Tomb Raider (Saturn vs PS1 vs N-gage vs GBA) comparison

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I have dedicated myself to making this comparison because a version of Tomb Raider has recently been published using the OpenLara engine for GBA in which I was impressed.

OpenLara is an open source project of the engine of the first Tomb Raider that has been adapted to multiple platforms, but of all the published versions, the GBA version is a very peculiar case. XProger had already been developing this version for a long time but it has been improving and optimizing it and the result is spectacular.

In this comparison I put the GBA version that is currently still in alpha phase to the Sega Saturn, PS1 and Nokia N-gage (symbian based) versions. This last device was the one in which Nokia wanted to enter the market for portable game consoles, trying to clearly compete with the most popular console of the moment, the GBA. Between all the versions, the PS1 and Sega Saturn versions are very identical except for the color palette, performance and slightly the polygon amount, since in Sega Saturn the graphics look a bit darker and the framerate is slightly lower compared to the PS1 version. The N-gage version was impressive for its time and was pretty much one of the few games to take advantage of the device's potential, but it was also criticized for the lack of cut-scenes, sound effects, and the framerate and draw distance are slightly lower than home consoles.

Now focusing on the GBA version, it is impressive that it can run it in an acceptable way having an ARM7 processor at only 16 MHz, because the Nokia N-gage had an ARM9 processor at 104MHz and even then it didn't take advantage of its full potential, because in GBA we have even additional sound effects and music missing from the N-gage version, no one expected the GBA to be able to run a full 3D game smoothly, the closest I've seen is CARS-matternational or Driv3r. Of course, the framerate is lower compared to the rest of platforms, hovering between 9-18 fps and 30 fps in the menus and the same applies to the draw distance, as well as some elements of the game, but it is quite good to be just an alpha version as well as being on a console that seemed impossible to port and is fully playable.

It must be remembered that the GBA also has the capacity to reproduce cut-scenes, since some games already had them, but there were also Game Boy Advance video series cartridges in which they brought complete episodes such as Pokémon or SpongeBob, the problem that would happen here as it happened with the Nintendo 64, is the storage of their game paks, as the maximum size a GBA game can be is 32MB.