There have been a ton of Tomb Raider games and most of them have been pretty great. There were some real garbage ones mixed in there that resulted in the franchise taking a break for a while and somewhat recently re-emerging on the scene with some pretty great games. However, there was a time when nobody knew what Tomb Raider or Lara Croft actually was. This game, despite the internet being in relative infancy at the time, took the gaming world by storm and this included my own college apartment.
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It's hard to imagine it now, 25 years later, but these were just amazing graphics back in those times and having a game with a really cool lead character, some very creative level design and the fact that the game was very open and also very tough to figure out made it a real journey unlike any other that we had experienced at that time in our lives.
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Yeah it looks pixelated as hell and the frame rate was also really bad and would slow down regularly if too many enemies got on screen but none of that matter to us and our PS1's back then because we couldn't conceive of anything better in 1996. It was amazing.
I remember my neighbors working as a team to try to figure levels out and the amount of joy that I would feel myself when finally getting through to the next area. My neighbors, by the way, purchased a user guide, the lazy chumps!
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Some of the bosses were huge and terrifying for the time period, this particular one would pick you up and slam you repeatedly into the ground if he got a hold of you. In this regard this one title kind of solidified the Playstation as a more "adult" game system because prior to this (with some exceptions of course) the games on Sega and Nintendo (and of course Atari) were kind of kiddish. This game as genuinely and intentionally scary and gory.
Adventure games like this we had them before but none of them could really compare to the majesty that was Tomb Raider. This game sold like crazy and went on to become a sensation that as I am sure you know resulted in multiple movies that also made millions. I still play the newer games of this franchise on my PS4 today. There's one of them that I have not yet finished.
Perhaps I will have to get out there and make some progress in that today.
Were you alive when this game was released? How did you feel about it?