![]() ![]() Moving Lara right and left simply pivoted her body in place, and thus she always moved in perfectly straight lines either forward or backward. Lara’s original movement was, as some observed, more like moving a tank than a person. This notion was especially true of the original Tomb Raider, given the very precise nature of Lara’s locomotion. Lara’s body becomes the main visual cue for processing and executing puzzles that otherwise might have remained in a simplified abstract form. But, what Tomb Raider adds to the voyeuristic subgenre of the puzzler is a little voyeuristic thrill due not simply to the aesthetics of a picturesque landscape, but also the aesthetics of a picturesque ass in khakis. The beautiful panoramic scenery of the world of Myst is present in Tomb Raider, as is (generally) the opportunity to take time to study it and consider how to advance in it, given that Lara - as an isolated explorer in the tombs of the dead - is usually unharried by enemies and the fast frenetic energy that they require to respond to. Viewing the landscape and then figuring out how to progress through it is a serene and nearly static process in both games. Like the purer puzzle-based adventure Myst, Tomb Raider is a game about watching and observation. Lara reaches for a conveniently-placed post As my wife so succinctly put it to me the other day as she watched me play this remade version of Lara’s first exploration of the world’s tombs, “its like Myst with shorty shorts.” This note seems to me a perfectly apt way of describing the mood and tone of the original game and also emphasizes the very elements that I have mentioned thus far about Lara’s original adventure - both its emphasis on solving visual puzzles and watching the solitary Lara penetrate the depths of underground tombs. In a note to the game’s fans available in its “Unockables” section in the new remake of the first Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Crystal Dynamics mentions that largely what they wanted to recapture in this revision of the original game was Tomb Raider‘s sense of “isolation.” Puzzles and shotgun blasts aside, Lara was also there as delicious eye candy to become, perhaps, the video game’s first legitimate, pixelated sex symbol. What Tomb Raider managed to do was create a hybrid between the two genres that allowed older school puzzlers the chance to figure out the mechanics of manipulating and moving through space while letting newer twitch gamers also enjoy themselves with the occasional shootout and boss battle. In fact, when the original Tomb Raider came onto the scene, it was hailed as adding new life to the ailing genre of the adventure (those old point and click games that largely resembled puzzle games wrapped within a rather linear narrative) because of its emphasis on puzzling out the manner in which Lara moved around environments rather than the combat systems that are often at the core of action games. Indeed, action was not necessarily at the core of Lara’s first adventure, as her infamous dual pistols often remained holstered throughout more of an adventure that emphasized thoughtful and graceful movement and acrobatics than fighting and combat. ![]() The series is generally agreed to have declined as near-yearly retreads of tomb raiding grew a bit more action packed and a bit less cerebral than the original. Croft, and she has gone through a variety of iterations. It has been 11 years since we first first began raiding tombs with the buxom and well bred Ms. I had forgotten what a complicated woman Lara Croft was. ![]()
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