Tomb Raider 3 – 14 years later – a retrospective, pt.3

Let’s finish this. After Lara already explored the jungles of India and the faraway place called Nevada, she moves closer and closer to her final destination. Whatever that was anyway. I forgot.

General things:

• The game still does that thing where it spawns a boulder right behind you that you can’t avoid it unless you already know about it.
• There are 6 outfits in this game, 3 have bare midriffs, 2 are skin-tight. I think I like the Antarctica-gear best, it’s practical. ..mostly
  
• Cannibals! Amputations! You know, for the children.
• There is a missile-launcher/bazooka in this game, which insta-kills every enemy, but there’s barely any ammo for it (I think maybe 5 missiles in the entire game), which makes them a valued commodity. The rockets look yellow-black, and immediately stand out everywhere.
• Tomb Raider 3 massively toned down the “spawn enemy in your back”-issue, although it still happens sometimes. It will have an embarrassing return in Tomb Raider 4.
• One render-graphic shows Lara with a belly-button-piercing. It is never referenced again and treated like it never happened.
• You don’t explode if you enter the cheats incorrectly. Awwww

 The dinosaurs (small and large) are still terrifying. Has something to do with the clunky controls.

• I’ve always subconsciously admired the minimalistic interface. Your ammo is displayed as a simple number in the corner, your health is a red bar on top, breathing-air is a blue one. They are only shown when actually necessary, so you never feel like they are in the way.
• You can sprint in Tomb Raider 3. When you do, you get a third bar on top (a green one). The sprint is really useless though. You can only run straight ahead, it’s very short, and only marginally faster than usual running. So far I know it’s only used in a few puzzles, some of them optional.
• Unlike sprinting, crawling does make sense and is fun. It feels a lot better suited to the environment to crawl through tight passages, and you’re able to explore vents. VENTS! Imagine that.
• In Tomb Raider 2 dropped items spawned at the feet of the enemy. In TR3 they spawn in the middle of the next ground-tile, so a medkit might be within a dead guy’s torso.

Hey there, flamethrower-guy. …Lara never gets a flamethrower.

• All items already in the environment are in the center of a square too. This takes away a lot of possibilities for item-placement. In TR2 you could, for example, have to carefully balance to an edge of a platform to get something.
• In TR2 items are sprites, here they are 3d-models. I think this might be the reason for the tile-placement.
• You can walk slowly through deadly spikes, but you don’t really notice or learn this until far into the game, so might make a lot more complicated jumps than necessary.
• Lara references Jeff Goldblum in a cutscene. Wait what.
• The bad guy is Finnish. Who would’ve thought.
• The cave-ins and eartquakes feel like classic Star Trek action, as in “shake the camera while I pretend to fall sideways”.

On to my ongoing exploration:

• There is a bonus-level which I never played. You can access it after the end of the game if you have found all secrets.
• Just accicentally pressed quick-load instead of quick-save and landed 3 levels back. See, it happened again.
• There are some kayaking-sections that are just awful. I never managed to make it through them, so I cheated me some medpacks and gulped them down whenever I got the into the damage/kill-zones.
• The bad guy in TR2 jammed a dagger into his heart and gained superpowers. This guy here just jammed a dagger-shaped rock into his heart and gained superpowers.
• Why is everyone so polite? Stranded in the middle of the jungle, with no supplies, predators everywhere, they go “Good day to you, Sir! May I offer you some biscuits?” The polite mercenary without a leg isn’t even supposed to be British.

“And a splendid day to you, young Miss!”

• Some level have multiple paths through them. They usually split very early, and then both ways arrive at the last room. When I played the game 14 years ago I was intrigued that there was another way to explore I never even knew was there, but it has some downsides. Some goodies/secrets can be seen from one path, but never accessed from it. It didn’t feel like an incentive to play again, more like a “fuck you” to the player.
• Just met the King of the Mole-people, with thug-bodyguard. All posh and polite.
• Another polite bad guy. WHY IS EVERYONE SO POLITE. It’s worse than The Avengers. Not the Marvel-one, the crappy Uma-Thurman-one from 1998.
• In the first level in London, right before the end, you can find the “cathedral-key”. In the next level it has disappeared. I never figured out what it does (turns out it’s for the bonus-level).
• I think this is where they realized there’s hardly any raiding of tombs. Conversely, Tomb Raider 4 is set entirely in Egypt. Lots of tombs over there.
• Correction: The shotgun can be found in London too, but it is very easily missed.
• In Antarctica you get the warmth-mechanic, which limits the time you can spend in water. It isn’t really fun and will never be used again.
• The mine-level in Antarctica scared me too much the first play-through, so I cheated my way through it back it. Let explore it now!
• In the last level the bad-guy Willard mutates into a freaky spider. I was so afraid of this scene that I had to wait a year before I had the guts to confront him.
• It’s still creepy as hell.

(If you look closely you can tell it was a person once)

• The giant Willard-spider has only one attack, which insta-kills you. Not fun.
• Final cutscene: Lara goes outside, evades some guards, steals a helicopter and has an aerial battle with another helicopter. What. The final scene, the final climax of the last 20 hours, is Lara destroying a foe/obstacle that has been introduced just 30 seconds earlier? This is worse than Mass Effect 3.

For 3 games the TR-formula has changed very little, and the cracks in it were becoming more and more apparent. Tomb Raider 4 will deviate from that is some significant ways, including a new inventory, more item-mechanics, less globe-trotting, and a more personal plot.

Will I check it out, to compare to the present of game-design as well? …perhaps.

-Matthias

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Tomb Raider 3 – 14 years later – a retrospective, pt.2

Last time in this retrospective I discussed the gameplay and level-design of the by now 14-year-old Tomb Raider 3. How will it compare to “modern” games? Did it do some things brilliantly, while embarassingly failing on others?

Read on for the thrilling conclusion.

More general stuff:

• You know, I think Lara is evil. She kills members of endangered species (tigers, dragons, octopi), steals for her personal gain, and murders hapless security guards, monks and soldiers.
• Winston the Butler is back! He follows you around! You can lock him in the freezer! You can shoot him!

This is one of the loading-screen-collages. Bask in its glory.

• Tomb Raider Legend (the seventh game) has the most “ordinary” boobs. They were quite pleasant compared to the anti-gravitational orbs of Tomb Raider 3-4.
• A lot of the “new” guns are actually re-skins. The MP5 already appeared in TR2 as the M16. The Desert Eagle, new in TR3, is a revolver TR4 (because the standard guns are Desert Eagles then, presumably).
• It just dawned on me that both TR1 and TR3 begin with a meteorite striking the earth and bringing some alien artifact with it. Aliens apparently were in this from the beginning.
• Medpacks have a green cross on them instead of the classic red. I thought this was a nice touch.
• Good god the German synchronization is just awful. It’s full of the useless germanisms like “tja, I don’t know what to do then” *shudder*

I literally have no idea who that is, and I watched the cutscene thrice. I think Lara doesn’t like her.

• I think the bad guy is inefficient because the player never confronts him at the beginning. Oh, Lara does, in a cutscene. It doesn’t happen in gameplay, which would be 1000x stronger.
• TR3 does introduce a bad guy early on, but he’s a lot less memorable that Marco Bartoli from TR2. See, I even remembered his name.
• There are vehicle-sections in this game, which require a lot of precision. The sections in TR2 were a lot more fun, what with the boat-jumping and snowmobile-machinegunning.
• There still is this fun bug, that when you quick-load within 0.5 seconds after having quick-loaded already, all the textures are garbled. It’s fun because Lara is breathing letters.
• I think the bad guy in the first act (“Tony”?) might be a riff of Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. The kids will love it!

Let’s continue exploring. This time I go to the mythical land of “Nevada”.

• The option to chose the order of levels is a weird one. As a first-time-player, you don’t know what the levels are like and probably have no preference, so it’s effectively random. As a veteran of the game you’ve already made up your mind about the order. As a kid you probably don’t even know what the symbols on the globe mean.
• And the game drops me off in my new chosen location, again without comment. I’m in Nevada now. Lots of tombs to raid. I guess.
• I always went for Nevada first. You lose all your weapons in that chapter, and I didn’t want to be at a disadvantage later in the game in case I wouldn’t get them back.
• Oh, flying enemies. They are not at all annoying.
• In Nevada is a huge canyon filled with water. There are items hidden and a lot of opportunities to climb around, so you usually go exploring. Then it turns out the bottom of the canyon is a giant dead end and you wasted all your quicksave-points in it.
• At the end of the chapter you enter a spaceship in Area 51. It’s bigger on the inside, which is a nice gag.
• Next to the spaceship is my favorite “secret”. There’s an entrance in the wall that leads to a corridor with moving lasers, which you have to avoid. At the end is a pool with two orca-whales. For no reason whatsoever. The whales never appear anywhere else. Oh, and there’s a medkit in the tank.

That is actually some of the better texture-work in this game.

• I’ve lost all my guns. I love these scenarios, they force the player to think creatively and turn all rules upside down. Now how did I get out of this cell….
• A side-effect of losing your weapons is that you can’t cheat anymore, so I’ll play this level for real.
• Oh right: A guard comes in and tries to beat me up / rape me. I counter by running around like an idiot trying to lose him.
• In my cell are security-lasers. IN the cell. I can trip them by walking around. WHY
• I let a terrorist/murderer out of his cell, who promptly kills the guard. All is well.
• In one of the room are 3 crates. All 3 look like the moveable crate I used before, but only one of them actually is. /Sigh
• Pressed a button which flooded the crate-room with water. What. Why? Why would you even have such a thing? What is the purpose of flooding said useless room with massive crates, that could never fit through any of the doors?

My friends from the high-security-wing killing a dude, I mean, helping me raid tombs.

• There are surface-to-air missiles and a F117-Stealh-Bomber in this “prison”.
• Oh, look, a 1-pixel-wide dark red laser that insta-kills you and you’d never be able to spot the first time. How fun!
• Giant water-room with lots of invisible currents so you arbitrarily can’t go in some directions. Woo, more fun.
• Oh, I found my stuff. It’s in this easily skippable room off to the side.

The longer you play this game the more you realize it moves away from the core-formula. There are barely any tombs anymore, and instead of fighting a central antagonist Lara has to deal with multiple people. The desert-levels around Area 51 also highlight how insane the level-design has become, with less and less care for plausibility. This will turn out disastrous in Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (pt. 6, the failed reboot).

There will be one more part of this retrospective, in which I’ll take apart the final chapters. Go read it here.

-Matthias

Tomb Raider 3 – 14 years later – a retrospective, pt.1

I’ve already chronicled my thoughts on Tomb Raider 2. Quite recently I’ve had some cravings to go check out its successor again, and so I fired it up. How has it evolved? Will the future (i.e. “the now”) look kindly on it? Read on to learn all these things in part 1 of this retrospective! (turns out I have tons of material, so I’m turning it into a trilogy)

 

I’ll chronicle my thoughts like last time, i.e. In bullet-point-form. For your convenience.

This is what it looks like, btw.

 

Here are some general observations:

• Lara’s breasts feature prominently. Almost every render-picture has them, and they seem to have grown since TR2.
• There are loading-screens in the PC-version now, but they are some of the most hideous ones I’ve ever seen. Basically they are collages of drawn pictures and render-scenes, while a small map in the corner shows the location where Lara is supposed to be.
• The loading-screen for London shows Lara’s location to be the middle of the North Sea.
• The mansion/training-level is still fun. There’s loads of stuff to do and to explore, even more than in Tomb Raider 2. There’s the attic, the shooting-range, the hidden trophy-room, the jumping-course, the obstacle-course, the RACETRACK, the hidden keys, the bug that lets you walk on the roof, the maze, the walk-in-fridge, etc.

 

The hidden trophy-room with stuff from previous games. The dagger! That sphere-thing from Tomb Raider 1!

 

• You can exit the premises of the mansion this time, which you couldn’t in Tomb Raider 2 (well, you could, by exploiting a bug). When you leave you, end up back in the main menu, which is a nice gag.
• The rotating inventory is still a thing of beauty.
• Flares are so much fun. Pop one, light a room. You can carry them, you can drop them. You can throw them down chasms and into water. If you pull out your weapons you automatically drop them.
• The best thing about flares: The T-Rexes you encounter will run towards them. It’s lovely.
• I’ve wanted to buy some real flares to play with them for a long time. Turns out a single magnesium-flare costs about 10€, and lasts for ~2 minutes. But they can light a stadium, and they burn underwater.
• Unexpectedly, I can set a resolution of 1440×900 without problems. I’m almost sure that resolution wasn’t even invented back in 1998…
• Cutscenes still play, but in a horrible resolution.
• The model used for Lara’s basic guns changes from time to time. For the first 3 games it’s 1911 Colts. In Tomb Raider 4 she wields Desert Eagles, and USPs appear in later games and movies
• There is a mini-addon called Tomb Raider 3: The Lost Artifact, akin to the “Director’s Cut”-extra-level of Tomb Raider 1 & 2. I’ve never played it HNNNG MUST HAVE IT

 

Enough generalities. On to exploring and raiding tombs then:

 

• The game drops you off in India, with no explanation whatsoever. Actually it drops you off “in the jungle”. I’m not even sure “India” is mentioned at all. Tomb Raider 1 & 2 had much better introductions.
• The very first scene is so ham-fisted, I will need multiple bullet-points to explain.
• You start off at a giant slide, the probably largest in all of the Tomb Raider-games.
• Right to the left, hidden under the bushes, in a small spot, is the shotgun. This is the only place to get it in the game.
• You can reach it by jumping precisely (and I mean precisely) on the small spot where you won’t slide down. This spot is hidden under leaves, and will require multiple attempts.
• You’ll never be able to figure out there’s a hidden weapon under there unless you already know about it.
   
  
  This. This is were you can get the shotgun. Can you see it?
   
   
• This game is brutal, it insta-kills you often. It took me 12 tries to reach the bottom of this slide. And this is the very first scene.
• Spikes. 3 times. You can barely see them, and they kill you.
• A monkey! Well, an evil monkey. It’ll try to kill you.
• The monkey has purple blood, a weird symptom the German release and concern about “violence”. Surely the discolored blood will put parents at ease. Human enemies have purple blood too.
• Down the slide are 2 hidden extras. To the left are ammo and a medpack, to the right is a Sims-like green octahedron-crystal. You can only reach one of these, and only if you prepare for it and jump all the way to the right/left.
• The crystals are “save-tokens” in the Playstation-version. Collecting one gives the player the option to save once. In the PC you can save without restrictions. The crystals remain, but are now “insta-medpacks”. They still feel weirdly out of place.
• The levels are huge, and appear a lot larger. There are tons of spaces to explore, and ammo/flares/medpacks are hidden everywhere.
• Every level in Tomb Raider 2 has 3 hidden dragon-statues, which are the “secrets”. If you find all 3, you get a special item (like the grenade-launcher in level 1, which otherwise is only accesible after level ~12). In Tomb Raider 3 a level can have a variable number of secrets, which are just stuff. The aforementioned shotgun was a “secret”, and things as mundane as medkits can be too.
   
  
  Funnily enough, the next game to use this color-scheme was the gpu-chomping Far Cry 6 years later.
   
• The game tells you in the statistics “found 3 of 5 secrets”, but this is a lie. There often are more secrets than shown, which is partly due to the large levels and multiple pathways through them. A level with 5 secrets might have actually 9, but it isn’t possible to get all of them in one attempt.
• To advance from the bottom of the slide you have to press a button that’s almost invisible against the wall behind it. I stuck around for an hour before consulting a guide during my first run back in the day.
• You meet a mad explorer/mercenary in a cutscene at the end of the level. He closes a briefcase, then holds it by the wrong side, where there shouldn’t be a handle. This always bugged me.
• The game is split up into locations, and you can chose in which order to play. You start of in India. After that you can chose to go to Nevada, London or Pacific Islands. After those are completed, the game ends in Antarctica.

Tomb Raider 2 feels like the better game overall. The narrative is more gripping, the locales are fun and varied, and there are some good pay-offs. TR3 isn’t as good, but still competent and fun.

 

This article will continue in Part 2.

 

 -Matthias

Replay: Half-Life

Since the Black Mesa Mod is still being reclusive, I decided to boot up Half-Life again after not having played it in several years.

And although this game is now 13 years old, it is amazing how fresh it feels and how it manages to still be more engaging that doays mega-sellers.

Observations:

• There are tons of incidental detail. Enemy Barks, textures explaining stuff, conversations, all add details to the gameworld, which I missed the last times. Probably because I couldn’t speak english then. And was 12.
• Fast movement, long jumps, no gun-recoil. They don’t make shooters like they used to.
• Firefights are harder than I imagined. I though I would be able to sleepwalk through everything, what with my 10+ playthroughs and 13 years of shooter-experience. But here were several points were I had to stop, figure stuff out, and retry, until I wasn’t crushed to death by a giant blue alien.
• Leaving lone, alive enemies behind you, never to be killed, feels kinda strange.
• here are indeed women in the game. There is Dr. Collette/Gina on the tutorial-level, and the female black-ops soldiers. Also, we don’t really know the sex of any of the aliens, so there’s still that possibility. It seems since then Triple-A games have taken another step backwards (while tripping on a rock and falling off a bridge), as most games barely even pass the first stages of the Bechdel-Test. There are virtually no female generic enemies in current games. Half-Life 2 made half the (friendly) NPCs female, which was much cooler (and realistic, but I try to avoid that word).
• Very little apparent scripting. Although this has always been a positive about Valve Games, in HL2 it got more obvious.

• It is LOADS of fun going in with the details of Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Decay and all info from HL2. Hey, that’s “the” barney. There’s Kleiner. That’s Eli, I guess. Breen is mentioned (although not by name). Here is Gina (Hazard-Course Hologram) supposed to show up. Here I would have met Shephard, would he have been put in retroactively. Also, just nuked Magnussons casserole.
• I am SO glad that Steam lets me play in english, not only in language, but also with the content. Which means: No green blood. No Robot soldiers (which were stupid in so many, many ways). No stupid mistranslated and mispronounced dialogue. No Barney-hologram on the Hazard-Course.
• Jumping-puzzles are a lot easier than I remember. Maybe it’s the 13 years shooter-experience paying off.
• At several points I thought “gravity gun”, followed by “damn it”.
• Snarks (those little bugs you can sic on enemies) are sill awesome. I miss them.

• Watching battles unfold between guards, aliens, and the military is also awesome.
• There is a surprising amounts of jets, tanks and helicopters here.
• In multiplayer, you can play as a woman, and customize the color of your uniform. This was way back in 1998. THIS IS AMAZING. WHY WASN’T THIS A BIGGER DEAL. You can’t do these things in current Shooters.
• There are several points where you can land in a dead end, from which there is no escape. DO NOT press quicksave instead of quick-load. FOR GODS SAKE, do not do it. Luckily, quicksave and quickload are now three buttons apart, instead of being next to each other. I am still programmed by Tomb Raider, however, to press f5 to quicksave. Got me some screenshots though.
• It’s much shorter than I thought. Back in the day you could boost with 20-30 hours play time, but now I ran through it in 5 hours. Okay, I knew were to go, and knew how to solve all puzzles. I didn’t backtrack, looking were to go. I didn’t die needlessly several dozen times. I didn’t flinch at spots I used to be afraid of. I didn’t, upon hitting a roadblock, ride to the next games-store to browse a game-guide (before gamefaqs days).
• It is amazing with how few resources are sometimes used. Moving hexagon: Crusher-thing. Particle-Effect: Sci-Fi-gizmo. Moving Crates: Train with stuff.
• Half-Life Blueshift added a hd-pack, which replaced all textures, 3d-models and sounds with versions which are 7 years newer/better. They haven’t been added to Half-Life since then. Interesting.

Well, apart from graphics, this game has aged incredibly well, and in gameplay and story it still outdoes what passes today as a blockbuster.

Go have a try. They are throwing it practically away on Steam from time to time.

-Matthias

Replaying Tomb Raider 2 twelve years later – A retrospective

Tomb Raider 2 was my very first PC game.

Well no. That was Redline Racer, but that I got for free with the computer, so it doesn’t count.

I played it. I devoured it. I found all the secrets, I mastered the even then ridiculous controls, I fell in love with Lara, and I had loads of fun.

There were some corners, however, which I have never explored. Two places where I never ventured. Was I tired? Eager to move on, only to return to these places later? Afraid? Well yes actually, I was quite scared. I was only 10, it was dark, and Tomb Raider 2 had a tendency to insta-kill you often, which made me jump in my chair. So I skipped those passages.

Yesterday I remembered these plans to return. And Replayed parts of the game. I also had the possibility to see how it played more than a decade later.

Observations:

• • Insta-death features often. Infuriatingly often. Sometimes it’s an avalanche that’s impossible to predict, other times the level drops a guy with a flamethrower behind you.
  • The game still tends to spawn enemies in places you have been to already, accompanied by a short burst of “danger music”. It creates them anywhere, anytime, even in already secure places, and I still jump when that happens.
  • Game-design alternates between brilliant and laughably stupid. Just as I think “yetis can climb stuff, cool” I stumble upon another frustrating issue.
  • There is a back-breaking amount of “borderline cinematic” scenes. Which suck. There are accompanied usually by several insta-deaths, re-loads, and realizations that the game is cheating (like spawning infinite avalanches), until you notice that this isn’t a game, it’s a movie, and you haven’t been handed the script.
  • Voice-acting is german. Well, in the version I have. I still can’t get my head around the idea of Lara having a british accent, even though I like those.
  • The graphic scales wonderfully to todays resolutions and widescreens. Only the cutscenes fess up.
  • The controls. Oh my, the controls. To beginners they are still incomprehensible. To gamers with a low rage-quit threshold they are incomprehensible. Funnily enough, it feels like it hasn’t been 12 years since I last played. It am able to recall all special and cool maneuvers, and jump around caves without any problems. Seems it payed off to drill the control-scheme into my head.
  • After years of post-Lara conditioning I press space instead of ctrl to execute actions. Ugh. I blame all other games ever.
  • The menu-system is still one of the most beautiful things in existence, combining elegance and satisfaction. Just rifling (ha) through your backpack feels fun.

• It’s still possible to accidentally press quicksave instead of quickload, thus trapping you forever in a possibly inescapable situation. This ruined my first playthrough back in the day.

So, on to exploring. I’ll cheat my way through most of it (let’s face it, I haven’t got 20 hours lying around), only planning to stop to explore.

Further Observations:

• The venice-level still looks beautiful and plays wonderfully.
• The water has a certain trasparent charme to it I haven’t seen since.
• The game is awfully blocky, akin to Minecraft.
• Flares are FUN. Yet I have rarely seen them in non-Tomb-Raider games since.
• It feels satisfying to light up a flare, and then drop it down a dark chasm or into a deep pool of water.
• Fights are short, terrifying bursts of adrenaline. Enemies kill you relatively quickly, and I believe the wonky controls are somewhat resposible for your panic.
• The last level, where Laras mansion (from the tutorial-level) is invaded, is still brilliant. Just the feeling of actually fighting in a formerly secure place makes it special

Now this is done, let’s continue cheating my way through the levels.

After you lose your weapons in level 5 I make it a priority to retrieve my pistols. Even though I have infinite ammo on all other weapons, it just doesn’t feel the same way without them. After I arrive in the deep waters near an old shipwreck, I realize I never explored this place either. I swim around, using my 100+ medpacks as breathing-aid. Turns out there is nothing but a huge invisible wall.

I arrive in the mountains. An avalanche rolls towards me, I jump over it. To the left is a small cave. Inside a tiger tries to maul me (making me jump in my chair). Inside the cave is – ammunition.

First checkpoint complete, on to the next one.
Before I can summon the giant reptile/bird-thing in level 14, I climb down the other side into a big chasm, where I press the usual button. The rest of the chasm I haven’t explored. It contains – nothing.

So that concludes my exploration of these places I have never been. And although they have been quite empty, I did get the chance to have some nice, warm, nostalgic feeling, and could marvel at the wonders (and atrocities) of the game design.

You should try it. It’s quite a good game, this Tomb Raider 2.

Now that I’m done, I remember some places in Tomb Raider 3 that I haven’t explored either. Like some of the caves in the Antarctic(of which I was alo afraid). Or all those levels which had a secondary path, thus leaving an entire level-progression unexpored.

Should I go trough Tomb Raider 3 too, in its entirety, to explore these places?

…nah. Maybe in twelve years.

-Matthias

//Addendum:
I did go through Tomb Raider 3 after all! Took me a while longer, so it’s in three articles. Part 1 is here, this is part 2, and click here for the thrilling conclusion.