ZarkSeven

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I’ve been literally waiting months for the latest versions of Lara Croft Tomb Raider Anniversary to hit the market.  I played Tomb Raider Legend on the Xbox 360 to death and loved it.  It’s the only 360 game I’ve gotten all 1000 achievement points on.  When Tomb Raider Anniversary came out this summer for the PS2, and snatched it up, hoping for more Lara Croft goodness.  I had only finished Legend a week or two before on the 360 though, and I had a terrible time switching my brain to use the PS2 controller after spending so much time playing Legend on the 360.

I stopped playing the PS2 version when the 360 version was announced, and decided to wait for it.  Then a Wii version was announced with new Wii controls and puzzles.  I figured I’d wait until the 360 and Wii versions were both out.  Online reviews and scores would help me decide which to get, right?  How wrong I was…

The 360 version came out a few weeks ago to moderate reviews.  It was scoring lower on average than the PS2 version did.  But I really didn’t pay too much attention to it, because I wanted to see what the Wii reviews were like.  The Wii version was released this week, and review scores have started trickling in, and so far there is little consistency between review scores between versions.  IGN and Gamespot have weighed in, and both scored the Wii version lower than the 360 version, but it’s difficult to ascertain why.

Gamespot’s reviews are both done by the same reviewer, Ryan Davis.  Gamespot doesn’t give scores for individual compnents (graphics, sound, etc), and he doesn’t mention the 360 version in his Wii review, but he seemed to have some issues with the camera control “without a mouse or a second analog stick to work with.”  Even though the Wii motion controls “lend the game a certain tactile quality,” it didn’t seem to be enough to overcome his issues with the camera, I’m guessing, so he gave the Wii version a 7.0, while he gave the 360 version a 7.5.  So that seems to be a point in favor of the 360 version.

But wait, what the hell is up with IGN’s reviews?  They did not use the same reviewer for both games, and it’s obvious in reading both that there was no coordination between the two reviewers to make their scoring consistent.  The Wii reviewer said that the Wii controls add to the overall experience, yet it scores lower in the ‘Gameplay’ category than the 360. The ‘Graphics’ on the Wii version score higher than the 360 version too. The ’Overall’ score for the Wii was docked ”because little effort has been made to capitalize on the added horsepower of Nintendo’s console. That the framerate regularly suffers in wide-open levels is really disappointing.”  Yet the ‘Overall’ score for the 360 isn’t docked similarly, even though the review of the 360 version says that sunlight makes the game “come to a near screeching halt.”  And unless one platform’s version is vastly inferior, I don’t see how they could score differently in the ‘Lasting Appeal’ category, yet the Wii scores lower, even though “Wii control additions really do add to the experience.”  Huh?

If you read both reviews and look at the final scores, it makes no sense that the overall score for the 360 version is a 7.6 and the overall score for the Wii is a 7.0. IGN should know that readers who own multiple consoles look to their site (and others) to determine which version to buy, and if they don’t use the same reviewer on all versions, they should at least coordinate the points and scores so they make sense.

So now I’m still as much at a loss as ever as to which to buy.  I really like Legend on the 360 and feel that Anniversary would be a similar experience, which makes me lean towards the 360 version.  But the Wii version has some added motion controls that could be really fun for a puzzling-type action game like this.  To top it all off, no one scores Lara Croft Tomb Raider Anniversary as high on the 360 or the Wii as on the PS2, which is the version I originally had trouble with.  *Sigh*  I think I’ll just go play some Super Mario Galaxy.