Video games have come so far

I didn't realize this, but Amazon has a whole gaming thing that comes with your Prime subscription. They have games to play directly like the PC version of Game Pass, and also games via Epic and GOG. The GOG part is super cool, because it comes as redemption codes to own the games forever, and GOG doesn't even enforce DRM. So the other day, the algorithm pointed me at some article that was like, "Tomb Raider Anniversary is free!" What it really meant is that if you were a Prime member, you could get it free via GOG, which obviously I did.

Tomb Raider Anniversary is a remake of the original Tomb Raider game, from 1996, that ran on the first Sony PlayStation. I owned it, and probably everyone did at the time. It was an exciting time for gaming that included the Nintendo N64, and a year or three later, the Sega Dreamcast. But Tomb Raider set a new standard for what consoles could do. Closer to the turn of the century, when dedicated 3D hardware became a thing for PC's, the port of Tomb Raider showed what a PC might be able to do. If you were an enthusiast, you kind of got into the arms race around video cards, to the extend that you could afford it. A company called 3DFX had the best cards, but I couldn't justify the cost. I was on team Rendition, an underdog that actually had solid performance relative to the cost. Tomb Raider was one of the games you used to see how well your rig could run, along with the Quake variants and other shooters. A company called Nvidia also surfaced around that time, and I think you know how that ended.

By the mid-aughts, I mostly got away from PC gaming, since Xbox, PS2/3 and Nintendo Wii came to be. Then with development being better on Macs, I got away from PC's in the general sense. In 2019, I built my first computer in well over a decade, with a high-mid-range video card, and was amazed to play Planet Coaster in 4K at 60 frames per second. Late 2023 I bought the handheld Legion Go, and just last month I bought a PC tower with a ridiculous video card (probably the last time it'll be necessary to buy a huge, water-cooled PC). The distraction and joy to play PC games has been excellent, and well-timed.

Tonight I started up that original, remastered Tomb Raider, and despite the silly modeling of Lara Croft, mostly fixed in the more recent Crystal Dynamix reboot, that quality of the play is actually solid. Sure, there's still weird camera movement at times, and the combat isn't super interesting, but I really appreciate how much this game elevated video games as an art form. In a world with Fallout and Starfield, my expectations for this old game were low, but it's pretty good, even with the (relatively) lower quality of graphics. What's changed the most is scope, certainly. The worlds are now much bigger, and it's possible to mix main line story arcs with countless side quests and potential for explanation. That's why many of these games command budgets larger than a Marvel movie.