You could pay Sony $20 to play the PS2 version of Tomb Raider: Legend, or you could save your cash and run it on your own emulator for free

Emulation is a dirty word in the world of gaming, except when it comes to big studios expecting to cash in on a port of a much-loved title. While emulation is often frowned upon if you do it at home, Sony’s recent port of Tomb Raider Legend took the original PS2 ROM and made a right old mess with the game running at 480p and locked to 30fps.

PS5 versions of PS2 games like Tomb Raider: Legend have come under intense criticism from gamers who expected a lot more for the $20 price tag for the re-release for example, especially when you consider you can pick up the PC version for less than a dollar at some places.

Tomb Raider was a staple of the PlayStation 2 heyday when studios took time to craft and build their narratives and used the limitations of the time to create a classic. Studios in 2024 can’t match those levels, much like an Art Deco building that was raised in the Industrial Revolution can’t be replicated in the era of paper-thin walls and prefabricated materials. What we can do however is emulate the games ourselves better in under two minutes than what Sony is charging for here (as long as we have a legitimate copy of the original game disc of course.)

You just can’t match the masterwork of time, effort, and making that leap to introduce something new to an audience crying out for a new IP or adventure but you could at least make it run half-decently.

So why would you bother with this latest cash grab? Here’s some advice, don’t do that unless you are absolutely desperate to play it on your PS5. Even if you have an old Windows laptop lying around, save yourself some cash and install PCSX2.

Emulation is increasingly the port of call for gamers looking to revisit the classic titles that shaped the current PlayStation stable.

Entire forums are dedicated to the craft and, as we covered the PCSX2 is doing a better job of presenting the old titles than the modern studios churning out a rehashed bash at an old game.

Studios get smaller, the expectations stay the same, and all the while the games of yesteryear stay firmly on their pedestal. Or in some cases, behind the glass for an emergency cash boost when the end product of recent releases isn’t matching up to twenty-year-old classics.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Tomb Raider: Legend feel like they are being played through dishwater and the pleasure of doing so is well above the $20 bracket. The use case of a PlayStation 2 emulator running on the hardware of a PlayStation 5 should be much better in appearance and gameplay.

Sadly either the studios can’t match the expectations an emulator can provide, won’t invest the time, or they just take gamers and their wallets for granted. No matter which one is correct, still results in the sad fact that PlayStation 5 ports aren’t a patch on what we can do ourselves on a free bit of software.

We recently gave a rundown of our top PlayStation 2 games and some remain the pinnacle of game design. Recurring trips to Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, and of course Lara Croft continue this trend of looking backward whilst a game studio can’t hit the high watermark left by the past.

That doesn’t mean you can’t travel back in time for free and keep a place in your heart for these classics but maybe it would be better if the studios left it up to us to sort out.

The post You could pay Sony $20 to play the PS2 version of Tomb Raider: Legend, or you could save your cash and run it on your own emulator for free appeared first on ReadWrite.