I'd love to see what that Serenity print looks like in HD, though. Bastards.

I wrapped up Tomb Raider last night, I suppose I should be clear and say that I wrapped up Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Legend: Suffix, and I think that Crystal Dynamics made a game here that is more than good enough to help you forget some of the silly garbage that is in there for no reason. I don't want to make a huge deal of it, but in a game this good otherwise this motorcycle stuff simply had no right being there. I understand that games need to be a certain length, I do, but the next time you need to pack in some Goddamn fluff or something, make a heavy stone gate that slowly opens over the course of forty-five minutes. A lot of this ancient shit is pretty decrepit nowadays, nobody's expecting a fucking turbo lift.

I ended up playing it on the PC, but using one of your (ordinarily, quite distasteful!) wired 360 controllers. The twenty dollars I saved buying the PC version over the next-gen product made my trials below ground seem almost sensible in their way. There are things about Lara Croft that have always just been inherently kind of nonsensical, the exhibitionist countess with the Daisy Dukes on, and even though some of the visual touchstones remain - out of homage or brand identity - Legend actually makes sense of the series and her place in it. This came as a surprise. So yes, I said mean things, and the game is short. It's also great, and they deserve the franchise if they're going to treat it with this kind of care.

I was interested to read an interview with the man who designed Lara Croft, where he makes it clear that their Tomb Raidin' gameplay - which is to say, the enclosed subterranean holes we associate most directly with the series - was largely a function of technology limitations. I found this fascinating. As hardware increased in power, what it actually enabled them to do was create spaces that felt less and less authentic to Tomb Raider fans!  The limitations themselves helped to create what we think of as "classic" gameplay, here and elsewhere.

This Nyko Thing seems, on the surface, to be the spigot whence flows a clarified sort of pimp juice. We had always fantasized about about making an authentic faceplate for the 360, no doubt hewn from imported plastics, but after I got that "wood grain" model I saw no reason to change it ever again. The official plates are significant chunks of plastic that feel like real additions to the console when you "install" them. That said, a customizable shell that contains user created designs, along with printer-friendly templates and a free, cross-platform app to create designs? Yes, I think so. We just picked a couple up, and the shell itself feels solid but the matte paper their templates are made of sucks up a lot of the vibrancy and clarity of a design. We'll goof around with it for a while, and I'll tell you what we come up with.

(CW)TB out.

another personal disaster

So I installed Boot Camp on my MacBook yesterday. I had read a few articles saying that people playing games under Windows on the new Intel Macs saw a “20% performance increase”. That number doesn’t mean anything to me so I figured I should test it out myself.

Boot Camp is a pretty slick program. Once it is installed it lets you partition your drive a then it burns a disk for you with all the drivers you will need to make XP run on your Mac. You go through a standard Windows install and then you throw your driver disk in and boom it just works. Once I had XP on it was time to test it out and that meant installing WOW.

So for reference here are the stats on my MacBook:

MacBook Pro
2 GHZ Intel Core Duo
2 GB Memory
Radeon X1600

I’m running WOW at 1440 x 900 with all my graphic settings jacked all the way up. I’ve got spell effects and textures and all that good stuff up as high as it can go. With these settings under OS X I hovered between 15 and 20 FPS. It was just barley playable but for raids and stuff I’d drop down to a lower resolution and take off a few of the fancy effects. Now on the same laptop, but running under Windows with the same crazy settings I averaged between 35 and 40 FPS. That’s a pretty fucking big difference in my book. It was even able to maintain that frame rate in major cities and in a raid out in SS.

So if you’re thinking about giving Bootcamp a try now you have some hard numbers to consider. I may try and get steam on there today and check out Half Life 2 just to see how it runs. On one hand I’m pretty impressed with the machine. It’s a hell of a laptop. On the other hand I’m disappointed that I can’t get that kind of performance under OS X. I honestly prefer using OS X at this point and it was sort of nice to have a game I could play that didn’t require me to go upstairs and start up my Windows box. But it runs twice as fast under Windows for fucks sake. I can’t ignore that.

There’s a pretty big interview with us over at CGW and we’ll have a new podcast up this afternoon.

-Gabe out

About a dozen people have pointed me towards this article or one similar to it. Apparently Apple is underclocking the X1600 in the MacBook Pro in order to reduce noise and extend battery life. I’ve been told you can return it to it’s factory settings with some tools but I have not tried yet. Interesting stuff.

-Gabe out

A new episode of Downloadable Content - The Penny Arcade Podcast has been made available. As always, you can subscribe to our iTunes compatible feed here.

Show Notes for 04/19/2006 - Treachery in 1080i:

F.E.A.R. On 360?
Gears Of War In November?
Hawk and Ananth From Applegeeks
Writers Named For Getting Up Film

(CW)TB