Written by: Bodhruj Jaman;
Date: Friday, August 8th, 2008;
Filed under: Featured, PS3, Reviews;
Tagged with: adventure, classic, Comparison, gameplay, genre, original, Playstation 3, ps1, PS3, tomb raider, uncharted, video games.
Comments:

This month’s ‘Monthly Beef’ is going to be a little different, because I’m going to pit a classic against a future classic, whihc might be hard on me, but we might also get a little useful information from it. I’m going to make it simple for myself and compare the original Tomb Raider (a la PSone) to Uncharted, which is obviously the first in the Uncharted series (if there will be one). There’s obviously no point in comparing graphics, because obviously the PS3 holds much greater graphical power than the PS1.

	Gameplay	Originality	Story	Depth (detail)	Sales (units)	Prospective sales (units)	Average(/10)
Uncharted	8	7	10	8	1.73m (so far)	5m	8.6/10
Tomb Raider	8	9	10	8	4.45m	N/A	8.78/10

Gameplay

Gameplay is basically ease of use, creativity of the controls and… that’s about it. Both games have good control systems, with small flaws so I gave them both equal scores of 8, although I could have easily given them both 7 or 9 (it doesn’t really matter).

Originality

This is partly originality of the storyline, the gameplay systems and the game in general. For example: in Uncharted it is quite obvious that you’re meant to collect those little bits of treasure, they’re a kind of collectable which just make the game a little longer and more fun. Tomb Raider has a similar dimension, so I gave TR the dominance because that had this feature first.

Story

Pretty obvious, really: The characters, the storyline, the background history/factual information. I gave both the games the top score of 10 as they both have true historical references but add and twist to make them original to their own games. Again, I could have scored them both 9 or 8 or 7.

Depth

Basically the detail of the game, including the story, the graphical details etc. I kept in mind the PS1’s graphical capacities so I gave both games an equal score of 8 because they both have incredibly deep storylines as well as showing loads of detail in the actual gameplaying mode.

Sales/Prospective sales

These are just based on facts found from the web, if they’re incorrect or inaccurate, just let me know and I’ll fix that up. I’ve put up a Prospective sales column because Uncharted hasnt reached it’s full potential in terms of sales yet, so I gave it a 18 month lifespan and calculated a rough estimate of the sales at the end of 18 months

Hopefully, you’ll realise thatthe original is always better, and it is sometimes just that little tweak that makes a game better. Thanks for reading!

PS: If you disagre with any of the data I’ve published, just let me know through a comment below or e-mail me: Contact.