tomb raider games s&d

I liked the baddie character, she looks like she should be playing in dimmu borgir

Has there ever been a game where the cutscenes aren't ridiculously pompous (GTA excepted) I wonder.

I meant to get a copy of Legend, the smoothness of the motion in the demo was actually one of the appealing features!

I think I mentioned this review here before, and it still makes me want to play Legend:
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/gamerev/tombraiderlegend.html

FWIW, there is a set of mp3s of the little music stings from the first TR game here:

http://gh.ffshrine.org/soundtracks/1205

really nice, some of them.

I'm kind of freaked out by eidos pulling core design off TR, and replacing them w/another games developer, when core had actually created the game in the first place. It seems to me to be somewhat like a record company looking at some band who've seen better days, so to speak, and sacking the members, to replace them with some other guys. It seems sort of wrong and back-to-front on some fundamental level.

The games industry appears to be a bit backward w/r/t creator's rights vs work for hire to me generally, though.

Anyway, on the way home from work last night, I figured I'd probably get 3.99 worth of entertainment out of the "Angel of Darkness" plus tbh I was curious about exactly how bad it was, based on what I'd read online. Based on playing it 'till 1.30am last night (!) I think if I'd been a fan of the previous games, and was expecting some kind of return to form, and had paid full retail for it, I'd have probably wanted the developers to suffer horribly. As it is, for 3.99, and with 0 expectations, it's actually been very enjoyable so far (ie, I was up till half one playing it, and I wasn't tempted to switch it off and go back to GTA:SA once - though the fact that I'm stuck on that fuck-awful mission where you have to get aboard the plane carrying the mafia hit team might have something to do w/this). On the downside, the character's moves are all very sluggish, and not always predictable, the game is obv unfinished - there's a parisian cafe where the interior isn't rendered from the outside and you can see the backend of other buildings through the window, some of the npc's animations aren't completed so when they speak, occasionally they don't move. At one point the icon for a nearby pickup came onscreen, so I pressed the action key, and Lara walked through the wall of the upstairs she was in, walked through the air, into an adjoining building, and picked up a 9mm clip from the floor there, wtf.

On the upside, the little character is still as cute & charming as in the 1st game, despite being much more detailed. The animation of Lara's face in the cutscenes is very well done. The best thing about it is that the general atmosphere of the thing is heading in it's inept way towards something quite surprisingly grim and almost thrilling. In the first few levels of the game, I'd had Lara sneak up behind a gendarme and break his neck, then kick a guard dog to death! In her interactions with the npcs, for all the spoken pieces are a bit corny, she nevertheless comes across as quite sinister and menacing. After escaping from a murder scene at the beginning, she winds up sleeping rough in a derelict tram car, and the first people she interviews in the shitty area of Paris she wakes up in include a couple of down-and-outs, a drug dealer and a streetwalker. The story of the thing so far, for a videogame storyline, is somewhat intriguing.

In all, it's the worst kind of artistic thing that sucks - the sort where it could obviously have been great, but it's been fucked up in ite execution. All the way through playing it, I was thinking "this could have actually been awesome, if..." Even based on the first 5 levels, I get the strong impression that if they'd actually done this thing right - specifically if the character's moves hadn't been so sluggish, if the scripted interactions with npcs had been done better, if the thing where the more hard graft she does, the stronger she gets had been implemented in a less crappy/jarring way, it would have been an absolutely great game. How can people fuck something like this up so badly?

TR4 was worse - instead of "Lara's House For Noobs" you had to go through all the cut scenes with that annoying twat telling you how to run and jump.

http://s87.photobucket.com/albums/k155/slayer_333_2006/?action=view¤t=07-bridge.jpg
http://s87.photobucket.com/albums/k155/slayer_333_2006/?action=view¤t=06-parisian__missing_bridge_area.jpg
http://s87.photobucket.com/albums/k155/slayer_333_2006/?action=view¤t=TRAOD_P42006-10-0316-52-37-681.jpg
http://s87.photobucket.com/albums/k155/slayer_333_2006/?action=view¤t=TRAOD_P42006-10-0316-52-11-071.jpg
http://s87.photobucket.com/albums/k155/slayer_333_2006/?action=view¤t=TRAOD_P42006-10-0316-47-27-531.jpg
http://s87.photobucket.com/albums/k155/slayer_333_2006/?action=view¤t=TRAOD_P42006-10-0316-47-12-601.jpg

These are all screens of parts of the Paris level of "Angel of Darkness" only accessible via using a flying cheat. A couple of the above locations can be seen in the background when playing the game, but you can't actually get to them w/o cheating. The accessible part of that part of the game has several streetmaps in it which are viewable, and the impression I get is that the playable area is at most one fifth the size of the entire map. I've had a couple of games where bits have been removed, leaving a ghostly trace in the game - the ghost tower in Vice City and the missing red light district in "Dun Darach", but nothing like this. I read on some forum that if you get the version of the game as released, which is like version 39 or 42 or something (mine is version 52), there's something like 250 character animations that don't appear in the game, as well as the extra map bits. This one, which some dude extracted and placed in the game:

http://tombraider.central-game.net/lacek/aod/bin1.avi

..appears to show the character scavenging from a garbage bin. WTF at that.

Once you get past the Paris section, it gets back into more I suppose "classic" Tomb Raider territory, hopping from platform to platform in huge underground vaults. It pretty much totally lacks the free ranging exploration thing that I remember enjoying in the first game (and that I also really dig in the GTA games), but most of the platform puzzles are at the right level of difficulty, there's been a couple of thrilling bits as well, where they added a bar so that when she's climbing walls or shimmying from ledge to ledge, she only has so much endurance, and a couple of the bits you have to traverse cut it pretty fine. The main thing it has going for it are the levels themselves. There's probably lotsa games out there with graphics that are "better" by some standard, certainly by any standard of "realism", but some of the locations in this game are absolutely gorgeous, a few are the best I've seen, actually. A fair bit of it, w/all the graphic options roofed, is like inhabiting a really nicely styled bande dessinee comic book.

The missing stuff does my head in, though. I feel like I've bought the computer game equivalent of "the wicker man" (cut version), eh. Def. a deal at the price, I've had hours out of it.

http://bulk2.destructoid.com/ul/189062-croft.jpg

wait a minute....

http://www.thedailyinquirer.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/sandra_bullock.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN7_8Yholm4

Huh, nobody talked about Guardian of Light? That was some great co-op, actually good enough to get me interested in Tomb Raider again.

I was excited by this too but on my 26" TV Lara was about 2 microns high

anyone get this? planning to? i'm tempted, it looks ok

My buddy has it and we're planning to play next week. Supposedly quite good.

keep us posted!

it looks good, will grab later this year on sale for sure

This is pretty rad. Hopefully i can play this a bit this weekend. The world looks gorgeous and Modern Game As Movie Cutscenes isn't all that intrusive. I really hope I can avoid the more gruesome deaths cos that stuff really isn't appealing to me. The first puzzle where you burn that one thing and burn the other thing and push the thing etc etc was pretty satisfying, i hope there are plenty more puzzles to come.

Oh yeah, i got the first game cos i had a PC when Mario 64 came out and i was way more into TR than Mario. Never played much of any of the other games.

I read some criticism that went 'this doesnt feel like Tomb Raider, where are the tombs?' and playing this game, the very first thing you do is escape your own tomb.

i raided the first optional tomb, it was pretty fun if kinda short. i got it for like $20 on pc and am perfectly happy with it. dunno if i'd drop $60 for the console version.

i bought this, it's great, i'm impressed.

funny how closely the plot & setting track with far cry 3

of the recent shoot-dudes-with-a-bow games this is my favorite by far.

what are the other shoot-dudes-with-a-bow games? is that a thing?

far cry 3 and crysis 3 are both bow-intensive

You can play Skyrim that way as well.

OK i finally got this to stop crashing. At first it would crash kind of randomly shortly after exiting the intro cave, then it would crash without fail at a waterfall inside that cave. I have an ASU EAH6850 graphics card. So i downloaded 13-1_vista_win7_win8_64_dd_ccc_whql.exe, which is an older Catalyst driver that fixes the bugs. Now it does not crash! BUT! I have to re-install these drivers every time i reboot my system, before i play TR. Yeah, kind of a pain in the ass but what are you gonna do?

This game is pretty great. Last night i was shooting wolves w arrows which was pretty fun. The more narrative pace of this game is a little limiting, but i think the narrative is decent and the cinematic way everything plays out more than makes up for it. First encounter with the wolves is a great example. You are supposed to get caught in that bear trap and have to sit there and face them off and it's such a tense and awesome moment that would be way harder to pull off if the player had lots more freedom.

That said, i hope there is plenty to explore here. The island look so amazing, it's sort of sad when i get to a cool interesting new place and then wander around and find nothing but dead ends and one direct path to the next narrative-driven moment. Controlling Lara (jumping, zip lines, bow-and-arrow, gymnastic swings, etc) is a piece of cake and has been flawless so far and probably the only reason the linear nature of the game is upsetting is the control is so rad you just want to go off-map.

There's a graphic brutality to the melee violence(and overall shitstorm) that both happen to and is employed by Lara that I'm wondering is necessary.

Like, I understand what they're trying to go for narratively and with her character act, but it seems that there's a visceral grisliness that goes way above and beyond what you need to communicate the character/emotional/narrative emotion.

Come to think of it, it's like a Stephen King novel, where not only does plenty of horrid shit happen to our protagonist, but also you're gunna hear about it in graphic detail.

Much like Lovecraft protagonists are little more than a set of sense organs to experience the horrifying shit for the reader, SK's protagonists can be just a corpus upon which the meat is torn apart and destroyed in detail.

In other words, Lara would need a full set of hockey pads and caged helmet to survive the concussions, contusions, and trauma(blunt force and otherwise) visited upon her.

Game is awesome and beautiful, tho. Wish there were more fiddly puzzles of ancient technology to bang on.

There's a shot stolen straight outta Apocalypse Now

due to a lazy hungover weekend and an impromptu day off work with a rolled ankle, i got through this. it's really good but i have trouble assessing whether i thought it was short or not. definitely seems to... accelerate near the end.

stuff that's good: the movement, the AI, your increasingly ragged and beat-up look, the long off-screen tease of the supernatural, the characterization and v/o, the gameplay balance (pretty much even between puzzles, exploration, stealth, and open fighting), the set pieces are all unique and fun and there are lot of them.

stuff that's bad: idk, not much! the gun sounds are really anemic (this seems like a common problem these days? FC3 too). also, it's a real design feat to make 3d platformer puzzles that also look and feel like real built or natural spaces; at times i was like, uh ok this is a game, especially with the porous climbable walls.

i played through on hard, which i recommend. some of the combats are just devilish.

there are tombs to explore but they are short. effective, but short. it's basically one trick/puzzle to figure out an then you get the reward.

sorry to bring up far cry again, but the layering of architectural elements is exactly the same: you have mountainous jungle land, with ancient asian ruins, plus abandoned ww2 japanese emplacements, and then modern shanties slapped on top of it all.

Yeah im thinking of switching to hard. I should really just play all games on hard. I'm naturally good at videogames. At most in combat i die maybe 4 or 5 times before figuring out a section, and i think I'm on normal right now. The biggest problem was the (first?) insta-kill stealth section w the flashlights but damn that was fun and intense.

I agree w all that stuff. Gun sounds are whatever, the bow and arrow is where it's at. Maybe my bow skills are at a higher level than my gun skills, but when I'm entering a combat zone, I take cover and then knock them all out w head-shots. Here's a little aside on videogame violence: I was showing a friend this yesterday, went into a camp and had a real intense battle, shot about a dozen or so baddies, plus a few deer and rabbits on the way out. He commented "Wow, you're just killing everything". We finish that up and try out "Nintendo Land" on Wii U and are playing through games and the favorite ends up being this one where you throw ninja-stars with the touch screen in a shooting-gallery style game. After killing several hundred ninjas we realized this game by Family Friendly Nintendo has a much higher body count than Gritty Tomb Raider Reboot. It's just the ninjas look like adorable paper dolls that explode into confetti, and I suppose that makes it much easier to accept.

Anyways, I found the first tomb, or it was probably the DLC tomb, with the crashed airplane and that destroyed temple. It was pretty amazing. I think this was shortly after i learned how to climb rock walls, which was also fucking cool. Jumping from rock wall to rock wall is so much fun. The design of this game is GREAT and i'm discovering more and more little things to keep my eye open for, like Buddha statues or dream catchers or whatever. I want to complain about it being too linear but I really enjoy all of the puzzles and dramatic moments. Like when you carefully walk across a log high over a waterfall and the camera shifts up, it really tries to get you on an instinctual level and succeeds. Parts of this game are nice, safe, and serene, and parts are really thrilling.

probably the DLC tomb

uh ok i guess i need to check through the menus a little better

Tomb of the Lost Adventurer. I mean, it was really only one big room with one puzzle, but it was a nice design, and it took me a good half hour or so of jumping around, exploring, figuring out ways to light the stuff on fire that was holding up the plane, etc.

tempted to pick up either FC3 or TR - I have the impression FC3 is more of a free roaming while encountering weird stuff game while TR is more platform-ish??

yeah exactly.

FC3 is open world and TR is more linear. TR does that metroid thing where you can return to cleared areas with new equipment to get at places you couldn't the first time through.

they also both have a core story of a normal person who learns to survive and kill in a hostile landscape (with skill and equipment upgrades to match) but far cry's is about 1000% more annoying and unbelievable, if that matters to you

i just finished FC3. i got to a pretty happy place of just doing the things i liked in the game (stealthily capturing outposts, climbing towers, doing the Wanted missions) and ignoring the stuff i didn't (path of the hunter missions, looking for all the letters/tchotchkes/etc). the story and 'boss fights' are super dumb but avoidable for long stretches of time.

nothing i've seen of TR so far looks exciting for some reason, probably because they show all the really linear setpiece moments in trailers? you guys are making it sound great though.

Parts of this game are nice, safe, and serene, and parts are really thrilling.

this is a good description of what i loved about the first tomb raider

i loved having the time and space to match wits with ancient, long-dead prankster architects

That one guy kinda looks like Manti Teo, amirite?

Yeah LOL.

Moving around the island gets more and more fun as you go through the story. The cool thing is that she keeps building new tools for getting around, and introducing new play mechanics. It's a blast to, say, shoot an arrow into a cliff, ride a zipline to the cliff wall, jump off, bury your axe in the side, and climb up. I'm looking forward to using these techniques after the story ends, and I hope they come out with some cool DLC that uses it.

at the outset of the franchise, playing Tomb Raider wasn't about getting to know Lara Croft's character. It was about searching, shooting, and platforming

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/187601/untold_riches_the_intricate_.php

years ago i did an interview for some students making a video for their course assignment and i said then that the point of Lara was that she was a personality-less blank that players could project onto. 99 percent of games worth playing are not equipped to fuck about with rich characterisation.

i redboxed this game last weekend knowing full well my ps3 was not recognizing game, dvd or bluray discs but hoping a little vaccuuming would do the trick. It did for games and dvd but no blu-ray. then i forgot the whole reason i was vacuuming it was to play the game and instead lost my mind over the bluray not playing and pulled the whole thing apart, dusted the whole disc area, broke a ribbon cable insert (but came up with a trick fix) then reassembled only to find id inadvertently messed up a spring and couldn't even put discs in the machine. now the game is back in the redbox and the ps3 is in parts again and I can barely stand to look at it.

Has anyone played Anniversary? I kind of want to check that out after this.

Yeah - it's good, all three previous Crystal Dynamics Tomb Raider games are good in a "they really get it" way.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/7025-Tomb-Raider

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/tomb-raider-writer-rhianna-pratchett-why-every-kill-cant-be-first-and-why-she-wanted-make-lara-croft-gay/

I just finished the game, and I'm looking forward to exploring the island for a good bit, uncovering all the GPS things and little relics and hidden tombs and stuff that I missed. It was pretty great! Definitely ended up being a little more combat-based than it seemed at the beginning, but that's fine. And everyone (not here necessarily) who is complaining about the ending, I really don't know what to tell you, because I thought it was pretty awesome.

Sad about the lack of single-player DLC that was announced. Oh well. At least the game itself is great!

Started post-game item hunt, which is extremely fun in this game. Item hunts in general I don't mind, because usually they are placed in weird out-of-the-way spots where you have to figure out exactly how to get from here to there. Spent about an hour on shipwreck beach last night blowing up mines. TR doesn't really have a whole lot of invisible wall/2-foot-jumps you can't make, which is nice. Also it's cool that the island still has random bad guys and is repopulated with fresh deer and wild hogs to hunt.

I have(possibly foolishly) decided to play through all the Tomb Raiders after getting them all for next to nothing in a Steam sale. TR1 still holds up pretty well with some actual good level design, although the last couple of stages really amp up the frustrating bullshit and I was pretty glad when it was over.

TR2 is a massive disappointment though, three stages in and I'm already considering calling it quits. The problems are exactly the ones outlined in the OP - twats with guns who never miss, very few health items, hugely awkward combat controls. In the first game the actual human antagonists were limited to a very few encounters, probably for good reason, but in this one they're everywhere. Now I remember why I never played beyond the Venice stage when I first had this game a decade ago.

started playing this last night, it feels a lot better than i expected. kinda wish i could stay in this hunting/camping/tomb raiding zone for the whole game, no other humans or epic story involved.

Which TR?

My ps3 disc drive is fucked so I looked for the new TR in the PS Store. The full game plus a bunch of extra stuff is only $29.99! Older TR games were between $5.99 and $9.99

yeah, the new reboot one.

kinda wish i could stay in this hunting/camping/tomb raiding zone for the whole game, no other humans or epic story involved.

otm

Half off on Steam for the weekend

kinda wish i could stay in this hunting/camping/tomb raiding zone for the whole game, no other humans or epic story involved.

yeah the odds on my playing this are pretty long but there was some shot of lara hunting a deer in the early promo for this that made me really long for a roguelike version

otm. Hopefully they are listening to the feedback (which in general seems to be "wish there was more playing around/exploring tombs, less shooting") for the sequel. I've been playing through TR Anniversary and while it's really great and exploring these awesome levels is a blast, there have been plenty of moments where I was just stuck, unsure of where to go next, for a long time, like hours spent running through the same 7 or 8 rooms. Say what you will about too much combat and movie-style QTE's but while playing the new game I never got stuck like that.

the reliance on Red Dead Redemption style cover-and-shoot shit is just..... like sometimes maybe it's cool, but tomb raider it ain't

though no game is perfect; to be fair to the OG tomb raider there were PLENTY of times i ran through the same rooms over and over trying to figure out what i was missing. though maybe i just wasn't very good at it

i thought the combat in this was really good!

it is but the shooting gallery mechanic is familiar from other games... i want to JUMP and SHOOT at the SAME TIME with TWO GUNS basically

picked this up yesterday, hoping to start it this weekend

this game rules, feels kinda like an uncharted but without relying on guns guns guns and hordes of assholes with guns. the bow n arrow shit in this is super fun

the best bits of this are where you're actually climbing on and exploring random jungle shit, not running down corridors blasting fuckheads

i hate the QTEs, so pointless

come on it's like a cutscene you can fail

lol

I wonder how much the PS STore charges for Tomb Raider II. Must be around $6, right? I love the Venice section. So much fun.

"Her soul is trapped inside a decaying body! THAT'S the reason for the storms!"

makes sense to me

Why did they come to the island in the first place? I can't remember.

The game begins with Lara setting out on her first expedition about the ship Endurance, with the intention of finding the lost kingdom of Yamatai. By her suggestion and against Whitman's advice, the expedition ventures into the Dragon's Triangle, east of Japan. The ship is struck by a violent storm and split in two, leaving the survivors stranded on an isolated island.

Which it turns out, is Yamatai. But why did they want to go there? It's a big crew! Were they gonna go raid some tombs?

the glory hunter academic wanted to discover it (iirc) for what i took to be a crappy history-channel style tv show

Ah it's coming back now - yes

I have been pondering exactly how his grisly death will play out for some time

started playing this because ps+ free / long weekend... the game itself is fun to explore but the "press square to not get choked, raped and killed" QTEs are very lame. the voice acting is terrible, the story is stupid as fuck and the EMPOWERMENT angle feels thrown in for critics and not well thought out. Girlfriend finds this appalling and asks how come Lara is basically sounding like she's having sex when she's climbing a building. On the positive, it's like a much easier and less sprawling Just Cause, so that's okay. I may finish this?

Rise of the Tomb Raider is very cool. the pickaxe climbing mechanics are perfectly suited to this game about scaling snow covered mountains and exploring icy caves.

the game looks really really nice and is full of beautiful wintry vistas. the lighting is very cool, the blue-white snow having colored light reflected on it, red, yellow.

there is combat yes but are a lot of actual tombs in this game, which is super nice. pulling up the map shows you all kinds of things to discover and explore: the screen itself is refreshingly free of HUD elements. there are no destination markers floating on your screen, no mini maps taking up valuable real estate. the game already looks cinematic, this just takes it to the next level.

i was scaling the side of a mountain while hearing someone talk about the legendary Russian witch Baba Yaga. i have no idea if she is in this game but it is always cool when games dip into this irl folklore.

aw shit... that was pretty awesome

https://i.imgur.com/j3DOxXTl.jpg

this game really looks amazing

https://i.imgur.com/cCsW7hnl.jpg

i've been playing shadow of the tomb raider. bought it a couple of years ago, made some progress then forgot about it until recently. it feels like a guilty pleasure to play it while everyone else is playing elden ring. it's so easy and repetitive, it's like comfort food that makes me feel like i'm good at video games even though i don't have the time to get good at something like elden ring. i don't like the combat sequences but even those are usually pretty easy. it looks pretty incredible. equivalent to the uncharted games in terms of visuals and (lack of) challenge i guess.

it's funny how on rails the various exploration areas are. oh you can climb this one specific wall but none of the other walls that are the same height and made of the same material, ok.

they build the whole plot around lara's guilt for all the destruction she has caused in the pursuit of raiding tombs, then she'll go into an ancient church and just bash the shit out of the walls with a crowbar to find hidden clues

Yeah, I have a couple of those games that I picked up cheap, and I can totally see (even having not played them yet) how they have influenced the current generation of AAA games.

it's funny how on rails the various exploration areas are. oh you can climb this one specific wall but none of the other walls that are the same height and made of the same material, ok.

This frustrates me so much, especially when it’s not always obvious which wall one can climb. I was stuck for ten minutes in some temple area in Uncharted 2 because I couldn’t figure out which combination of ledges I need to leap across to get to a window I needed to climb in—like, Drake can survive falling several stories or leaping over giant pits, but for some reason, he can’t simply hop onto the waist-high pile of rubble right below the window and climb up. I understand why, from the designer’ POV, but still...