Первое:
Lara Croft saves her most lethal makeover look for the 360.
Lara Croft dodges whirling blades, and her nails have never looked better. She bounds between compacting stone walls an instant before they slam shut, and her hair is full of body and bounce. "She's actually got shiny nails," says Senior Producer Matthew Guzenda. "Her lips have their own reflective properties. She has a glint in her eyes."
If you want to see the tomb raider at her most tarted up, you'll need to play the Xbox 360 version of Tomb Raider: Legend, which hits in late spring alongside the PS2 and Xbox incarnations. Crystal Dynamics, who inherited the series after publisher Eidos fired original developer Core, began working on the 360 version a year ago. The priority: Use the peppier hardware in ways other games have not. "We're really happy with what we've been able to do [on the 360]," Guzenda says, "especially looking at the launch titles. Perfect Dark [Zero] looked great, but that was the focus of Microsoft. ["And it was in development for how long?" adds Senior Programmer Sean Skelton.] Call of Duty 2 was the best-looking [launch game], but that was taking a PC title and porting it over. We didn't look at Gun or Tony Hawk, because they didn't really do anything to take advantage of the hardware."
Tomb's Day
So what is the Legend team doing to harness the 360? The usual stuff first: They've reupholstered the environments with techie buzz phrase of the day "normal mapping," a process that adds 3D divots and bumps to every stretch of dirt, rock, and skin. "This generation, it's all about the subtlety," says Skelton. "We can make leather feel like leather. Cloth feel like cloth. Skin feel like skin."
But other 360 games already show off such texture effects. So the team is going one step further and adding a realistic lighting system that makes it fun to frolic in the dark. It's something you don't notice until you see the game in motion, watching Lara dart through the shadows while she in turn casts shadows on her own body and her environment. "I haven't seen anything doing the complexity of shadowing that we are," says Skelton. "We knew from the start that this would be key for us, just because there are so many places where she goes in and out of the dark."
No Valley Girl
While Lara has explored everything from Atlantis to a dino-filled forgotten world in past games, her handlers have drawn the line at letting her trek to one venue in particular: the uncanny valley. It isn't a place; it's the geek-speak term for that forbidden zone in character design where your creation looks real but just fake enough to be creepy. "People will accept models up to a certain point of realism, and then there's the perfectly realistic image," says Associate Producer Elio Rutigliano. "And if you're too close but not perfect, people will notice it in a second."
Skelton gives a recent example in another game. "It's like the Jack Black character in [Ubisoft's] King Kong," he says. "He looks like a dead body. They fell pretty hard into the uncanny valley."
The 360 team doesn't want to go there--a task made tricky because it's easy to craft a too-realistic-looking Lara on the hardware. So they've stuck with the stylized look while still making her character model twice as complex as in the PS2 and Xbox versions. She's also been coated with the same normal mapping as the rest of her game--even if you might not notice. "Most game characters, when you talk about normal maps, they have pockmarks and scars that make it look obvious," says Guzenda. "But Lara has a perfect complexion. It's kind of hard to tell."
A Tale of Three Laras
Although all three console versions of Legend have the same story (Lara is trying to solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance) and gameplay (much-improved controls over previous games, plus a heavier emphasis on tomb-based puzzles), each has its subtle differences.
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Второе:
Does the reinvented Tomb Raider hold up on 360?
Alright, let's get one thing out of the way up front: this is the same game being released on PS2 and Xbox. There will be no extra levels, no bonus modes, and no gameplay differences outside of the Xbox Live Achievements included with every 360 game. But the game is prettier -- a lot prettier.
Perhaps the best way to describe the visual differences between the PS2/Xbox and 360 versions of the game is that the current generation versions have a sort of fantasy, plain shaded look, while the 360 game takes on a more realistic appearance. This look on 360 comes from a lot more detail on series star Lara Croft (stats: 12x the textures of current gen Lara, 2x the polygons), as well as other graphical effects throughout the environments.
One of the most immediately noticeable environment effects is the lighting, both coming from Lara herself when she turns her flashlight on and from the sky above. When combined with the game's real-time shadows, the lighting in the 360 version of the game is extremely powerful. You can swing along a vine and stare in awe at how distinctive the lighting in the game looks -- similar to how it was done in Shadow of the Colossus but less saturated.
The textures used in the environments also add to the realism of it all, adding bumps and veins all over the walls and objects in a style very similar to what we saw in King Kong on 360. While not looking as nice as Lara herself, the environment visuals fit in well with the improved lighting and help the world feel more alive -- especially when combined with the physics in the game. When you place your grappling hook on a pillar and pull it down off a ledge, watching it fall apart realistically, the added details perform quite admirably.
We only got a brief one-level glance at Tomb Raider: Legend on 360 but are relieved to see it's not just a cash-in straight port of the current generation game. While not the kind of current to next-gen jump we're seeing in games like Fight Night, Tomb Raider on 360 is thankfully a much more significant jump that we saw in first-round 360 games like Tony Hawk's American Wasteland and GUN -- and given the quality in general shown in the current generation version of the game over the past few months, that's reason to celebrate indeed.
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Вер, надеюсь я тя сильно не утомлю подкинутой работкой=))) (Только не убивай при встрече)
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