More retro gaming, with Lara Croft

Last year I discovered that there were some gems to revisit on GOG, or Good Old Games, starting with Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2. It turns out that an Amazon Prime perk is a bunch of free games via their own gaming thing, though many of the titles they have are actually acquired via GOG or one of the other services. One of those recently was Tomb Raider: Anniversary, the cleaned up and remastered original game. She still has the absurd proportions.

Video games were exciting when that game came out, in 1996, on Playstation, Sega Saturn and the PC. I think it was the game that I bought with the Playstation, which for its time was a really big deal. Nintendo had the 64, and Sega had the Dreamcast a year or two later. PC's were for the first time coming out with dedicated 3D GPU's. They were expensive, though there were some reasonable models out in the coming years. At some point, I did have a PC remake of the original Tomb Raider that was made to run on my Rendition card, I think, though I think I had an S3 and ATi at some point. I couldn't afford a 3Dfx card, the state of the art at the time. Rendition had a compelling price-performance ratio, and they were relentless at improving drivers. They didn't make it, financially.

It is wholly absurd playing even an enhanced version of a game like Tomb Raider, which is closing in on 30 years, on a modern computer. I'm playing with a wireless controller (they weren't a thing back then) at 4K resolution and 60 fps locked in. The fans don't even get loud. But it's surprising that it still looks pretty good with the improved textures and such. It was made to run without 3D hardware, so that original version was not pretty, with blocky and pixelated everything. I do think it's fair to say that this game invented the third-person adventure game.

This one hasn't completely aged well though. The controls are kind of janky compared to newer games, and the game is littered with what I call dumb physical challenges that you may have to repeat over and over until you get it right. It's annoying, but not intolerable on a modern computer that reloads the scene almost instantly, but it was just brutal on Playstation. Remember, they had very little memory and had to load stuff off of CD-ROM's. You lost so much of your life to loading. I'm not sure if I actually finished any of the original versions, but I did this time. The game says it took me 14 hours, and yes, I had to look up some walkthrough videos because some of it was absurdly hard to find anything to do.

I really like the reboot trilogy that was released in the last decade. They all look great, and are playable on all kinds of hardware. They're cheap now, too. The control is excellent and you're not likely to get stuck. There's more stealth than combat, but all of the puzzles. Lara is even appropriately modeled as an athlete, which makes more sense with all of the climbing and running. The 2018 movie covers some of the ground in the reboot games, and you'd think that Alicia Vikander as Lara inspired the game, but the movie came years later.

This has been a fun diversion, and I hope that I'll find more. With Xbox Game Pass, it's pretty low risk to try new-to-me games, but I feel like it's such an investment to even get through tutorials. I'm lazy doing lazy things.