tomb raider games s&d

i remember being amazed at the size of some of those cave environments. i was still used to doom, p much

the only tomb raider i've ever played was the demo that came on a disc with some magazine, all i remember is that it was really hard to control.

First game had some human characters that you shoot at, they are just insane 90s genx cartoons instead of insane 00s pirates.

Don't let the talk of gore turn you off this game. There is far more time spent jumping, shimmying across ledges, figuring out how to get from _here_ to _there, making dramatic escapes, using grappling hook, exploring the island, etc. I haven't finished the game yet but it follows the Indy paradigm where the archeologist really gets the ancient mystical stuff, and believes it, and knows how to use it against the bad guys.

There is nothing problematic in the setting either. What is a tomb? Well it's a place where you put a corpse, or multiple corpses, where you write stuff on the wall, put up a bunch of candles, do some rituals, etc. etc. I don't think you can go 10 mins in this game without being in a tomb of one kind or another.

It's important to remember that when the very first one came out, the only other game like it was Mario 64, and it was seen as the more adult version of the 3rd person 3d experience. You shoot wolves, you watch Lara take horrific tumbles and get impaled and get swallowed whole by a T-Rex. Mario just jumps on a guy's head, that's it. Tomb Raider has always had a violent streak to it. You can imagine it as part of an adventure lineage starting maybe with the original Prince of Persia, and who can forget the horrific sight of being chomped in two by those razor blades in that game.

haha wait, why on earth would Lara Croft stumble across a room full of body parts

― Darth Icky (DJP), Monday, March 18, 2013 1:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tomb
/to͞om/
Noun

A large vault, typically an underground one, for burying the dead.
An enclosure for a corpse cut in the earth or in rock.

Synonyms
grave - sepulchre - sepulcher - shrine - vault

yeah thanks

real answer is that in this story you go up against not the supernatural evil directly but a crazy cult of earlier castaways who worship it

...who kill a lot of people

there is something gendered going on here w/r/t a young woman in dire circumstances. certainly the whole enterprise of making the iconic lara croft a """real woman""" needs a vigorous unpacking

― goole, Monday, 18 March 2013 17:16 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're aware this was a whole thing, right ... ? i don't think any of the criticisms amounted to 'a vigorous unpacking' because lol games journalists but the iffyness of all of it has been commented on many times

oh and the island was also fought over in ww2 so there's a sub-strata of death from that. and then the ancient shit! bones galore.

xp yeah i figured as much but i avoid most media on this subj.

understandable!

i'm kind of surprised by how much i find myself wanting to play this, despite i. all of that ii. it also sounds kind of like L O S T

My favorite part of the game early on is the hand to hand combat stuff. Throwing dirt in the eyes, and then clocking someone with a bottle. It feels kinda desperate. Agree with the comment upthread about wolves being genuinely terrifying and chaotic. But also ninja shit like shooting an arrow at a wall, and having people move to check out the noise and then picking them off with arrows, or shooting out the lights, or whatev.

My biggest complaint is that there should have been a slower buildup but that's probably my fault, my impatience. You come upon a new area and there are a couple bad guys and nowadays i just start taking them out immediately, where you can usually just wait it out, some of them will walk away and leave one by himself, planning out the attack, etc.

The whole set with the shipwreck and where you are ziplining from one piece to the next is effing GORGEOUS. This game is just totally beautiful. Except the shantytown ;-p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCe8-1dbXZc

"you have an organic reason to follow right behind her and very close"

Wow youtube to the rescue.

Hi everybody. When you shot the guy and the skull appears. Go towards the guy and press F, then you have to repeatedly press E, untill the symbol changes into the exclamation mark, then press F... Took me a while to figure this out... :S

Conan pretty otm. I think as the game goes on she tones up quite a bit but maybe that's my imagination.

can you translate that into playstationese?

I dont understand the 'characters are poorly done other than Lara' critique. I mean, you don't spend nearly as much time w them but they do have individual personalities. Some of them look up to her, they think she's a hero and they want to help in any way that they can, and they give their lives to help Lara. They only existed for a few scenes and I don't even remember their names but by having Lara's heroism develop through the eyes of her friends and fellow captives, it makes for a character arc with depth.

I like the scene when you go back to the Endurance, which mirrors a shot from the cutscene that opens the game. The first time through Lara looks in the mirror she looks like she does in that Conan clip; idealized mannequin-esque cgi with sex appeal, which triggers a reaction like we see Conan have hear, which is sort of normal bro gamer behavior, especially for someone raised on exploitative b-movies. Later in the game she sees herself in the same mirror, face and skin all caked in mud, covered in bruises, and armed to the teeth. Her reaction is steady then sort of surprised at what she sees. The acting is good enough that this comes across rather subtly. She realizes she has changed. In the 1st cutscene, which mirrors this, she kind of looks shocked at seeing herself in the mirror.

Anyways I think they did a fine job w story.

She has some kind of Old West 1000 yard stare or something the 2nd time. It's pretty cool.

the other characters are useless, they either abandon lara or break their legs or some shit.

Well Reyes learns to trust her after being skeptical for most of the game. And Roth helps out by killing a ton of people before he gets axed.

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