![]() ![]() Looking back, I feel like those early years of Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider IP were more a showcase for how cool and edgy gaming could be now that it had ‘gone 3D’ rather than actually good games do we remember Lara Croft as she looked in Tomb Raiders 1-3, or how she looked on all those lad magazine covers in the late 90s? Maybe, being just 10 years old at the time, my hormonal makeup was just too young and innocent to be duped by Lara’s butt and tits.The first Prince of Persia game was released in 1989 for the Apple II. I actually ended up buying all three OG Tomb Raider games years later as PS1 Classics for my PS3, and while playing with a controller helped a little bit, it was painfully clear that these games were products of their time: graphical showcases, headed up by a sexy protagonist with 3D ‘assets’ that became the obsession of thirsty gamers for years. I ended up opting for Theme Hospital, and I never looked back. Īfter playing the Tomb Raider demo back in ‘97, my parents said they’d buy me one game for the shiny (well, dull ‘90s beige’) new PC. Again though, all this felt like highlight-reel stuff rather than reflecting the moment-to-moment experience, which I could only describe as stodgy. With a single button, Lara could roll, whip her guns out, and do a 180-turn to shoot enemies behind her, and she could also do a sideways flip-jump, shooting while no-hands cartwheeling through the air. And Tomb Raider had some lovely moves and animations. If you’re not familiar with cinematic platformers, these were games where flashy animations and atmosphere were prioritised over super-precise controls and snappy mechanics. To me, Tomb Raider felt like more of a technical showcase than a satisfying game, or a cinematic platformer in the style of Another World or Operation Flashback, awkwardly transposed into a rudimentary 3D format. RELATED: 10 Best PS1 Third-Person Shooter Games, Ranked I’d spend inordinate amounts of time rubbing up against walls trying to jump to ledges that were just out of reach, or running straight off of platforms because the delay between me pressing the Jump button and Lara actually jumping took the best part of a second. Having popped back into the OG Tomb Raider today, I estimate that the jumping animation takes about three seconds to fully carry out, with little room for maneuver once Lara’s got that abnormally high airtime. Maybe Mario 64 is a high bar to set, but it did put into perspective that maybe Tomb Raider should’ve focused on action rather than horrid platforming. ![]() What’s more, I’d go down to my local Electronics Boutique to play Super Mario 64 (which I’d duly come to own for Christmas ‘97), so I knew that 3D games didn’t have to come with this massive trade-off where you get pretty graphics but god-awful gamefeel. I came to Tomb Raider from a background of 2D platformers where precision and responsiveness was critical in playing games, and when I first played the Tomb Raider demo I couldn’t get over how bad it felt. 3D graphics were something of a revelation to me, though I wasn’t entire sold on them yet (I was always more into the Build Engine shooters, for instance, than Quake and Quake 2-something about a really pretty pixel style just chimed with me more than the chunky low-poly look of early 3D). ![]() I remember my dad had just (inadvertently) gotten a gaming-capable PC at the time, and I was coming to this new piece of hardware basically from the 8-bit era, with the NES being the only games console I had ever owned up to then. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |