14:15:21

so framerate issue is only in HD?? 480p is smooth? i

In reply to

Prez

Commented on 2006-04-14 15:41:30

I wanted to buy it, but the fact that this game is about 8 hours of gameplay holds me back.

In reply to

boardeaux

Commented on 2006-04-14 16:58:50

buzzfunk, I have the demo for the PC and also the 360 marketplace demo. After playing both, I have to say that I enjoyed the 360 experience much more than the PC (probably because of the screen size --larger TV than Monitor) but both ran fine. I dont know what everyone is talking about with the frame rate... the only studder I noticed was on the PC when swinging with the waterfall behind.. and that was only for a second. I have not noticed any frame issues with the 360 version.

In reply to

alimokrane

Commented on 2006-04-14 18:54:29

The frame issues in the 360 version are extremely minimal ... hardly noticeable. I played the entire game and it runs absolutely fine!

In reply to

buzzfunk

Commented on 2006-04-14 19:15:55

yeah i have the pc demo. I liked it. I didnt know that there was a xbox live demo out...gonna try that right now. ;)

In reply to

Denjinflash

Commented on 2006-04-14 20:59:56

hey this game looks very solid! i'm not a tomb raider fan, but yeah, it looks great. gameplay looks more fun than previous tomb raiders and looks to have a balance of gunfights and puzzles(anyone notice the shenmue qte thing?). graphics are great.

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20 first minutes of Tomb Raider Legend

Video gallery

Video gallery

20 first minutes of Tomb Raider Legend US

20 first minutes of Tomb Raider Legend FR

Tomb Raider Legend: The Croft Mansion

20 first minutes of TRL X360 US

20 first minutes of TRL X360 720p US

All comments (31)

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