Tomb Raider Anniversary is a remake of the original Tomb Raider. I didn’t actually know this going in even though this project is about a series of videos I’ve essentially memorized (I like yahtzee’s later stuff more). This is an interesting time in history for the series. Tomb Raider is maybe the first non sports series I remember feeling like that the company making it were running into the ground. It seemed like there was a new one every five minutes and the games were continually getting worse as time went on, culminating in a legendary bad release called tomb raider: angel of darkeness which essentially killed the series for a few years. This apparently was not the big comeback game, which was something called tomb raider legend I don’t remember, but in 2006 when it came out I was mainly playing gamecube games on my wii and probably didn’t notice it came out.
I didn’t count myself among a fan of the original tomb raiders, it was a little too awkward to control and quiet and as a little kid I was waiting for something to shoot that barely came. I’m also have a notoriously bad sense of direction and open ended games like breath of the wild and the elder scrolls series tend to devolve into me walking around in circles in a field on the wrong side of the map the entire time. I remember at least playing one of the tomb raider games on a playstation demo disk around when it came out, barely getting out of the first room, and turning it off. I wound up eventually playing some of the first game when i was in college and enjoyed it.
The game really benefits from a remake however. The original tomb raider was released before analog controls were standard in games, or before developers expected you to control games that way as a default. So the original was all resident evil style tank controls. And while resident evil was slow and awkward, there was no platforming, so it was relatively straightforward. Tomb raider had all kinds of extra bullshit where you had to use the shoulder buttons to shuffle side to side to line up jumps and a button that essentially made you do a 180. The camera controls were also a pain in the ass, as it was in basically every 3d game until about 2002. I’m not going to pull out my playstation just to play a little tomb raider, but I think it at least had the ability to swing the camera with the shoulder buttons. However, I did get used to it and started to enjoy the original tomb raider from what I played of it. This new version has a standard analog stick driven movement system and 360 controls mapped to the right stick, and its a much smoother experience because of it.
The other big issue with the original was the graphics. The game started development in 1994, essentially when the playstation had just launched. I actually heard it was originally planned to be a sega saturn exclusive, and that version does run a little better. The saturn version also lacks the pyramid level later in the game because the sega saturn based its graphics processor on quadralaterals instead of triangles, and no i’m not kidding about that. There are very few full 3d playstation one era games that look even legible by this point. The original was able to accomplish that, but the dull repeating textures and short draw distance made the game visually exhausting. Unfortunately, this is not improved upon as well. Tomb raider is a sort of shot for shot type remake. I can’t say for sure whether the game maps are 100% the same, its probable they’re not. but the game is still mostly muddy identical looking caves that stretch on for hours. the characters as well, which in the original were very jagged and strange looking, look fine, but when you get up close, especially in cutscenes, you can see painted on highlights on their skin that make them look like they’ve been spray painted. If you’ve ever played the first shenmue game, they look like that.
the combat, which is mostly unchanged, adds a very 2007 era... i guess its like a quick time event? but its just a cross between a dodge and a bullet time mechanic. You sometimes will move in a way that triggers bullet time and then the game slows down and you press.... something, i never figured it out. then if you don't get it right you get hurt, which i always did. i understand that this is because i forgot whatever key i was supposed to press and could just look it up, but two things were in the way of me doing that. one is that the game is so old that it assumes you're playing on keyboard, despite having controller support, which means that the on screen text will be "press button 12" and i'm supposed to figure out that's R2 somehow. the second issue is that, while in the original combat was hard because you were using horrible tank controls, the enemies were weak and slow to account for this. now with the modern control layout, the combat is so ridiculously trivial that i never died once even after tanking a ton of hits. So this winds up being the weakest, but luckily very short part of the game
However, while i’m venting up front, i actually enjoyed my time with tomb raider. Its a quiet sort of contemplative game where most of it is platforming through the levels. It has the qualities of a good hike in nature, and while i was bored out of my fucking mind when i first started, when i got into the groove it became a nice way to unwind at the end of the day. I’m one of those sickos who’s favorite 3d mario game is super mario sunshine, because it drops you in the middle of a giant level, puts a goal at the top of something far away, and its up to you to figure out how to get there. Tomb raider was very similar. The game has some weak points with the look and the combat, but 90% of the game is some very satisfying and interesting puzzle platforming. The game also reminds me of the original god of war, specifically the second chapter of that game. The whole middle part of god of war is a giant interlocking puzzle box. You start on the outer ring of a giant circle, with each individual room being its own puzzle or combat challenge. Then when finishing each puzzle, the entire ring of rooms (sort of a giant hallway with multiple entrances) becomes its own puzzle. Eventually you make your way to the center of the labyrinth and find out the entire building, and each of these rings are part of an even bigger puzzle that solves the whole levell. Tomb raider has this same super satisfying interlocking puzzle system. There is usually some sort of middle hub area you stumble into that requires you to experiment for a while just to get to the 3 or 4 smaller rooms that make up the puzzle areas. These puzzles will unlock even more of the hub room and eventually lead to your exit. There’s a real satisfaction in slowly picking apart an area, learning its ins and outs, and eventually making it the whole thing click together.
Unfortunately, the game runs like absolute shit. I’m playing a mid 2000’s pc port, and mid 2000’s computer gaming was notably horrible. This is a time before companies like steam had really taken over and made digital distribution standardized and mostly painless. So instead this was the age of horrible draconian anti piracy programs/spyware like Uplay. It was also a time when most companies were in a dick waving contest to make the most impressive looking graphics on games, something they still do to a point, but back then companies did not even try to make games for the average user. Games like doom 3, crysis, and even to a point half life 2 ran like shit on anything that wasn’t the most expensive computer parts of the time, to the point where it was common practice to wait several years before even attempting to run the newest stuff. So considering you were also expected to run this stuff on windows vista, an operating system so reviled that it lead to the biggest sales macintoshes ever had, you were basically fucked six ways every time you bought a game and were in a constant loop of crashing and upgrading. Tomb raider had multiple game breaking bugs, one that deserves special mention was the fact that no matter how many times i tried to change the settings to run in 60 fps it didn’t seem to want to run outside of its initial “cinematic” 27 frames per second frame cap. Which is great if you’re playing on an old crt monitor or something with a variable refresh rate. But i live in a tiny apartment and my gaming pc is also my work pc and the entertainment system in the living room, and my monitor is a shitty 55 inch tv from best buy. So even though the game seemed to be running buttery smooth, it wouldn’t display properly. Not even in the normal jumpy way a game does when its slowing down, this was just making the tv miss every second frame. I’ve had this problem before, and i keep a smaller thrifted monitor for just there sort of occasions, but it was kind of humiliating playing a game on a tiny 20 inch 1080p monitor standing directy in front of my giant tv. and eventually i hit a bug that wasn’t getting any better after restarting, or even changing from my linux laptop running it miraculously well in a compatibility layer (so i didn’t have to fuck around with the monitors anymore) to my normal windows gaming computer. i found a switch that was supposed to open a door to the end of the level, but it wouldn’t budge no matter how many times i tried it. So i wound up just moving on with my life.
Since ive started i’ve beaten every game in this project, in the case of games like heavenly sword and bioshock this is because i loved them and didn’t want to stop, in the case of games like psychonauts or fable it was because i wanted to make sure the game wasn’t going to show me something later in the game that would make up for it not being particularly good. However, tomb raider started out pretty fun and ended pretty fun. So while i can’t recommend the pc release, if you find another way to play it (i think its on ps+ or whatever they’re calling that now), go nuts. But lets be honest here, its fucking tomb raider. There’s 87 of these games. You’ve probably played one and decided whether you like it already, and if you haven’t this probably isn’t the best one out of the bunch. However, i think there’s something to be said for this specific game’s simplicity and focus. It has next to no bells and whistles, it isn’t cramming in tons of story. Its a game where you platform and other than that it gets out of the way. It reminds me of the time i had with dragon quest 1. Dragon quest 1 is clearly not the best game in the series, and frankly its so old its not a must play for anyone by this point, but i loved it because it gives you a boss at the end of the game and then leaves you alone while you adventure. The game wasn’t bogging itself down with cutscenes and narrative, it was your story to write. While the reboot tomb raider games later on are ghost train rides with miraculous set pieces that you mostly just run through while stuff happens around you, this game just lets you calmly explore and enjoy yourself. So if you have an afternoon to kill, and youre tired of the crushing feeling you get by playing solitaire on your phone while listening to podcasts for the 800th day in a row, you can flip this on and at least feel like you were doing something. But if you’re a regular gamer who has lots of games i can’t say that tomb raider will exactly change your life.
But until next time, duck the clothesline, and happy halloween
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