Games Inbox: How old school will Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis be?

The Tuesday letters page muses over Rockstar’s peculiar last few months, as one reader is dubious about Marathon’s future prospects.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@metro.co.uk

Third time lucky
So, we’ve probably all seen the pics of Sophie Turner as Lara Croft by now and if there’s one thing you can say about it, it’s that it’s unexpectedly old school. That look was outdated even before the first movie, so that is a very big decision to go back right to the source for the show.

I don’t know, and I don’t much care, what the show will be like, but my question is will the games be going back that far as well? The remake (or reimaging, as they put it) Tomb Raider: Legacy Of Atlantis looked pretty old school but you couldn’t really tell from the trailer.

Will they have the old-fashioned grid movement? I doubt that. But what about the style of platforming, where it was like rock climbing mixed in with Zelda like puzzles? Will it be like that again? Combat was a really small part of the original game, and it had no stealth, but will they try and change that?

What will Lara be like? Will Sophie Turner voice her and will she be quippy or boring? I have a lot of questions and the game’s going to be out this year. But my hopes are high that it’s going to be the new reboot (the third?) the series really needs.
Grackle

Busy few months
Well, that was not the sort of headline I expected to see for GTA 6. When I saw the news about an explosion at Rockstar North’s offices I’m sure I’m not the only one that thought a fan had gone and done something crazy. The story of it being a boiler explosion sounded a bit Scooby-Doo to me at first, but I guess it is winter and it is Edinburgh. I’m assuming there’s no updates on exactly what’s happened?

So much seems to be going on at Rockstar right now I think the reader a few days ago is right and the chances of another delay are creeping up. If morale was bad because of all the protesting over union busting I can’t imagine what it’s like after an actual act of god strikes the HQ.

Now, what are the bets that this turns up in the game in one way or another, as a mission or at least a message on the radio or something.
Xane

GC: As far as anyone’s saying at the moment, it was just an exploding boiler and nothing more.

Direct demand
I have to agree that Nintendo’s attitude to Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been very odd. I didn’t realise they stopped support so soon, which seems madness given how well it sold. Now they have people assuming that whatever comes next will be badly supported too, while they missed out on million of sales because everyone already knew the game was dead.

And for what? So they could make a barely different Switch 2 version five years later? There’s got to be a Nintendo Direct in February, because I feel opinion is really turning against the Switch 2 at the moment. The console is fine, but the games line-up has got nothing to get people excited about at the moment. It’s all very strange.
Housane

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Flight of fancy
It’s a shame that leak of Project Blackbird didn’t have any gameplay footage, because I’d love to have seen the game that was so good that Phil Spencer couldn’t stop playing it… until he did and cancelled it.

Despite all the fuss over Cyberpunk 2077 I don’t feel we’ve really got that kind of vertical city before in a game, at least not in a good modern one. That kind of Fifth Element and Coruscant type of sci-fi, where it’s not really grounded but more an exaggeration of what things are likely to be.

For some reason that’s got me thinking of G-Police on the PS1, where you were flying around a kind of Blade Runner like city. I always wanted a sequel to that with decent tech, because you don’t get much flying around in modern games. I hope GTA 6 has a jetpack in it again, but one that can let you get around a bit more easily.
Goose

Unsung heroes
I’m glad to see that Rockstar are good enough to give a dying fan their wish. It’s nice to see they have a heart because most of the time they just come across as this unreadable wall. They never do interviews, there’s almost nobody that works there now whose name I know, now all the top writers left, and yet there’s half a dozen studios and we never find out anything about any of them.

I don’t understand it but I’m sure it’s some kind of evil business decision. So you get attached to the brand and not the individual, I guess. It probably worked too, because I didn’t see a ton of people flocking to buy MindsEye or whatever it is that Dan Houser is doing now. Maybe that would’ve been different if they’d been household names by this point.
Clooney

Sent to die
I would be very interested to hear from any reader that is interested in Marathon because I don’t think I have heard a single person mention it outside of news stories. The game has zero hype, which means that I haven’t heard anything negative or anything positive about it. I just don’t think anyone cares even a little bit.

I don’t especially blame them either, because even with the controversy there is nothing interesting about the artwork and I have no idea what the story is supposed to be. Despite seeming such a non-entity though it probably cost hundreds of millions to make and will be the end of Bungie if it’s a flop.

I’ve been wondering why Sony even let it be published, since they’ve had plenty of chances to cancel it, but then I began to wonder if they want it to fail, as an excuse to get rid of Bungie.

I guess they don’t really need an excuse, since it belongs to them, but they’ve seemed to regret buying them right from the start. What a sad story that will end up being: become famous making Marathon on Mac, get bought by Microsoft to make Halo, get bought by Activision to make Destiny, get bought by Sony to make Marathon. The End.
Tibbett

GC: Activision never bought them; it was just a publishing deal for Destiny.

Zombie Revelation
This recent talk of talking zombies in Resident Evil Requiem just goes to show how few people have actually played Resident Evil Revelations.

Who could forget the comms officer repeating, ‘Mayday Mayday. This is the Queen Zenobia’ and ‘Stop it. I’m human’ as it (he?) proceeds to one-hit kill you with a misshapen mutated chainsaw for an arm? Shudder.
Ali K

GC: Technically, they weren’t classed as zombies in that game, but Ooze. Although we do agree the two Revelations games are underrated.

Restart the lines
I think what these analysts are not saying about the RAM problem for PCs at the moment is that it’s going to affect all consoles, and not just the next gen ones. If RAM is scarce that means it’s hard to get hold of for the PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 as well (and I guess Xbox, but I’m assuming Microsoft isn’t making too many of those nowadays).

As if things couldn’t be even weirder at the moment for gaming, we could find this generation going on for longer than expected but consoles actually becoming quite difficult to get hold of. I imagine they’ve been pumping out the Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 as quickly as possible at the moment, while it’s still possible, but it sounds like by later this year there could be real problems.

I don’t know what affect that’s going to have on gaming, and I’m sure nobody else does either, but I don’t think many will complain if this generation is left to steep a big longer. In theory it shouldn’t ruin any plans either, as most PlayStation 6 games were probably planned as cross-gen anyway.

I’ve got one of each console, so you could say I won’t be affected, but strangely all this just makes me want to go retro and remind myself of simpler times. If they can’t manufacture more modern consoles maybe they could start up the Mega Drive production lines again. I bet they don’t use much RAM!
Cranston

GC: The PlayStation 5 has 16 GB of RAM; the Mega Drive had 64 KB.

Inbox also-rans
I keep meaning to go somewhere where I can try out a VR headset, but I’ve never got round to it. I guess I could well go to my grave without ever playing one or VR ever becoming the ‘future of gaming’.
Focus

Whatever happened to those rumours about Final Fantasy 9 getting a remaster? They seemed pretty certain and then everything went quiet. I was looking forward to that.
Goku9

GC: It was never mentioned again. Either the rumours were wrong or, as often happens, the game was cancelled somewhere along the way.

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