Tomb Raider (1996)
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"I only play for sport."
— Lara Croft
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Tomb Raider is an action-adventure video game developed by Core Design and published by Eidos Interactive. It was initially released in 1996 for the Sega Saturn, MS-DOS, and PlayStation. It stars famed archaeologist Lara Croft.
In 2007, the game was remade, as Tomb Raider: Anniversary, to commemorate the franchise's tenth anniversary.
Synopsis
Lara Croft, a renowned archaeologist, is contacted by Jacqueline Natla about an ancient artifact called "The Scion" which her father had been searching for. She sets out to find this artefact, only to discover that it is only one of three pieces.
Why It Rocks
- This is one of the first action games where the protagonist is of course woman.
- The game set a new benchmark for future 3D action games thanks in part to its vast and open design.
- The levels themselves are huge. Not only that, but they also vary greatly in their overall layouts, so they don't feel too samey.
- Introduces Lara Croft, who has become famous for her portrayal of sexual empowerment and still being a total badass.
- The graphics were cutting-edge for its time, and still looked good despite the compromises made.
- Has an awesome soundtrack, and it is only used sparingly to create a sense of tension and mystery.
- The animation is very smooth, more so on PC.
- Controls are fairly simple to understand, as the action button for example is context sensitive. Navigation is also very straight forward, and the environments are designed around the control scheme that's used.
- If you have the game on PC, you get an expansion called Tomb Raider Gold - Shadow of the Cat (Unfinished Business outside the US), which contains four additional levels.
- Despite being an early CD based game, the loading times are incredibly short, being less than 10 seconds on PS1. The game saves very quickly as well. The PC port loads INSTANTLY most likely due to being installed on a Hard Drive.
- While the levels are mostly linear, they still have loads of room for exploring. Some levels, like "The Tomb of Qualopec" and "St. Francis' Folly" even have many rooms that can be entered in any order, so those levels can be played differently each time should the player chose to do so.
- There are many ways to die in the game, including the touch of King Midas! Therefore, dying is a lot more interesting compared to other platformers where the character simply falls over and dies. One particular death is pretty gruesome (though still tame compared to the most recent installments).
- There are four weapons in the game.
- Pistols: Lara carries two at all times and they have infinite ammo. While they aren't the most effective, they're a good way to save ammo on your other weapons especially when fighting weaker enemies.
- Shotgun: It offers massive damage, but severely short range. It needs to be reloaded after every shot, but offers massive firepower. It fires 6 pellets per shot with random spread applied.
- Magnums: They have the same rate of fire as the handgun but deal twice as much damage. They are a great pair of guns that loses in firepower only to the shotgun, though they shoot faster and ammo is plentiful (it is still best to conserve ammo for tougher enemies, such as lions and mummies). Despite all their advantages, magnums tend to become a bit obsolete once the Uzis are unlocked.
- Uzis: They use the same ammunition as the Pistols and therefore have the same firepower, but their higher rate of fire makes for more damage. The Uzis can quickly kill endgame enemies like the Atlantean mutants and Xian guardians. Ammo is very plentiful.
- The use of black distance fog is used to create a more eerie atmosphere for indoor levels, though you can still see for a reasonable distance. However, The PC Port with the patch mentioned below lets you remove the distance fog if you want.
- Lara and Natla sound okay.
- The final level is where the game takes an almost horror-like turn. It takes place in Atlantis, however, it is NOT the underwater utopian that many believe it to be. Instead it's a place made of muscle tissue and bones along with inscriptions of something much more technological advanced surrounding the area almost as if the place is alive itself is alive with eggs all over the place with umbilical chords attached to them. The Atlanteans are also skinless creatures that can hurl bomb-like projectiles and come in different shapes. Some are animal-like, one is winged, and another is centaur with a MegaMan-like cannon as its arm.
Bad Qualities
- Many aspects of the game hasn't aged well.
- While good for the time, the graphics are very blocky due to the low polygon count and the textures are extremely pixelated. This is because the developers had to reduce the graphics to accommodate for the vast level design.
- Since 3D movement hadn't been fully realized yet, the game uses tank controls which makes the movement feel rather sluggish, and require very precise positioning to get anywhere.
- The game has some technical issues:
- Texture glitching, and a lot of it. You can practically see where the textures connect.
- The only way to save is using Save Crystals; these are single use, and only appear in fixed locations. Though the PC version lets you save anywhere anytime.
- In the final level, it is possible to obtain a maximum of 2 out of 3 secrets even if you had got them all. This is because of a bug where the game will read the third and final secret of the level as the second secret, and therefore only registers if you didn't get the actual second secret beforehand.
- The ports outside of the PlayStation version have some issues.
- The Sega Saturn version has framerate issues, poor audio quality, and lower resolution.
- The PC port lacks the event based music from the console versions and has black lines around FMVs, this can be fixed with a patch found here.
Reception
Tomb Raider was critically acclaimed at the time of release. On GameRankings, it holds a 91.67% on PC, 90.02% on PS1, and 86.80% on Saturn. It praised for its graphics, atmosphere, environments, cinematic approach to storytelling, and level variety. The game was also a massive critical success, selling over 7 million copies world, and pulled Eidos Interactive out of a $2.6 million debt, generating $14.5 million profit in just 12 months. The game strongly contributed towards the success of the PlayStation.
In addition, Lara Croft was also widely praised for breaking away from the standard male perspective, and is hailed as one of the most iconic video game characters of all time. She has been featured heavily outside of gaming, appearing in many comics, magazines, and movies. She is also recognized as the "Most Recognizable Female Video Game Character" by the 2008 Gamer's Edition of the Guinness World Records.
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