Lara keeping her head above water

Tooling around with the numbers for Sonic was such Excel spreadsheet fun that I decided to do the same with another venerable series — Tomb Raider. I admit that my perception is that this is a series that has seen some tragic sequels and that as a franchise has been greatly cheapened, like Kain. But it has not been as bad as I thought.

The following chart shows all the Tomb Raider releases for all platforms. The series was a definite decline until the Legend release, which did fairly well across platforms. What jumps out after the Legend release is that Lara doesn’t do well on handhelds. [I debated making that sentence more sexual. ]  Yet, the stronger PC and console releases are not much above average, sometimes stepping a toe over into the ‘good game’ scores.

All Tomb Raider scores

This prompted me to look at the series by platform. I grouped at a high level so that I had some meaningful numbers, although I kept all handhelds as one group, partly because I suspected that they had similar limitations and mainly because I wanted to more fairly compare consoles and the PC versions. When I look at the first graph, I expected to see Playstation releases to fair the best, but it was the Xbox and 360 releases that seemed overall most kind to Lara. Even so the differences among the platforms was not much–excluding the handhelds, the Xbox releases average score is 79.75 while the Nintendo average score is 73.3. Lara performed next best on Sega consoles. followed by the Playstation [76.7] and then the PC [76.6].

Tomb Raiders scores by platform

For a little more number fun, I created charts for all the releases for each platform. These charts tell a more interesting history that the platform average scores can’t tell. Even though Xbox releases had the highest average, the platform has been trending downward for Lara, from 83 to 77. [Note: Reviews for Underworld are still coming in, which is the lowest scoring Tomb game for Xbox.]

Tomb Raider Xbox scores

The same trend is true for the Gamecube and Wii releases.

Tomb Raider Nintendo scores

Overall, the Playstation releases have been somewhat consistent, but the first PS2 release [Angel of Darkness] was the lowpoint for the Playstation.

Tomb Raider PS scores

Similarly, the PC releases have been overall somewhat consistent, except for that Chronicles title in 2000.

Tomb Raider PC scores

And then there are the handheld releases. [There have been no reviews for Underworld for the DS at this time.] There’s no clear pattern or trends, except that perhaps the PSP is the closest to being kind to Lara.

Tomb Raider handheld scores

Conclusion

It’s obvious once again how numbers can be used to argue just about any point. It seems that if you were to take a stab at what platform to buy a Tomb Raider game for, the PC is probably your best bet, followed by the Playstation. These platforms have more consistent scores, while the Nintendo and Microsoft platforms have definitely been getting worse with each release.

[Updated]

Not being much of a platform gamer, I never had the passion for Mario, Donkey Kong, and the like, but Sonic has always intrigued me, largely because of the fan reaction and the discussions of when the series jumped the shark. Rocket Boy’s account of Sonic’s mistreatment is fascinating, and it got me to thinking about . . . numbers because there’s nothing as fun as plugging in numbers to an Excel spreadsheet and seeing what magic blooms.

So, I took the major releases of Sonic games, put them in chronological order, and sought the assistance of another piece of magical number software, gamerankings. And I came up with the line chart of the Sonic series. No, no, that’s not your 401k over the last month.

It’s clear why there’s debate about at what point the series went awry because there are several peaks and valleys, although the series is clearly trending downwards. Sonic 3D Blast is the first notable dive, although it seems that Sonic R often gets a lot of negative attention. But it’s little wonder that 3D is also often regarded as not kind to the series. Games like Sonic Adventure, Sonic Advance, and Sonic Rush lift the series out of mediocrity although nowhere near the level of the first 4 games. But it was Sonic Riders that took the series to a new low where it would stay for the next 4 games. If it weren’t for the 2 DS installments for Sonic, the Series would seem to be entrenched in poor scores.

As for when Sonic jumped the shark, I think it’s the Sonic Riders title. While Ted McGinley doesn’t appear in this game, it’s clear that the series plunged into a definite subpar existence. While the series had low points before Riders, it was less of an acute drop, even nearly flat, from which fans could hope for a return to the salad days.

I started to map out the scores by platform, but I think it’s fairly obvious even from the graph above. The Sega platforms were the most kind to Sonic, and the Gameboy Advance and the DS have been the best platforms for the series since those Sega consoles. All the peaks after Sonic R are either Dreamcast, GBA, or DS games, which would indicate that, like Megaman, Sonic should be confined to 2D. Also, unlike Star Trek movies, the odd numbers [2001, 2005, 2007] are generally better years for Sonic games.

By this data, it seems the forthcoming [today!] Sonic Unleashed will be a disappointment.

Update: And it is.