Tomb Raider 1 was my absolutely fav game on the PS1 back in the day, I was so good at it too, did speedruns and everything.
That's wild and I'm curious what captured you. Even in 1997 I found tomb raider 1+2 to be almost unplayable. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen and Lara plays like a stiff puppet. I've looked into the remake and I struggled to get past the first two levels. Trying to jump across certain gaps is just destillated frustration. Mario 64 came out the same year and after 5 minutes of running around in front of the castle, it instantly made Tomb Raider (and any other 3D movement before it) look ancient.
I genuinely believe Tomb Raider only became a success because of the sexualized "mature" design and marketing. It does some atmosphere right and being proper 3d at all at that time made it stand out, but with a character design that's not pure gamer brain or just the generic John McShoot it would have been all but forgotten.
I think it was exactly the difficulty and Lara sometimes ending up inside a wall. It gave me such pleasure when I got all the jumps down and could progress through a level in this glorious smooth flow. It took a lot of perfecting. All of the jumps have a spesific amount of movements and steps that need to be done to do them perfectly.
I also just really really loved the music, the ambience. Nothing got the blood pumping better then the wolves and he music in the first level for example, it was that sense of her being in those places all alone. It was epic to me. The zombie stuff in the last levels gave my little brother nightmares, the sounds were so creepy and the sense of fear so real. And the puzzles were so hard, it was amazing.
So it was all about the adventure for me really.
But I am of the nes generation, I really hated when they moved to the analog controller, I stopped playing after that. I was so good at gran turismo and tekken 2 as well, on the cross-controller. Oh and Crash Bandicoot.💗
That's wild and I'm curious what captured you. Even in 1997 I found tomb raider 1+2 to be almost unplayable. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen and Lara plays like a stiff puppet. I've looked into the remake and I struggled to get past the first two levels. Trying to jump across certain gaps is just destillated frustration. Mario 64 came out the same year and after 5 minutes of running around in front of the castle, it instantly made Tomb Raider (and any other 3D movement before it) look ancient.
I genuinely believe Tomb Raider only became a success because of the sexualized "mature" design and marketing. It does some atmosphere right and being proper 3d at all at that time made it stand out, but with a character design that's not pure gamer brain or just the generic John McShoot it would have been all but forgotten.
I think it was exactly the difficulty and Lara sometimes ending up inside a wall. It gave me such pleasure when I got all the jumps down and could progress through a level in this glorious smooth flow. It took a lot of perfecting. All of the jumps have a spesific amount of movements and steps that need to be done to do them perfectly.
I also just really really loved the music, the ambience. Nothing got the blood pumping better then the wolves and he music in the first level for example, it was that sense of her being in those places all alone. It was epic to me. The zombie stuff in the last levels gave my little brother nightmares, the sounds were so creepy and the sense of fear so real. And the puzzles were so hard, it was amazing.
So it was all about the adventure for me really.
But I am of the nes generation, I really hated when they moved to the analog controller, I stopped playing after that. I was so good at gran turismo and tekken 2 as well, on the cross-controller. Oh and Crash Bandicoot.💗