You know what I love? Acting. I love games that encourage me to treat the world like a stage and my playable character like a role to perform. I love not using my character as a mere tool to do what I want to do, but doing what I think my character would do.

When a game makes me feel like I should act out the role of the character, it gets me out of the mindset that I should play in the ‘perfect’ or ‘most efficient’ way, and instead makes me feel like I should play in the way that best strengthens my own version of the story.

Documents released as part of Square Enix’s financial statement show a company disappointed by Tomb Raider‘s sales of 3.4 million, a number substantially below the 5-6 million they were aiming for.

“We put considerable amount of effort into polishing and perfecting game content for these titles,” reads the statement (PDF), “receiving extremely high Metacritic scores.”

“However we were very disappointed to see that high scores did not translate to actual sales performance.”

Hitman: Absolution similarly underperformed, selling 3.6 million of the 4.5 – 5 million Square Enix were hoping for, and Sleeping Dogs only cracked 1.75 when Square Enix were hoping for 2 – 2.5.

Late last month Square Enix warned it was expecting “an extraordinary loss” in company profit, and their CEO Yoichi Wada stepped down. It’s a genuine shame that these games have performed under expectation, as Square Enix have shown that they’re capable of publishing some top-quality games with excellent PC support.

Source: Eurogamer

Back in the nineties, Lara Croft was actually a man. Yet Larry Croft never saw the light of day, because one sex symbol named Larry was quite enough. Okay, well, actually, Tomb Raider’s creators vetoed him for being too similar to Indiana Jones. Then, they went back to the drawing board.

This hasn’t stopped other developers from copying Indy, however. In The Secret World, my character wields a whip. She found the whip by using a “time tomb”, called the “TARDIS”. She also has a fancy fedora hat. The other day, she wielded her whip, while wearing her hat, riding on a train to recover an ark. The ark, after all, belongs in a museum.

That quest was great fun, but the obvious ripoffness of at least three IPs got me thinking: how far can a game go in blatantly copying someone else? We all know how paranoid publishers can get about gamers copying games. So what gives with the double standards?

NVIDIA have released GeForce 314.22 drivers for you to download, claiming a boost of up to 41% in BioShock Infinite and an astonishing 71% in Tomb Raider.

“Other highlights include single-GPU and SLI performance improvements of up to 30% in Civilization V, 22% in Sniper Elite V2, and 12% in Sleeping Dogs,” reads the announcement. “314.22 WHQL also includes SLI profiles for Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter, Resident Evil 6, and Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army; 3D Vision profiles for Brutal Legend, MUD, and Tomb Raider; and a NVIDIA Control Panel Ambient Occlusion profile for BioShock Infinite.”

Head on over our file library (or to the GeForce website) and grab them for yourself.

Source: GeForce (Thanks, PalZer0)

And that’s about all we know! The trademark filing, which you can see here, was discovered by Silicon Era and lists the usual broad range of trademark-application subjects, including everything electronic under the sun and some other things besides.

Crystal Dynamics recently confirmed that they have no plans for single-player Tomb Raider DLC at the moment, and ‘Lara Croft: Reflections’ sure doesn’t sound like any multiplayer game I’d want to play (and why would they name it ‘Lara Croft’ instead of ‘Tomb Raider’?). So what is it then? Mysteries abound!

In the meantime if you’re still on the fence about Tomb Raider, why not check out our massive two-person video review?

Source: SiliconEra

A Reddit AMA thread with Crystal Dynamics global brand director Karl Stewart and creative director Noah Hughes has revealed that more of Lara’s single-player experiences aren’t likely to be released in DLC form.

“There are currently no plans in place for any Single Player expansions,” said Stewart.

“All of our DLC is based around the Multiplayer experience for now.”

Hughes also revealed that outfit packs have been ruled out as well, saying: “There are not currently plans for a classic outfit DLC. We did try to have a lot of nods to the classics in this reboot, and even her outfit itself is intended to evoke her classic outfit in a way, but is more practical for her situation.”

Focusing on the multiplayer side of the game for DLC seems like a poor decision, especially since the single-player side is so strong. Check out our video review for more.

Source: Videogamer

The promised fixes for NVIDIA owners trying (and failing) to play Tomb Raider have now begun to roll out, with the company working hand-in-hand with Crystal Dynamics to solve the issues preventing people from playing what is a thoroughly impressive game.

Users of Windows 8, 7 and Vista 64-bit versions should download theirs from here, and users of 32-bit versions should get theirs from here instead. NVIDIA are also offering a Windows XP 32-bit download here.

Additional downloads and more info can be found at this NVIDIA thread.

Crystal Dynamics’ reboot of one of gaming’s most beloved franchises left us with a quandrary: do we review it from the point of view of the new audience it was intended for, or as the hard-core fan who has been with Lara since the start? So here at games.on.net, we decided — why not both?

I don’t know about you, but Tomb Raider on PC is actually rather pretty, isn’t it? While I’ve had the odd graphical weirdness on my GTX670 and one or two crashes, it’s mostly been smooth and very pretty sailing. For some people however, especially on SLI cards, things haven’t been quite so smooth.

The latest patch, which you should restart Steam to get if you haven’t got it already, should hopefully address a few of these crash issues as well as improve the efficiency of TRESSFX rendering (which I personally turned off as it looks like Lara’s hair is possessed by the devil).

Check out the notes below:

(more…)

We’ve already experienced the occasional crash and weird graphical artefact while trying to play Tomb Raider on our GTX670 here, and NVIDIA are on the case — but they need to collaborate with Crystal Dynamics to clean it up.

“We are aware of major performance and stability issues with GeForce GPUs running Tomb Raider with maximum settings,” claims NVIDIA’s Andrew Burnes on the GeForce web site. “Unfortunately, NVIDIA didn’t receive final code until this past weekend which substantially decreased stability, image quality and performance over a build we were previously provided. We are working closely with Crystal Dynamics to address and resolve all game issues as quickly as possible.”

Burnes also clarified that they would need time to collaborate with Crystal Dynamics on the fix. “Please be advised that these issues cannot be completely resolved by an NVIDIA driver. The developer will need to make code changes on their end to fix the issues on GeForce GPUs as well. As a result, we recommend you do not test Tomb Raider until all of the above issues have been resolved.”

“In the meantime, we would like to apologize to GeForce users that are not able to have a great experience playing Tomb Raider, as they have come to expect with all of their favorite PC games.”

Even though EB Games broke the street date on the console versions of Tomb Raider literally five days ago, and PC versions have been unlocked for about 24 hours, Tomb Raider actually launches today. And, already, a new movie deal has been announced.

Speaking to Variety, the head of Crystal Dynamics Darrell Gallagher confirmed the existence of a movie reboot, based around this younger, more inexperienced Lara. GK Films and Crystal Dynamics are said to be collaborating on the project.

“They are working from this new take that we’ve given them.” said Gallagher. “It’s a good partnership. We’re seeing the challenges through the same lens. It was important for both of us to have a cohesive version of the franchise. We didn’t want to see a film version that was a continuation of the old ‘Tomb Raider’ films.”

How are you finding Tomb Raider so far, and what do you make of the new TRESSFX hair? (We turned it off as soon as possible.)

Source: Variety

Footage from the PC version of Tomb Raider has finally surfaced on the internet following its unlocking on Steam a short time ago. In the video below, uploaded to YouTube by EzioCroft, we can see Lara’s hair swinging around with the new TressFX hair rendering system from AMD in action. It looks nice, but… perhaps a bit too exaggerated? Hard to tell right now — what do you think?

Source: All Games Beta