Nostalgia is a dangerous thing, It's like grieving, in fact I'd swear the same brain patterns are at play when you're looking through rose-coloured spectacles as when you're mourning the loss of a loved one.
When I first heard about the Tomb Raider remasters, the original trilogy that led to many a sore wrist back in the 1990s (from the precision jumps, you filthy-minded beast!) I figured it'd be another case of a needless cash-in, in an industry that is fast running out of ideas and is spending huge wadges of cash on new IPs that are ultimately crashing and burning purely because, well let's face it, they're just no fun!
Back in 1996 when Tomb Raider arrived, I first encountered it via the mighty Playstation Official Magazine. Each issue of the mag came with a cover disk crammed with demos, and it just so happened that one mag had a demo of Tomb Raider 1. That was it for me. I was a student at the time, working a part time job just to pay the bills and always poor. But I always put a little cash away every week to spend on something as a treat - and for 9 long weeks I stashed a bit of cash away to be able to afford my own copy of Tomb Raider 1 on the PS1.
TR1 was my escape. I was tanking my course, my first marriage was failing, and I was living in Brighton - a very expensive place to live - on bugger-all cash, so the chance to immerse myself in Lara Croft's dusty caverns was a welcome distraction from all that.
As it was one of the few games I had on the PS1 I played it to death, and in fact completed it. Which is a feat that my 'older' self is in awe of considering just how frustrating and difficult the game is. You've all seen that episode of Spaced where Tim Bisley reportedly shouts "Just fucking jump you big-titted bitch!" much to the alarm of his listening-in landlady Marsha? Yeah, that was me. Without the addiction to cannabis and all the other filthy little habits Mr Bisley had.
Skip forward to today, now, and the remasters are here - surprisingly not shoved out as a full-price 60 quid cash-in (Rockstar, are you listening?)
Better still they work (Rockstar, are you listening?) and better still, Aspyr did a great job of keeping things more or less preserved, but giving you the option to play either in super-smooth sex-o-vision or the original juddery blocky lego-textured pyramid-titted mode.
When I first started playing the remaster, the first thing I realised is just how spoon-fed we are in modern gaming. I'd just recently replayed all of the Uncharted games (yes, even the Vita version) and the colossal difference between Uncharted 1 and Tomb Raider - just 11 years apart in terms of release dates - is phenomenal.
Tomb Raider does not take any prisoners. Whether you're a real sadist and opt to use the good old "Tank controls" or adopt the modern control method, you're going to need something to scream at or punch or throw across the room between grisly deaths and jump fails.
But let's look on the positive side, these games being preserved more or less 'as is' is a good thing. We've seen a LOT of remasters. Most aim to reinvent the original game, often ruining the experience. Some just lazily port mobile versions (Yeah fucking Rockstar again, maaan I'm never going to forgive those shitbags for their GTA 'remasters'). Tomb Raiders 1-3 have been 'restored', almost like three museum pieces, preserved for all posterity for old-skool gamers like me but also ready to be reintroduced to a whole new generation of gamers who will probably hate the very bones of them.
So why is Lara Croft such a massive icon? Let's face it, back in 1996 there had been plenty of third-person action games but Tomb Raider did something that few games had succeeded in doing, shifting the focus from pure combat to exploration and puzzle solving but still mixing enough gunplay in there to satisfy the meatheads who prefer to use their brains than their bang bangs (this is something that has always annoyed the piss out of me with the Uncharted games, there's just way too much combat in them and often it's just used as filler with no purpose other than to just hold Nate Drake up a bit in between exploration bits).
While playing the game, I realised that this was an era where characters fell to their deaths - often - because the developers never thought to include a tiny little game mechanic to have a character stretch out their fingers at the last minute to save themselves. It was an era where characters didn't automatically lock-on to enemies when shooting at them (though these remasters do tidy that up a bit, and it does improve things a lot in the combat sections). It was an era when immersive game worlds could be wrung out of the lowest of low poly counts (and in the remasters those are purposely kept, though the new textures are sometimes jarringly weird looking applied in a game engine that maintains a smooth 60 FPS at all times.
Most of all the biggest change in gaming, without a doubt, has to be regular checkpointing. Some games get it right, checkpointing satisfyingly just before a life or death scenario (though even in modern-day gaming, the number of games that checkpoint just before a long unskippable cut scene are still unforgivably high). In the TR 1 remaster I found myself having to remember to save manually, regularly or else risk being sent right back to the very start of a level. I moaned a lot about this at first but once I got used to manually saving, and returning exactly to that point after a nasty fall or creature-related mishap, I actually began to wish more modern games had manual save modes that did the same.
One thing I did find is that it was all too tempting to dive onto the internet to solve a particular puzzle (and let me just state for the record that making the fecking rusty keys the same colour as the floor in the Cistern level was UNFORGIVABLE! I spent HOURS looking for those fecking things and I'd walked right over them!).
This wasn't a luxury I had the first time around, and I hate cheating but old-brain me just couldn't get into the mindsets of Mr Gard and his TR1 team, and their bizarre level maps.
With the remasters I spent the first few hours writing them off as a disaster. But then something weird happened. I started to ENJOY them, I started to remember how to play them. Some old forgotten muscle memory stirred and I began to remember just how annoying the camera systems were on these old games, but learned to compensate for them. At first it took me ages just to work out how to exit a pool of water (I realised that no one had actually thought to make stuff like that 'automatic' back then so it often involved pressing a couple of buttons in tandem - just like it does now). I remembered having to use the 'walk' to avoid walking off the edge of platforms, I started to remember how to jump backwards and hang off ledges for a bit of shimmying. I also remembered having to compensate for gamepad lag, letting go of buttons sharpish so that Lara didn't 'run on' into yet another grisly death.
If there was one huge criticism, but again you could count it as a positive as well, it's that the cut scenes - which were dizzyingly brilliant bits of CGI back in the day that younger me never imagined would be eclipsed by the in-game engine graphics - look absolutely terrible now. Like watching old Quantel demos from the 80s. Core really phoned all that stuff in but at the time it set the scene perfectly for the action ahead. Now they're just embarrasingly twee looking and horribly muddy and indistinct (though if you're a sadist who is playing the game through with the 'original' graphics I guess they fit in better).
I am now locked into completing all three, and for £25 I'm happy that these were priced right, and I'm also happy that Aspyr did a really nice job of not 'messing with 'em' too much, hell they even have the same game menus, music and everything. Nice job folks.
So if you're an oldie gamer like me and had a lot of love for these games, you need this new remaster in your life. If you're entirely new to Tomb Raider, or have played the modern stuff, consider those games as the 'training wheels' before the real deal. Because you will die, and die, and die again playing TR1, 2 and 3. But you'll die with a smile on your face, for sure.
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