Eidos looking into Tomb Raider Wii bug

By Tom Bramwell Published 26 November, 2008

Lara forced to load from earlier save.

Eidos is investigating a glitch that stops players making progress in the Wii version of Tomb Raider: Underworld.

According to scattered reports and threads on the official forum, a horizontal bar that doubles as a lever is failing to appear towards the end of the Coastal Thailand level.

What should happen (as handily illustrated on YouTube - thanks Kotaku) is that Lara jumps onto a bar and her weight causes it to descend and open an underwater escape route. What happens on the Wii, in a small number of cases, is that no bar appears and Lara is trapped forever. Poor old Lara.

Fortunately, Eidos is looking into it according to representatives on the technical forum, and in the meantime support folks are advising players to try reverting to a previous save or to download a save-file and copy it onto an SD card to help get round it.

We've contacted Eidos for further comment.

For more on Tomb Raider: Underworld, check out our Tomb Raider: Underworld review. Short version: same old Lara with a few new tricks, but very pretty and you can strap a sticky-bomb to a tiger. Win.

UPDATE: Eidos has now issued a statement in which it says, "We are aware of a bug which is present in the Nintendo Wii version of Tomb Raider: Underworld. We would like to stress that this is an extremely infrequent bug, however on the rare occasion that it occurs; it affects the presence of a lever in the Thailand level of the game and prevents progress beyond this level.

"Eidos sincerely apologises to anyone who has experienced this frustrating problem. The quality of our games is paramount to us and the Nintendo Wii version of Tomb Raider: Underworld went through three separate QA testing departments prior to release. Regrettably anomalies such as this do occur occasionally in videogames despite the best efforts by publishers to avoid them.

"The good news is that it is not an unsolvable bug, so if you encounter it and it persists please visit www.eidosinteractive.co.uk/support/worldmap.html."

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • the_dudefather #1 3 years ago

    "Lara trapped forever. Until patch"

    Are there patches for any wii games yet?
    Edited by 1 at 26/11/08 @ 08:54

  • DFawkes #2 3 years ago

    I hope this isn't the first of many memory devouring Wii patches because it's cheaper than testing your games. It probably isn't even cheaper, just lazy.
    Edited by 1 at 26/11/08 @ 09:00

  • Shakey_Jake33 #3 3 years ago

    If anything, this is a demonstration of why patches can be a good thing. You can be sure they didn't intend to patch this later (if it's even possible) because it's not really the 'done' thing on Wii. Patches are only an issue when publishers take advantage of them.

  • snowdog #4 3 years ago

    Well that's what happens when a company makes their entire UK QA team redundant, expect other Eidos franchises to have problems in the future too. A shame to see it happen really. :(

  • SpyroViper #5 3 years ago

    QA must be a BIG part of Eidos.

  • Darren #6 3 years ago

    I'm glad I didn't buy *that* game for the Wii then because I have no space left in my machine's measly 512 MB of internal RAM to store one on and it's the reason I stopped buying VC games over a year ago and have never bothered with the WiiWare ones.

    Wiilol

  • Xerx3s #7 3 years ago

    "I hope this isn't the first of many memory devouring Wii patches because it's cheaper than testing your games. It probably isn't even cheaper, just lazy."

    Sorry but piss off with that crap. OBVIOUSLY DEVELOPERS ARE LAZY. You know, despite the fact that they work tirelessly for years on a game, putting out more hours than most on here. I'm so sick and tired of people making the lazy comment. IT'S NOT LAZINESS. It always boils down to one thing: money.

  • wattoo #8 3 years ago

    I would guess it's not the developer, but the publisher. Rushing the game out before it's been properly finished or tested. Using words like "infrequent" and "rare" is just spin.

    This really is shocking. It's bad enough enough that 360 and PS3 publishers rely on patches, but this could set a startling precedent for doing it on wii too.

    Bad bad Eidos

  • IronCladChicken #9 3 years ago

    @the_dudefather
    I know the Wii PaperMario game had a patch released for it (at least the US version did)

  • sneetch #10 3 years ago

    @Xerx3s
    ""I hope this isn't the first of many memory devouring Wii patches because it's cheaper than testing your games. It probably isn't even cheaper, just lazy."

    Sorry but piss off with that crap. OBVIOUSLY DEVELOPERS ARE LAZY. You know, despite the fact that they work tirelessly for years on a game, putting out more hours than most on here. I'm so sick and tired of people making the lazy comment. IT'S NOT LAZINESS. It always boils down to one thing: money."

    Indeed, developers don't want to be part of producing buggy software so it comes down to someone making the call that it's "good enough" and can be released in X weeks time. Games are hugely complicated and very difficult to test completely: it's the combinations that screw you up. It's obvious that shooting a Blorg with the Blorg-blatter either works or doesn't: the Blorg is blatted or it isn't. But what happens if you do so after jumping. Or through a particular texture? Or from behind cover?

    The sheer number of combinations and number of things to test (in a 3D game especially) is enormous.

  • tripitaka #11 3 years ago

    Eidos QA really went downhill after I left... :)

  • Dan234 #12 3 years ago

    @IronCladChicken

    I know the Wii PaperMario game had a patch released for it (at least the US version did)

    In Europe it was replaced, even Nintendo don't put out patches. I'm not sure that the Wii can do patches, at least in the current version of the OS.

    (Of course if the US they did put out a patch then ignore that last part...)
    Edited by 1 at 26/11/08 @ 13:01

  • green_nifta #13 3 years ago


    Actually, the developers aren't blameless. Publishers make them aware of the release deadline months and months in advance. Publishers have to invest millions in booking advertisting campaigns for a specific release date months in advance, and that's not something that can be changed. Its the developer's contractual obligation to ensure they've fixed all reported bugs before that deadline. If the developers fall behind schedule, it's their fault.

    ... unless the publisher QA doesn't find some show-stopping bug until the night before you're due to subit a master candidate of course.... then it's the publishers' fault for having sloppy QA... And of course most publishers pay their QA peanuts so that's not surprising.