Tomb Raider

The Good
It's strange how things can be all over the place one moment, and forgotten the next. 'Wing Commander' is the next best example; after a series of increasingly elaborate games and the spin-off 'Privateer' series, there was a flop film and then nothing, nothing at all. The last Wing Commander game came out seven years ago, and it's hard now to remember that it was once a major force in the PC games world. Star Trek will go the same way, in a few years. The lone and level sands will stretch far away.

Tomb Raider is another case in point. The series was everywhere for a good five or six years, and the character of Lara Croft was a pop cultural icon to rival Pac-Man. The Tomb Raider games became such a phenomenon that magazines and newspapers took to writing about the phenomenon itself rather than the game. The series merited a film that was a financial success, and a sequel which was not. The most recent game came out only two years ago, but the Tomb Raider series seems to be dead and gone. Only a few dozen months ago, Lara Croft was the wet dream of the kind of people who write for 'Wired' magazine, and caused the nocturnal emission of several pints of buzz words and grandiose musings on the nature of celebrity in the internet age and so forth. The character and physique of Lara Croft had the effect of reinforcing the media's stereotypical portrayal of computer gamesplayers as hormonal male teenagers with little experience of real-life breasts, or indeed women in general. (Thankfully, the few games which directly imitated the character flopped dismally, perhaps because hormonal male teenagers are more comfortable with images of black-clad Ninja men holding guns than they are with women.)

The impulse to write about the Tomb Raider phenomenon rather than the actual games is so seductive that I am doing so myself, right now, in what is supposed to be a review of Eidos' 1996 original. I could carry on indefinitely, if only a publisher would agree to finance me; and that is unlikely, because Tomb Raider is no longer the money-spinning cultural giant it once was. The lack of an impulse to scrutinise the games turned out to be a blessing, because the games were essentially the same, with slightly different graphics and different environments.

Tomb Raider is an unusually atmospheric platform game. Unlike the majority of its contemporaries, it takes a broadly realistic approach. The main character is a human being, rather than a dragon or super-deformed plumber; the environments are supposed to represent the real world, albeit that they are hyper-real in the style of the 'Indiana Jones' films, which the game resembles. The main character is, unusually for a computer game, a woman, and plenty has been written about Lara Croft elsewhere. As she is mostly viewed from a behind-and-above perspective, her breasts quickly fade from the memory, and although it is surprisingly erotic to drown or otherwise kill Lara - admit it, you enjoyed it too - her abundant physique quickly becomes mentally invisible.

The gameplay is, as covered effectively by Mr Ludicrous Gibs elsewhere, a mixture of jumping puzzles and "hunt the cog / switch" runabouts, complicated by the unusual control scheme. The player's control of Lara Croft is much less direct than in other platform games; she jumps of her own accord, and only on one of the invisible gridlines that make up the world. Performing a running jump from the edge of blocks is devilishly hard until you realise that you have to press the jump key a few steps in advance.

As such the platform action feels distanced, closer to being a puzzle game than a test of skill. It's not so much "can you make that jump" as "where will you jump next", and frequently you find yourself having to ascend shafts by leaping from edge to edge in a careful and unique sequence. The game's enjoyment comes from working out the puzzles and enjoying the spectacle, and at the time Tomb Raider was a very attractive game. Particularly if you had a PowerVR or 3DFX card, in which case the textures were smoothed off and the underwater bits had a gorgeous fog. The music is actually a set of ambient soundscapes which sound nice when listened to on CD, plus a theme which uses a lot of woodwinds, from what I remember.

The Bad
Apart from the abovementioned control issues, the game was generally of a consistent standard and only occasionally marred by excessive obtuseness (a level in which you have to fiddle with water pumps sticks badly in the memory). The biggest gripe is that of the series itself, which barely progressed from this game onwards; rather than using the character of Lara Croft in a new context, or fundamentally altering the gameplay, the people or organisation responsible for the product seemed content to pump out the same game with minor variations.

The Bottom Line
In its day it was a fun platform game, with frustrating controls, atmospheric locations, one or two impressive setpieces - an attack by a big dinosaur was particularly good - and an iconic female character who utterly failed to stem the tide of rape, prostitution, forced marriage, female child-murder, battery and casual, constant abuse which is still a woman's lot in 2005. I have no idea if it'll work on a modern-day Windows machine - the game emerged even before 3D cards were common. It also has a historical part to play in the story of Sony's PlayStation, because along with Wipeout it was one of the console's first wave of killer apps (if we count Gran Turismo and Final Fantasy VII as the "second wave"). As such it might be best to buy the PlayStation version and play it on your PC with an emulator, albeit that you'll miss out on the attractive 3D accelerated graphics.

Ah, I remember when Lara Croft was played by Rhona Mitra. She was almost the same age as me. And yet she never answered any of my letters, even though I sent loads. That made me very upset but I have calmed down now.

The Good
Released just as Nintendo's Super Mario 64 was showing gamers just how well true 3D could be done, Tomb Raider was the first true-3D, free-roaming action game for both the PlayStation and the Saturn.

The game put you in the short shorts of Lara Croft, a female Indiana Jones with a debutante background and a shady employer. Her mission is to locate the Scion, a legendary artifact of great power.

The graphics are better than you'd expect from a second-generation title, a bit blocky and crude in some respects, but the environments and levels themselves are HUGE, obviously pushing the limits of the PlayStation's RAM. (the Colosseum comes to mind). Water and other effects are done surprisingly well. And they all take great advantage of being in true 3D, with multi-tiered halls and high architecture. Core Design created an engine that was about two years ahead of its time, and while it has some rough edges, it definitely provided the most epic settings on the PSX at the time.

Sound is dead-on as far as effects go; the first time you are surprised by a bear from behind you WILL jump thirty feet in the air and rip your controller out. TR also approaches music fairly uniquely. Most of the game takes place in silence, with 45-60 seconds stings of dramatic orchestral music occurring when you enter a climactic battle sequence, or mysterious music when you enter a section of the tomb vital to the level.

Of course, what made Tomb Raider famous (and as I will explain later, infamous) is it's control and gameplay. Overall, the control for TR is fairly intuitive. Lara defaults to running with the D-pad, but you can make her walk with a shoulder button, and while walking she will stop at ledges and not fall off. The rest of the buttons are fairly mundane, draw weapons, jump, action (for grabbing onto ledges and picking up items) and sidesteps. Also unique is the quick roll, where Lara collapses onto the ground and quickly gets up again facing the opposite direction. Doesn't seem very useful on paper, but after about the third time you narrowly escape an Indiana-Jones sized boulder, you'll be glad it's there. When underwater, Lara controls almost like a flight simulator. Camera work is fairly stable, with a fixed above-behind perspective except during action sequences or when you order Lara to "look" around (you cannot move in first-person mode, however).

The gameplay generally follows the conventions of old-school dungeon crawlers, where you go through the level finding keys in hard-to-reach places that open doors to the next area. Also, you will often pull switches that open doors, alter some level area to make it passable, or occasionally trigger a booby trap.

Combat is a little odd in this game. Your basic weapon is a set of twin pistols with unlimited ammo, and along the way you will pick up a bad-ass shotgun and two Uzis that you wield John-Woo style. These must be fed with ammo, conveniently found strewn carelessly all over the old tombs and caverns. When you draw your guns, Lara becomes unable to grab ledges or pick things up, and automatically aims at the nearest enemy. You dodge around and shoot until the enemy is dead, then Lara will target the next one. Combat is rather hectic and haphazard, especially when fighting large groups of wolves and such, but serves as a welcome diversion from the otherwise slow pace of the game.

The Bad
While Lara herself and the environments in the game are beautifully rendered, the various animals and human enemies are very primitive and minimalist. The bear in particular looks like...sh*t. The aliens in the last few levels look like deformed humans turned inside-out. It would be scary if they were as meticulously modeled, as in say, Silent Hill, but that is not the case.

The game also has some scattered issues with positioning of Lara when she tries to manipulate switches or pick things up, which has to be done perfectly for the game to detect you want to open this door and kick in with the corresponding animation. This shouldn't be a big deal, were it not for the many "flip this switch, and run like hell to flip the other one before you die" challenges, where a pixel's worth of misalignment will result in an ugly death.

Also, the physics are a bit out of whack. Enemies will collapse through walls when shot, and if you shoot an alligator or rat and then drain the water, they will remain there, levitating Copperfield style in the air.

The Bottom Line
Rather than post seperate reviews for all the TR games, I'll give it to ya right here. All the other TR games in the series are basically the same as this, the only differences being varied, improved environments, and a new move or weapon here and there. If you've played one Tomb Raider game, you've pretty much played 'em all. So while the original game was a groundbreaker, and the second and third were decent sequels, the series as a whole has gotten very stale and over-marketed. So buy and play one Tomb Raider game (looking at them objectively, TR4: Last Revelation is probably the best), and maybe another if you like them. Then stop.

The Good
You have to give it to the guys at Core, regardless of what happened AFTER this game got released, they managed to give us a fantastic action/adventure classic that followed in on the footsteps of Prince of Persia, but gave players chance to play in a fully 3d world. Amazing! From the first moments you ran around jumpin and performing acrobatic stunts while the camera followed you around tilting and panning as you moved you knew you were watching something special. And special it would be indeed! This game pretty much created 3D action-adventure as we know it, and that's no small feat indeed.

As mentioned above, the gameplay basics follow the lead of Prince's, with the addition of some more features to cope with the added 3rd dimension (such as the auto-aiming). You can roll, jump in all directions and control your jumps easily with pre-set jumping distances and a free-look camera mode (I never understood those that said it was hard judging jumps on Tomb Raider, heck they pretty much copied Prince's model to begin with!!). Graphically speaking the game is a beauty to behold, the engine (while prone to clipping problems) handles large massive areas with virtually no problem, as well as providing some nifty effects like when you are underwater. Granted, due to the technology they didn't have any colored lightning or stuff like that to play with, but the high-resolution mode is still fairly decent by today's standards. Another high point for the game was Lara's animations, which were truly a thing of beauty. Watching Lara perform sumersaults, swan dives, and even simple stuff like the handstand or the regular walk was a joy thanks to the fluid, life-like motions. I had literally seen no better character animation at the time and even today Lara still ranks high as one of the most life-like animated characters (heck, I even loved it when you fell down and broke all her limbs from the fall ;))

Add to that some stellar level design that gave us such wondruous experiences as the lost world level (that T-Rex, KICKED ASS!!) and you have in your hands the true heir to Prince's crown.

The Bad
Well, sound-wise the game was pretty weak. There wasn't any music save for some "ambience" sounds, and Lara's grunts and moans lost it's, uhm... "appeal" and turned annoying quite easily. The action itself in the game is good, but I really got tired of shooting wildlife creatures after the first few levels, luckily they throw some humans and those weird atlantean creatures your way later on, but until you get to them it's open season for wolf/bear/croc/etc.. hunting. Maybe it's me, but I never felt too heroic when taking out a a couple of bats with a shotgun.

Other than that, the only thing you can really pin against Tomb Raider is that for as many good things as it brought to the videogame world, equal amount of crap came with it. Namely the overdose of crate-puzzles, the over comercialization of game characters, etc, etc. But all these aren't faults of Tomb Raider's success, they are the faults of an industry that exploits it's own honest-to-good ideas with as much savagery as a pack of rabid hyenas.

The Bottom Line
Before the main concern for Core in terms of gameplay were the roundness of Lara's breast or her image as an "eXtReMe Girrrrrl", they gave us an honestly good game that managed to shatter all conceptions of what action/adventure should be. Tomb Raider didn't just introduce the 3d 3rd-person perspective viewpoint to the world, it also offered a magnificent gameplay experience that combined action, exploring, puzzle solving and acrobatic stunts. DO NOT be deceived by Lara's current state as a comercial cyber-whore, this first date with her was a roller coaster ride to remember.