Tomb Raider does add some flourishes, like the swan dive and hand standing ascent, and some necessary additions for 3D, like the ability to turn and jump sideways, but the rest is straight up Prince of Persia (the original 1989 one).
About the control scheme, guns, swimming, crouching or vehicles are just a few.
As for the latter, tomb rider balanced platforming with exploration and puzzles (prince of persia was mostly about platforming) and there was no sense of urgency (prince of persia had a timer).
This was one of the many pebbles that paved my way to IT and dev. Thank you.
Another fun fact: There was an Indiana Jones game for the N64, which was heavily inspired by Tomb Raider. Which was heavily inspired by the Indy movies.
> Tomb Raider does add some flourishes, like the swan dive and hand standing ascent,
The handstand is absent from the Saturn version.
Lara used to have the same consistent design till Tomb Raider 6 (The Angel of Darkness). Her iconic face, known from countless magazine covers, posters, ads, and even music videos (in German speaking countries she appeared in a Die Ärzte music video which topped the charts for weeks [1]). Her trade mark braid hair style, too. It was never just the boobs.
Unfortunately Tomb Raider 6 was a medium flop (due to poor gameplay). The next title, Legend, was a reboot, and they decided to change Lara's face. In subsequent titles they changed her more and more. By the time of Tomb Raider (2013) she was replaced with a completely different person. Not even her signature braid was preserved. It was just some generic looking woman of a similar age.
That's like Nintendo deciding, after the 6th Super Mario title, that Mario should now look like a more realistic man and lose his big nose and his outdated hat. Or as if Capcom had decided, for Metal Gear Solid 3, to swap out Solid Snake for some other guy with the same name.
I would have been okay with changing Lara Croft's not-very-realistic body proportions to something which fits the zeitgeist better. If it is so important for those people who love to complain about such stuff. Though I suspect most of the people complaining about her proportions didn't even play the games themselves. But please at least keep her face and don't change her into a completely different person.
(And in my opinion, keep her braid. No other character has it. Without it she is like Mario without hat, or Sonic without his red/white shoes.)
> That's like Nintendo deciding, after the 6th Super Mario title, that Mario should now look like a more realistic man and lose his big nose and his outdated hat. Or as if Capcom had decided, for Metal Gear Solid 3, to swap out Solid Snake for some other guy with the same name.
You're saying that Mario and Snake didn't also change from their initial 2D sprites to their later 3D models? Mario's nose and signature cap were hardly distinguishable in the early games, and just weren't important compared to the gameplay. Mario himself changed radically in each game; from Tanooki, frog and cat suits, to becoming other characters entirely in Odyssey. Snake's features only became visible in the first MGS, and the model in The Phantom Pain might as well be a different character. (It doesn't help that MG chronology is confusing as hell, and I'm not certain that "Venom" Snake is actually the same person as "Solid" Snake...)
The change of Lara Croft was certainly influenced in part by the zeitgeist, as you say, but it's largely the result of normal character evolution in most gaming franchises. Do you really expect a character to have a braid in all versions? And why is Lara's hair or physical proportions so important to her character? Her defining features are being an upper-class explorer and overall badass, which is part of every TR game.
This is a really good article, BTW. Kudos to the author!
Are you saying real women don't have triangle boobs?
Well, the article explicitly shows an early sketch where she looked even more comic-like than in the final renders. The character was never intended to look realistic, that wasn't just a technical limitation of the hardware the game run on. In fact even for Tomb Raider 6 the renders didn't look realistic:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/laracroft/images/e/e4/Tr6-...
> You're saying that Mario and Snake didn't also change from their initial 2D sprites to their later 3D models? Mario's nose and signature cap were hardly distinguishable in the early games, and just weren't important compared to the gameplay.
There were some early changes, but Mario looks basically exactly like he did on the cover of Super Mario Bros 3 some 25 years ago:
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/8csAAOSwH9JeGgLT/s-l1600.jpg
Even Tomb Raider 1 - 6 did not have that much continuity.
> Her defining features are being an upper-class explorer and overall badass, which is part of every TR game.
That could also be someone else. Lara Croft now looks like a completely different woman. And very generic too, nothing like the distinctive face (and with the braids, and the exaggerated proportions) she had before. The continuity of the first six games is simply lost, it's like replacing Homer Simpson with some different, slimmer, more average looking character, while still calling him Homer Simpson.
Maybe they wanted the series to have more realistic graphics, which wouldn't fit her classic stylized design. But I'm sure they could have come up with a design that looked at least similar to the old Lara. Even cosplayers do a decent job:
https://prd-rteditorial.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/wp-conten...
I can't tell if you are trolling here, but MGS is made by Konami and that is literally what happens in MGS3
You can make your point without claiming that people who have a different view just “love to complain”. It might be worth asking yourself why they're complaining instead of dismissing their views — you wouldn't want someone else to dismiss your view like that.
It’s far from the only case of developers doubling down on a rebooted character redesign. Kratos didn’t get a physical image shift but isn’t he like a responsible dad now or something?
And now she's also a literal mass murderer and the actual tomb raiding feels like an afterthought.
Lara as a sex symbol was the cherry on top and free marketing for the game, all the media talked about the game and made more or less obvious jokes about Lara's chest (90s jokes, you know).
where the creator of Croft, Toby Gard, hated how Croft was turned by the marketing department into a sex symbol.
To most players it was basically a tech demo. I spend most of my play time in the mansion, wishing there where levels that were reasonable to play.
Tomb Raider has become a major movie franchise, so it's not too surprising that the new games from the last decade are essentially movies.
Original Assasins, The Saboteur.
Maybe it is just me, but the implication that my buying decision are based on something so puerile is just so damn insulting.
Eidos’s marketing team apparently thought otherwise. No idea if they were right—although the game's sales make me suspect the marketing department was probably at least competent.
Probably lots? It helped with publicity for sure, so they would have sold fewer but it was successful because it was a great game, not because of triangular boobs.
https://playkey.medium.com/nvidia-and-amd-queens-how-virtual...
Edit: Any idea how his (WP-based?) site's TOC works? Having a hard time continuosly reading associated posts if you don't use his links he inserts in the footer, but instead try to search f.e. for 'Lucasarts'.
The last TR game after Shadow of the TR was a mobile one: TR Reloaded[1]. It looks like a lazy cash grab infested with microtransactions. It's a damn shame seeing yet another franchise tarnished like this.
It's great when an IP experiments with different game genres and mechanics. Guardian of Light and Temple of Osiris were beautifully done, and there should be more of that. But these lazy mobile ports do a disservice to the IP.
I'm looking forward to the next proper release in the franchise. We need a good current-gen title to fill the void of Uncharted. :)
Whoa… I could call “Corporation ” many things… a proto-FPS, a quasi-RPG, a precursory attempt at something like System Shock… But it definitely wasn’t your typical run-of-the-mill platformer or standard action title. It may have failed at what it set out to do, but it definitely was very ambitious!
Meh, that’s only a small percentage of the world population. There’s a lot of first world Western bias here.
