Lara Croft's Boobs

After hardly using our Playstation II for a while, I recently rented the latest Tomb Raider, The Angel of Darkness. I was a fan of the earlier games because they combined action and puzzle solving in a seemingly endless world. Even though the older games were chunkier on the original Playstation, the world and the game play held together pretty well. And at the time the games were some of the best and most popular. Of course countless articles have been written about Lara Croft's physical appearance and her appeal to adolescent boys, as well as her possible ability to act as a role model for girls who can be tough and solve problems. I'm going to spare you the post-modern post-feminist essay about her boobs, but still, this review is largely centered around them.

Somehow in the long gestation period of the latest installment, Eidos and/or Core have lost the plot. They re-invented the control system which has been almost universally been trashed by the critics, and the game is full of bugs. While I know nothing about the internal workings at Core, I suspect that there must have been some serious development problems because even though the ship date slipped countless times, the game still has so many painfully basic bugs that I can't imagine that it was released under happy circumstances.

The real give away to the depth of the problems is Lara's boobs. In general the animation in the cut scenes and the game itself is marginal. It has no weight and you can tell that no real animators were involved in the process. In fact when she does something simple like turn in place, her feet slide on the ground like a giant was turning a barbie doll or a chess piece around. However, when Lara moves quickly, her boobs are slavishly animated so that they sway and bounce. You can just see some pimply-faced sex-starved 20 year old spending hours tweaking the code so that they moved just right. Perhaps Core even hired some well-endowed woman to do some motion capture with a dozen tracking points per breast.

By being on PS2, of course the graphics can be less chunky than they were on the older games, but yet, in any given scene it seems like a disproportionate number of polygons are dedicated to T and A instead of the backgrounds. Many "cylindrical" shapes are still extruded octagons, and hanging chains still look like they're made of paper.

Though they aren't willing to spend any more polygons, they do love their textures. Every single surface has the texture mapping disease. It's the "because we can" school of computer graphics where no object is allowed to be a solid color - they all have some pattern on them. I would love to see a game where shapes are rendered more by line weight, light and shadow than by texture. Something that looks like an old comic book, or a cell-painted cartoon. In a way all computer graphics start to fail when they strive to be too "real" because then our highly tuned eyes pick out all the flaws, consciously or not. Pixar is one of the best 3D CGI companies around, and yet the people and animals don't succeed the way the toys do. The toys are stylized and obviously cartoon characters. It's also easier to render plastic and metal than it is to make skin look real.

I'm getting a little off the track here, because Core couldn't even manage to make Lara walk properly let alone get into the finer points of extending the art of video games. For that we have to go back to Ico, which is still my favorite. ever.

Comments

[Xpert]

Article is Good.
Plz Send me Lara's Nude Boobs Pics

[andrew]

this is the best porno i have seen in ages

[Kurtis Trent]

Lara Croft has nice tits.

[OwnsTits]

This game sucks donkey dick.
I know I'm late on this but damn does it suck. And as a "female gamer" I gotta say PS2 is a yawn except for Katamari Damacy. I don't need my game console to double as a masturbation aid, so I mostly stick to my GC.