[gemeaux333]

Wish they could ressurect Core Design and bring them back the licence.

[Ninety-Six]

Y'know, funny thing. Just a few months ago, my friend gifted me every TR entry on Steam up to Underworld.

I've actually never played TR before. I've seen it plenty of times; my father had the first game and I'd often see him play it. I guess saying I "never played" isn't completely accurate. I remember trying a few times but something always got in the way. The only memory I really have of actually playing it is dicking around in the mansion.

I do intend to play them at some point. Even the bad ones.

[Aristotle Gumball]

The controls are terrible, but for some reason I had a really easy time playing TR 1-2 on my phone, since those have been ported to Android. Tried to play 3 in Windows and had to give up. Might be the relative discomfort of sitting on top of failing over and over. Playing shit on PC demands more of my commitment, so my patience threshold is lower.

[The Battlelord]

Trapping Wiston in the cold room was the best.

[Aristotle Gumball]

These days I'd much rather play Urban Chaos:



Essentially the same control scheme and platforming (of which there is quite a bit), but it's one of the earliest examples of a 3D open world game like GTA. You have pedestrians in the street, not much traffic, but you can drive, etc. There's a pretty interesting storyline too.

[MrFlibble]

I've always had an appreciation for the series because it was so popular in the 90s, literally everywhere. Have some German mags from 1996 reviewing the (IIRC) console version. But I played the demo, and then got the first trilogy, comparatively recently. I actually collected all the PC demos of the first five games that I could find - there are four different TR2 demos alone. But did not play any of that for a long time.

Some years ago I played the first game for quite a while - set up DOSBox with 3dfx emulation and nGlide, it worked very well. Later on I discovered the Windows native patch but never tried it. I got through the first episode and then just made a pause, and sometime later I had to reinstall the OS and did not bother to install TR again. But I would play it if I had the mood I guess.

Last year or so, I wanted to try out TR2 and installed that. Started fine but at some point the game just turns into a non-stop gauntlet with traps one after another, and I think you either need to perfectly memorise them, or use a joystick (I don't have one). So I got through several of those traps by trial and error (read: dozens of reloads, thankfully there are manual saves), and then it just sapped away my will to play further as I realised that there would be even more traps of the same kind. I'm not sure if the first game gets into a similar beat later on, but what I played of TR1 and the Unfinished Business add-on was actually pretty meditative and relaxed in comparison.

[gemeaux333]

I liked all the games of the series, but the flashback one (between last revelation and angel of darkness) is un-necessary and gimmicky, some time and money that could have been invested in Angel of Darkness, this last one was in the end a trainwreck on a pattern that cross the mentality of Duke Nukem Forever with the raw level of Blood 2... I tried to play it back then but didn't go very far, I should try to finish it in the upcomming days as I always regretted to not have finished it

The main issue with the Tomb Raider games that came after Angel of Darkness is they are way too assisted... and not even properly assisted... the frustration of failing an action the computer grant you as always succeding because he messed that up is way bigger than the one of failing because of your own lack of knowledge of the games inner working

[Morpheus Kitami]

I really liked the pre-2010s games. The original Tomb Raider was one of my fondest early gaming experiences. I used to be terrified of the dinosaurs in the jungle level back then, especially the T-Rex. The boulders and most of the non-animal enemies weren't much better. Took me years to beat the original game. Not because it was necessarily hard, or because its too long per say, but its a bit of an exhausting game in my mind. You've got basically every single action aspect of gaming, plus looking out for secrets, plus puzzles on top of that. Its not really something I can zone out too often in, not without Lara dying. Probably why it took me decades to beat the original.

Most of the games up til Underworld I've taken a good chunk out of, but I've never played Anniversary or 2. I remember really liking the puzzles in The Last Revelation, at least until about third or fourth level. Can't remember why I never finished that one. I've also gotten pretty far in Angel of Darkness, but far too many parts in that game I would describe as tedious at best, unfun maliciousness at worst.

The Crystal Dynamics series was also fun, but they definitely take away some of the key elements out of the series, even if those did make the games more difficult than they needed to be. There was always a real sense of death with every jump you took in the originals, here that's generally missing. I shudder to think what the new games do.

[gemeaux333]

Tomb Raider 2 is certainly the best game of the entire series imho, and Tomb Raider Anniversary is a remake of the first game with Crystal Dynamics settings

new link for the video :

[Aristotle Gumball]

Always disliked how they made her look soft in the newer games (post-Core). Old Lara looked like a mean bitch, which fit her character better.

[gemeaux333]

Indeed, I always prefer the old Lara Croft from Core Design : steroided and badass... but someone told me that aristocratic and arrogant doesn't fit the badass style, so lets just say she was ballsy

[gemeaux333]

In Tomb Raider 2 there is a bigger variety of weapons and more than the 4 of the first game (base pistols, magnum pistols, uzi smgs and shotgun), that include M16 very efficient against humans but pretty unpleasant with fast enemies at close range, the grenade launcher for the big game and the harpon gun which is very situational as its only really usefull in the Maria Doria segments of the game although doesn't deal enough damages and there is hardly enough ammo to get the job done...
In the Barkhang Monastery, monks are your friends and will deal with Bartoli's bad guys for you, but if you shoot them a single time (on purpose or not) they will be hostile to you until the end of the level...
I have forgot how ballbusting Xian Temple was : trap after trap after trap, and tricky moves to progress in some sections...

[gemeaux333]

Much could be said about Tomb Raider 3... some new good stuffs such as the possibility to crouch, sprint and walk/stafe right/left by pressing walk + left, desert eagle replacing auto-pistol/magnum and the addition of a rocket launcher, a non-linear adventure, the friendly npcs won't turn hostile to you even if you slaughter then (the other extremity of the spectrum)
We will regret that the game is climbing on the dickishness ladder... ennemies and traps straight in the corners that you can't avoid unless you know where they are and a huge portion of them poison you and you only get rid of it by healing, criminally complicated level design, more elaborated vehicle phases/platforming but seing ho clanky these vehicles are : no thanks (they are as clanky as the motorcycle in Serious Sam 4, the worst of it with the cayaks), bosses who instakill you if you make a single mistake...
A friend piece of advice : once you are done with India, go to Nevada first, because after the end onf the first Nevada level you loose all your items and the game will never give them back, you have to find/loot them again

[gemeaux333]

Tomb Raider Last Revelation decreased the difficulty of fights and platformings as well as the number of weapons (compensating with ammo types and the possibility to add a scope on some weapons especially for solving quests) but increased the difficulty of puzzles and riddles (forcing you to find tiny hidden items in the environments to progress, often needing another item to be able to get them : crowbar is your friend), you also notice an improvement to the game engine and a modification to the game interface (end of the rings menus, no more croft mansion)
Sadly Tomb Raider Chronicles seems to be a stretch too far, its 12 levels of 15-30 minutes (which is considerably shorter than any other Tomb Raider game), it gather the flaws of the previous games but hardly their strenghs, the game is mostly composed of assets recycling and filler, the puzzles and riddles hardly make any sense, the amount of medikits and ammos present in the levels is insultingly low, and worst : bugs (crash to desktop, medikit mysteriously disapearig from the inventory after being looted, and progression breaking bugs forcing you to load a previous save)

[Morpheus Kitami]

The real strength in Chronicles was that it originally came with a level editor. Don't know if it came out elsewhere beforehand, but I doubt a standalone release of it came with most/all of The Last Revelation, so you had a good bit of levels to learn the design of directly. I say most here because the level editor came with 10 levels, and the copies I've owned over the years of TLR I had "Special 10 level edition" on the front. Dunno if that's less special than it sounds. I could have even just repurchased the same copy I originally had, I was a dumb child who sold off his games whenever I was done with them.

[gemeaux333]

Indeed, some peoples have made an outstanding work with this level editor, despite the restrictions of the engine

I just finished Angel of Darkness, and surprisingly I had the easiest time of all the Core Design Tomb Raider games at the exception of some ball-busting set pieces because they managed to make Lara even stiffer than she was before (not to mention Kurtis, the fight against Boaz is a nightmare, especially if you don't know you have to use the roll button to switch targets because the game won't do it for you let alone the smart way, and seeing how unresponsive Kurtis is : no way) which is an accomplishment... you would be mad if you weren't sad for Core Design because you would feel bad blaming them for (most of) their problems, Eidos after having forced them to release 5 games from 1996 to 2000 forced them to release an unfinished/embarassing product in june 2003 just so it would meet the cinema release of the second Tomb Raider movie : The Craddle of Life
Surprisingly, with the GOG version (Build 52) including many fixes, the game is playable and not nearly as atrocious as the PS2 version, you might just have a learning curve with the new type of jump : keep pressing SHift/walk and them push Alt/jump, its very usefull to make delicate jumping manoeuvre to reach platforms way to close to use the regular jump, make sure Lara is properly placed and look in the proper direct and possibly rectify the direction during the jump (besides Lara cannot hang a border doing this kind of jump)
Still the game still screams unfinished... Gordon Ramsay would get crazy... the tutorial doesn't explain how to use the new inventory system, before reaching the cemetary in Paris you can loot rare items to sell them to the Mont de Piété because money is sometimes usefull but rather anecdotic during the course of the game (and when you leave Bouchard's hideout you can win the golden watch of a Box coach by betting but you will hardly be able to sell it as the npc who was buying your rare items is dead by now), a skill progression system completely scripted that doesn't obey to any patern (the best of it is when at the very end of the Louvre segment, when looting a gaz mask Lara say "I am now faster" just to say that she can finally sprint while it was available from the start in the previous three Tomb Raider games), a variety of weapons which is purely superflux while only counting 3 main types (around 10 pistols of unequal efficiencies, an underpowered shotgun and 2 smgs that works fine) and of couse the one who suffered the most : Kurtis (his personnal story squandered and his psychic powers reduced to cutscenes) so sad you could die from your own sorrow...
The upside is there is no filler in this game (for the aforementionned reasons)...

https://youtube.com/...u5N22kdZ4AaABCQ

Really wish the original team could remake the game and possibly devellop the two other games that should have been the trilogy (including at least a Kurtis spin-off according to the original plans)

[Outtagum]

[MrFlibble]

I saw the trailer a few days ago, but I thought this was a Switch-only release or something.

I quite like the aesthetics of the TR games and remember how iconic Lara was when the first instalment came out, but somehow I do not enjoy the games themselves if playing for a long time. I guess keyboard is not the best input method, and I don't feel like buying a controller for something I'm just gonna play sporadically at best.

[jkas789]

LETS GO BOYS! FUN LARA IS BACK!

[Morpheus Kitami]

MrFlibble, on 16 September 2023 - 02:35 AM, said:

I saw the trailer a few days ago, but I thought this was a Switch-only release or something.

I quite like the aesthetics of the TR games and remember how iconic Lara was when the first instalment came out, but somehow I do not enjoy the games themselves if playing for a long time. I guess keyboard is not the best input method, and I don't feel like buying a controller for something I'm just gonna play sporadically at best.

Interestingly, you seem to be the only person I know of who thinks that a joystick is better than the keyboard for this game. I've seen multiple arguments on different websites about how the joystick doesn't quite work for a game of precise controls like Tomb Raider. Can't say I've ever noticed a problem with the game myself, having only ever used the keyboard. (For some reason, joysticks never seem to work for the game for me...)

[MrFlibble]

Morpheus Kitami, on 17 September 2023 - 07:27 AM, said:

Interestingly, you seem to be the only person I know of who thinks that a joystick is better than the keyboard for this game.

I don't really think that, I made that assumption simply because TR is originally a console game, so I thought that the controls would have been designed with a joystick/gamepad in mind.

I've never owned a console or a PC joystick, so I have zero experience with playing any game with those. I'd be happy to be proven wrong about TR being better played with a keyboard, but personally I'd prefer a WASD+mouse combo for controls I guess. I can't really put my finger on what made me think that keyboard only is not the optimal choice for controls, perhaps I'm just not very good at TR in the first place.

[jkas789]

TR has the option to be played with a keyboard and mouse on PC? Neat. I have always played the games with a controller.

MrFlibble, on 19 September 2023 - 06:05 AM, said:

I've never owned a console or a PC joystick, so I have zero experience with playing any game with those.

Shame. Flying sims and space sims are really fun with a joystick. You should try them out mate.

[MrFlibble]

jkas789, on 19 September 2023 - 05:24 PM, said:

TR has the option to be played with a keyboard and mouse on PC? Neat.

I'm afraid, it hasn't, but it would certainly be nice if it had.

jkas789, on 19 September 2023 - 05:24 PM, said:

Shame. Flying sims and space sims are really fun with a joystick. You should try them out mate.

I have played some -- back in the early-mid 90s one of the few games which I had on the PC was F-19 Stealth Fighter. I've always played it with the keyboard. Later on I tried other, more recent games in the genre, and indeed they require something other than keyboard to be truly enjoyable. But I'm not that much of a fan to buy a joystick for something I'd only plat very occasionally at best.

[jkas789]

MrFlibble, on 24 September 2023 - 01:45 PM, said:

I have played some -- back in the early-mid 90s one of the few games which I had on the PC was F-19 Stealth Fighter. I've always played it with the keyboard. Later on I tried other, more recent games in the genre, and indeed they require something other than keyboard to be truly enjoyable. But I'm not that much of a fan to buy a joystick for something I'd only plat very occasionally at best.

Yeah, good joysticks can get really pricey. Personally this days I stick to keyboard and mouse, mostly because I can't also justify the money to invest in Elite Dangerous (which I don't play as much anymore) or No Man's Sky. Both games work fine in a keyboard.

Getting back to Tomb Raider, I recently played Tomb Raider: The Prophecy for the GBA. It was surprisingly not bad. It was not great either, it was average at best, kinda mediocre at its worst. It doesn't help the level design and art direction made navigation somewhat confusing. And at the end it was an obscene amount of switch hunting.

Still, I was expecting absolute coal and instead I found a little quartz. Neat.

[MrFlibble]

I think I enjoy Tomb Raider more from an aesthetic perspective -- it's a beautifully made game that has accomplished a lot with its tech that -- rather than for gameplay itself. For a long while, I had only had the two demos of the first game (and also tried out the various demos of the second instalment), and only relatively recently grabbed the 1+2+3 collection from GOG. I completed the first episode of the first game, and dropped it because the second one just felt more of the same, although in a different setting. Tried TR2, expecting the more or less relaxed pace of what I experienced in TR1, but right in the first level it quickly switched gears from exploration to an Indiana Jones-like gauntlet of traps that I did not like at all, and I generally don't enjoy save scumming my way through a sequence of traps that I couldn't possibly get right on the first try without any advance knowledge. So I put that aside for the time being.

I also cannot shrug off the feeling that I cannot mentally go back to the context of 1996 when Tomb Raider came out. I remember reading magazine articles about it back then, and the general hype around true 3D games that were coming out on the then-new generation of consoles that supported this tech. Much of this novelty has irrevocably worn off since then, and I can only appreciate the 3D environment and the fluid character animations as a vintage art form, but not as something groundbreaking that is "cool" simply by the merit of existing, because nothing quite like it existed before.

Additionally, I have this feeling that today, we're so saturated with information that it takes away a big part of the "mystery" of playing a video game for the first time, when you are genuinely interested to know what will happen next, and there is no immediate way to find out other than play the game yourself. Today, It's much too easy to open up a YouTube playthrough or even just read the Wikipedia article it almost makes playing to find out the story completely redundant.

[Morpheus Kitami]

Greece, right? I'd actually say try playing that one a little longer. IIRC, a lot of people, myself included, think of that as the best part of the first game. It has some of the best puzzles and obstacles in the game, with my personal favorite coming in at the second level. Most of the later entries, except TR4 IIRC remove some of the relaxed opening pace for more action, either in combat or platforming. TR2 in particular gets criticism for how many people you have to shoot.

While your last paragraph is true, is the temptation really so strong as to be unignorable? Perhaps that's why I find myself more drawn to obscure games, less chance of getting unnecessarily spoiled.

[MrFlibble]

Morpheus Kitami, on 08 October 2023 - 07:37 AM, said:

While your last paragraph is true, is the temptation really so strong as to be unignorable? Perhaps that's why I find myself more drawn to obscure games, less chance of getting unnecessarily spoiled.

I don't know, it's not really about the temptation to me, because I don't watch playthroughs of games very often and do not rush to check a level immediately when I get stuck. Yet there's this knowledge in the back of my mind that I could do that if I wanted, whereas back in the 90s this was surely not possible. But then again, in the 90s, and even in the most of the 2000s, I had more free time to poke around the rather limited collection of games that I had, both because one generally has more free time at school/uni and because I did not spend as much time online as I do today.

What I mean is rather similar to what happened to watching TV (for me, at least). Any programme, series or movie had more of immediate value because who knows when they're going to re-run it again? Gotta watch now or possibly never. But today, I can find all the info I want about almost any show, read the synopsis and a ton of other info I didn't even want to know, and watch anything whenever I feel like doing that, on streaming services or YouTube. (BTW, I don't really watch TV these days, certainly not as much as I did back in the 90s and 2000s.) It very certainly removes a lot of immediacy from watching stuff, like you know you can always go back to it, and you can read the synopsis and/or some in-depth information, watch reviews, etc. It's a whole different kind of knowledge horizon, and I'm very sure it affects the act of entertainment itself. I honestly don't know how to explain it better. Also I am mindful of other people possibly not feeling the same way about this too.

One other possible reason for my attitude is that after playing many games, one develops a been there, done that feeling, which is in a stark contrast to how it felt back then. It's somewhat hard to get really invested in Lara's adventures when she isn't exactly a nostalgic childhood memory, and I don't particularly enjoy the gameplay itself. I can rather clearly picture in my head how cool it must have been for first-time players in 1996, with all the true 3D, fluid motions and stuff, but I can only mentally reconstruct this context, not live it through to the full extent.

[gemeaux333]

The Tomb Raider 1-2-3 remastered have been released

I enjoy the improved graphics and controls but... am I the only one to find the camera more annoying than in the original games ?

[Morpheus Kitami]

Did they fix the issues with textures? I found myself noticing last time I played how poorly textures lined up with other textures. (There's some technical name I forgot, sorry)

Regarding the camera, I haven't purchased the remasters yet, but playing Anniversary, I noticed (among other janky controls) that I was constantly fighting the camera. Considering the modern controls are, from what's been said, supposed to be like the Legend series, it makes sense that you're having problems. TR1X improved upon it in a good way, but sadly that port only works for the original and without any of the other changes.

[gemeaux333]

what I meant is that the camera get crazy when hitting geometry, which mess up the orientation of Lara and it drive you crazy when you move or plan a move
and these camera problems are getting even worst in combat situations