21st Century Digital Boy

So I bought Tomb Raider: Anniversary recently. On the Wii. After they heard about that, friends of mine mentioned that Eurogamer slagged it very bad. I was worried for a bit, until I actually played the game.

I’ve played to about halfway through the Egypt episode now, and I’m afraid I’ll have to be a dick and disagree with Mrs. Gibson’s rather controversial statements such as

As for the Wii version… I never thought it would come to this, but here we are: I’d rather play Angel of Darkness.

or

The shooting in TRA Wii just doesn’t work. The remote is ridiculously sensitive; the blue dot on the screen jiggles nervously even when your hand is absolutely still.

I’ll have to agree on the point that the cursor does jiggle a fair lot – however, for all I can tell the wiimote is no more sensitive than in any other game. The difference, and a very noticable one at first, is that the cursor movement isn’t “smoothed out”. You know what I mean – most Wii games smooth the movement of the cursor to prevent the “jiggling” that Ellie describes. TRA doesn’t, which feels weird at first, but I’ve actually come to like it, possibly even better than the heavy smoothing most Wii games (Mario Galaxy, for example) apply – if only because the cursor doesn’t feel “laggy” this way.

Either way, I honestly don’t see where this causes problems with the game, since there is a rather heavy aiming assistance for everything involving the cursor. If you lock on to an enemy or target, the camera will (usually) keep them on the screen, leaving you with the task of dodging their attacks and pointing the cursor within a rough 10cm distance of them so you can hit them. The same holds true for shooting targets, with the exception that those don’t move around.

Now I haven’t played the 360 or PS2 versions of TRA, but I have honestly not had any problems at all with the controls in the Wii version. Nor the camera, for that matter – the camera can be turned with the cursor when holding C (the upper nunchuck button). Much like the lack of cursor smoothing, this feels a bit odd at first but works surprisingly well, giving you full control over the camera on a console that doesn’t have a secondary analog stick to control it with. Moreover, if you hold C and Z on the nunchuck, you get freelook AND target highlighting, which is excellent for scanning your surroundings for stuff to shoot. Aside from enemies sometimes passing behind objects and the camera not turning quite fast enough to keep up with them when they run past you, I have yet to experience any of the camera issues described in the Eurogamer review. Much like in Legend, the camera pretty much always helpfully turns to show you where you’re supposed to go next.

They ruined [the T-Rex battle] in the first versions of Anniversary with the bright lighting and the boring cut-scene and the Quick Time Event nonsense… It’s the same in the Wii version, except instead of pressing buttons you wave the remote and Nunchuk as directed. It feels silly.

I’ll actually go and say that unlike Ellie, I really like the gimmicky added Wii controls – such as having to tilt the wiimote backwards to pull levers or holding the nunchuck and wiimote facing each other and pulling them down to pull levers with handles, or having an “off hand” grappling hook activate with a flick of the nunhuck – thus not requiring you to move your fingers to another button in mid-jump. The rhythmic button pressing from Legend is also back in slightly modified shape. Instead of mashing A, you flick the nunchuck back and forth to speed up climbing, swimming or shimmying – a motion that long-term fans of the series should have little problem making while gaming.

What, did you think I could write about a Tomb Raider game without making a joke like that?

My main gripe with the “added” “puzzles” in the Wii version is that their implementation is rather… hamfisted. It’s the same two basic puzzles (a Lights Out!-style switch puzzle and a Connect-The-Gears puzzle), which would be fine if they hadn’t just done three variants/default setups on each and put the clue/item needed to solve them right bloody next to the puzzle itself. A bit more effort with this would have gone a fairly long way – just simply spreading the gears to pick up out a bit further, or moving the hint two rooms ahead instead of mounting it conveniently next to the puzzle mechanism, just, you know, things to make it seem less like they just carved out a niche and dropped Puzzle Prefab #2 into it in their level editor.

The graphics are as good as those in the PS2 game, though there’s a disgraceful amount of frame-dropping going on.

Again, an issue I can’t really say I noticed. I haven’t played the PS2 version so I can’t make adequate comparisons about the graphics, but I don’t really notice any significant slowdowns. The game doesn’t run at 60fps, but the framerate has been almost exclusively solidly playable for me so far. The only point where I did experience notable slowdowns was the Damocles chamber. I don’t quite see why, since there’s not an incredible amount of detail here, but I’m going to guess that it’s the sheer size of the room that makes the Wii sweat a bit.

All in all, I can only summarise that while the “problems” described in the Eurogamer review are indeed all present and in the game, I feel that their impact on the game is heavily exaggerated (if I’d even consider them to be a problem at all). Despite what the review says, I feel that the Wii version of Tomb Raider Anniversary, too, is an excellent re-imagining of an excellent game, and it’s refreshing to see a multiplatform game actually have some differences on a platform that’s different from others without completely redesigning it. It could’ve done with a bit more work put into the added puzzles, but doesn’t suffer too much.