Old School Game, Old School Annoyances…..

Routine kind of day today. Woke up, went to work, came home. Nothing really of note to talk about in depth. Oh, except Becca made a fantastic croissant/cream/wild turkey desert thingy. Kind of like bread and butter pudding, but with croissants, and wild turkey, strangely! Bloody gorgeous!

My major talking point to day settles with Tomb Raider: Anniversary for the 360, but it could just as well be any platform I suppose. If you dont know, this is a remake of the original Tomb Raider for the original Playstation (and about a million other formats), and I find myself getting extremely frustrated with it. Whereas the last Lara Croft game (Tomb Raider: Legend) had a pretty decent story, and had some good puzzles, this game kills you. Lots of times. Lots….. It does have puzzles, but theyre so dumb the answer practically beats you over the head (king midas statue turns stuff to gold. you collect lead ingots…..slots on the wall only accept GOLD ingots….hmmmmm?!?!) Its not the puzzles that frustrate, its the perfectly reproduced spectacle of pixel perfect jumps. I know I have to jump from here to there. I know what to do, but I dont have the willpower, or patience to watch onscreen Lara plummet to her inevitable doom every 20 seconds or so. It really isnt conducive to my improving the longevity of the game, and I just end up switching it off. Collision detection is also a another area where there are problems. Trying to navigate a room with spikes that pop up from the floor with a constantly moving camera is damn hard. If Lara grazes the edge of spikes that are already raised from the floor, which are a good foot or 2 above your head, then you warp 2 feet into the air and “onto” the spikes and its instant death.What also isnt helping is that according to the in game stats, Im 43% of the way through the main game, and if you check out my gamercard on the right, you’ll see that this feat has earned me a whopping 10 achievement points. Wow. So now I have FIFA 08 which I dont play as it gets me mad, Tomb Raider which gets me mad and a couple of 1st class FPS multiplayer games that Im generally too tired to play. Oh well, I’ll have to re-learn the story and controls for Mass Effect. Thats the only problem with RPG’s…..if for whatever reason you stop playing htem half way through, youre screwed when you go back to them .Not a clue what to do, who to see and where to go. I may just crack open the Wii this weekend and buy Mario Galaxy. I feel as though I need my faith restoring in gaming at the moment, and from what I read, even in the most fickle of gaming magazines, this is hailed as a revelation. Getting games back to being fun, and not hyper realistic, hyper challenging anger sessions.