Retronomicon 02.03.10: Tomb Raider

Posted by Lee Price on 02.03.2010

This week the Retronomicon finally recaptures the third dimension as it is lured out of its 2D bolt hole with the promise of some great platforming action and some extremely pointy breasts. Join Lee Price as this week the Retronomicon takes a look at one the the biggest games of the 1990's, Tomb Raider.

Hello my fellow retro junkies and welcome to yet another week of the Retronomicon. As ever I am your host Lee Price, ready to whisk you away into the dusty caves of yesteryear in search of the treasures of a bygone age in gaming. I've had a pretty damned fun week this week. Some Lazer Quest fun has been followed by much drinking with far too little money to support said alcohol intake. Luckily it appears I have a new job on the horizon, so fingers crossed my cash flow will be looking a little more healthy in the coming weeks. As for my own personal gaming, I'm plugging my way through Bayonetta in what little time I had last week for games. I adore the game and should have a review up by the end of the week. I just can't get enough of the little shout-outs, crazy gameplay and insane storyline. I've also had a few more fights on UFC Undisputed. I hate Rampage Jackson and his stupid clinch game. Still enough about me because its time for the...





Comments

Five seems to be the magic number in the Retronomicon comments section in recent weeks as I have another five comments that are just hankering for some responding. So lets get to it with Guest #3481;

I'm proud to say Worms popped my gaming cherry.

that is, it was my very first game. On the good ol' PS1

Awww, thanks for sharing that tender moment with us. I'm glad I could bring back some warm, fuzzy feelings with last week's column. Worms is a very much under-appreciated game, so it definitely needs as much love as people are willing to give it.

Next up we have shaydee;

The best thing about worms was my Arnie custom voice mod. It was hilarious. I only wish I had recorded a match using them.

And when you drown the Labyrinth zone music.... and super sheep flies to Robotnik boss music.

That sounds like an awesome mod just for the Arnie voice. I can imagine worms screaming "Get to da choppa" or quipping "I'll be back" when they die.

dAVE has some happy memories;

Me, my brother and sister lost many afternoons to this game.

I still contest that Worms is one of the best multiplayer experiences around. I similarly lost days to this game.

August has found possibly the best use of a game to date;

I play Strip Worms Armageddon with my girlfriend. It's as awesome as it sounds.

Nothing could be as awesome as that sounds! I think we have tapped into Worms' unknown potential here. I can imagine drinking games with Arnie worms that somehow devolve into stripping. Sounds like a great night to me.

Finally, bringing up the rear we have The One and Only Thunderthief

Yes, I'm male. :)

Y'know, it's crazy to think worms have been so common in gaming. I mean, a true classic like Earthworm Jim.... who would have thought that would be a hit?

This one looks really unique as well. I would check it out, but $40 is pretty steep. :)

The lowly worm's heyday has seemingly come and gone in regards to gaming, but for a while it seems you could rely on them to produce some quality gaming. If you're looking for some Worms gaming, try Worms Armageddon, which you can pick up much cheaper right HERE. In all fairness, it is probably the superior game, even if it is just an extension of the Worms formula.

Okay then, all comments are dealt with so we are ready to go. So strap on those rose-tinted specs as this week the Retronomicon looks at Tomb Raider.



The Background

Core Design were a fairly well respected game development company. Started up in 1988 by a group of guys that mainly consisted of former developers for Gremlin Graphics, Core set up shop in the English city of Derby, famous for little apart from having a fairly rubbish football team.

Core set to work designing games, with their main output being on the SEGA consoles, specifically the Genesis and SEGA-CD. While not achieving huge success with any of their games, they put out a few pretty solid efforts. Bubba n' Stix on the Genesis is definitely worth a look for people who want a slightly more quirky and inventive take on the puzzle/platformer genre, and Corporation did a great job of both utilizing and exposing the technology of the Genesis, even if the game was severely limited. Additionally Core Design were behind the Thunderhawk series, a superb little set of shooters that never really garnered the attention they deserved.

The company was acquired by Eidos Interactive in 1996, who up until that point had been struggling to make a name for itself in the industry but had been steadily buying up companies to develop games for them, including the Danish developer Domark, who enabled Eidos to get a foothold in the lucrative football market in Europe thanks to the Championship Manager series. Upon buying Core Design, Eidos knew they had a solid developer in their hands. However they could not have possibly predicted the phenomenon Core were going to unleash on the gaming world when they released Tomb Raider.



The Game

Tomb Raider is one of the most influential and revolutionary games of the 32 Bit era. While many may bemoan some of the series' later efforts, the original game was one of the first to really showcase the potential of the new generation of consoles. Only Super Mario 64 had pulled off a fully 3D game as convincingly as Tomb Raider at this point. The game also saw the birth of Lara Croft as a mainstream icon, a mantle she inherited from such gaming gods like Mario and Sonic and proudly carried throughout much of the late 1990's.

The game follows the many adventures of our heroine, one Miss Lara Croft, an aristocratic millionaire with a penchant for dusty tombs, priceless artifacts and rare animal slaughter. Lara is often seen as Indiana Jones with boobs and the Indiana Jones comparisons are something which have dogged the character from her very first days of existence.

So she likes to break into tombs and get her hands on rare items. She is also filthy rich, as evidenced by the enormous playground she calls a mansion that acts as a sort of tutorial or training ground for intrepid adventurers. It is here that players will first get a taste of Lara's penchant for pixel perfect jumping, slightly erotic swimming and insanely hot accent.

The story goes that while on vacation in Calcutta, Lara receives a communique from an American named Larson, who wants her to retrieve a mysterious artifact in Peru for a mysterious business woman named Jacqueline Natla. Sounds like a task for an intrepid adventurer, and upon Lara realizing that that is what she is, she sets off to retrieve the artifact. All is not rosy in the world of Lara though as Larson attempts to kill her upon retrieving what is later revealed to be part of a mysterious artifact known as the Scion, which is apparently the key to a power that can enslave humanity. Or something. That's what these things usually do after all.

This discovery throws Lara into a revenge mission against the corporation that attempted to use her before killing her, a mission that takes her from a Monastery in Greece to the temples of Egypt, all while keeping one step ahead of Natla and discovering the link between the Scion and the lost kingdom of Atlantis. Of course there is plenty of killing to be done, with all manner of rare beasts to be killed, as well as both an American and a Frenchman. So that pretty much makes Lara your typical English aristocrat. A strong hatred of animals, Yanks and the frogs is a must for the English nobility and Lara does her job admirably.

The game itself is one of the first to really utilize 3D to its full potential, or at least what was believed to be its potential back in the early days of the technology. The level design is cubic, allowing for a large amount of well timed jumps to be implemented into the game, but the crux of the gameplay is actually the puzzle element. Lara must throw levers, avoid traps (including the classic trapdoors and arrow shooting holes or collecting certain keystones. While nothing overly inventive, most puzzles basically resorting to collect this or pull this to open that over there, they add a reason to explore the levels that Core designed, as well as providing context for some of the more difficult jumps that Lara must face along the way.

And jumps are one of the main weapons in our intrepid Tomb Raider's arsenal. Lara is extremely athletic, especially for a 3D character, and Core made damn sure to take advantage of this by putting some of the most tricky platforming to date into the game. Jumps often have to be perfectly timed, with a late button press often resulting in Lara plummeting to her death at the bottom of a cliff or ravine, usually accompanied by the infamous ear splitting scream that she would unleash that acted to chastise the player for their buffoonery and incompetence. The frustration was increased by the fact that save points were few and far between, meaning that one cock up could lead to a huge chunk of a level having to be played again. However, when you got the jumps right, especially the more precarious ones, there were few feelings in gaming at the time that could really match the satisfaction felt.



To aid you in your progress, Lara had a set of moves that took full advantage of her 3D environment. She was able to side-step, hang onto ledges and traverse them with her fingers when they were too narrow to be walked across. She could roll over, a move that becomes extremely useful in combat situations, as well as dive and swim to reach more out of the way areas. Clever use of all of these maneuvers, as well as some sharp combat instincts, must be utilized to survive in the punishing world of Tomb Raider as Core seemed to take immense pleasure in finding ways for Lara to die at the hands of her player. The amount of deaths Lara can suffer is quite frankly astonishing, and they are all animations that you are destined to see time and again, especially on the first play through.

The final piece to Tomb Raider's gaming puzzle was the combat. Gun play in Tomb Raider took a back seat to the puzzling and platforming elements, but Lara was more than capable of defending herself when the time came, be it against dogs, bears or even human foes, Lara's auto aiming dual pistols were usually enough to get the job done against any beastie the game could throw at you. Lara should surely have become a hate figure to the loony groups like PETA, but she seemed to escape their wrath, meaning that Core somehow managed to get away with having a game where you kill rare tigers and bears to get your hands on precious artifacts. Combat was very much secondary in the first Tomb Raider game, though it would be expanded on in the later sequels.

So the gameplay was solid and the story wasn't too bad at all. So how about the graphics? Well looking back with today's standards they look how many 3D games from this era look nowadays. Dated, blocky, blurry and quite frankly hideous. The textures are awful, Lara is a mishmash of awkwardly angled polygons and the camera can be an absolute mess at times.

Of course, this does the game a disservice. For 1996 these graphics were revolutionary. While dynamic lighting and the like were years away in the future, it can be considered an achievement for Tomb Raider that everything looks pretty similar to how it should, that there is very little in the way of clipping or graphical glitches and Lara's animation, especially for the time, is quite frankly stunning. There's a certain amount of variety to the levels too, which helps immensely when compared to other 3D games of the era. Still it doesn't match up to the standard bearer of early 3D, Super Mario 64. Having said that, the game was developed originally for the much less powerful SEGA Saturn, which had the weakest 3D processing of the three major consoles of the late 90's. Even the PlayStation couldn't match what the N64 could offer, so for an early effort into the fully 3D adventure market, Tomb Raider's graphical achievements were immense and provided a building block for the future games in the series to massively improve upon.

One can't talk about Tomb Raider without mentioning the stellar soundtrack though. While lacking in music, the game didn't need it and was actually done a favor by not having it. Instead Core opted to include little sound effects specific to each area, helping the game to maintain a certain ambiance throughout that simply helped to further the effect that each area would have on the player's senses.

The main track was the longest used throughout the game, clocking in at a little over 3 minutes, and it has become synonymous with the series ever since, being used in some variation in every Tomb Raider game. The original was composed by Nathan McCree and Martin Iveson, and played entirely on the oboe, which somehow managed to lend the distinct feeling of tomb trawling that the developers must have been looking for. The game disc also acted as a CD thanks to the encoding that Core placed onto the sound, so popping it into a CD player would enable you to experience the music, as well as the dialogue from the cutscenes.

The game is nowhere near perfect, the graphics have aged horribly and by today's standard the animation is clunky and makes the game a chore to play at times. This isn't helped by the sporadic save points, a problem that would be remedied in the PC port and the sequels. However, Tomb Raider was a remarkable achievement for its time, offering an interesting blend of platformer, puzzler and shooter, as well as providing an insight into the potential of 3D gaming and being one of the leading lights in the technologies development.



The Aftermath

Where to start eh? Okay the game first. Tomb Raider saw its initial release on the Saturn, with a PS1 release a few months later. While selling decent numbers on SEGA's machine, the game clocked in massive figures for Sony, prompting them to secure the license under an exclusivity deal in an extremely smart move to keep the brand away from SEGA and Nintendo. This allowed Sony to claim Tomb Raider as being essentially a PlayStation brand, and the series did indeed become synonymous with Sony's machine.

The Tomb Raider series went from strength to strength in the 32 Bit era. Tomb Raider 2 and 3 were both seen as improvements on the original, and sold progressively large numbers as well. The rot started to set in around Tomb Raider 4, and by the time the nest generation had gained a good head of steam, the Tomb Raider license was looking to fade into obscurity.

That is until Eidos pulled the series away from Core and handed it over to Crystal Dynamics, allowing for a breath of fresh air to be breathed into the aging formula, but also denying the original creator's their due credit in many respects. Crystal Dynamics have since remade the original Tomb Raider, to some critical acclaim.

So not only did Tomb Raider take off, but its success catapulted Lara Croft right into the mainstream consciousness. She stands as one of the first really influential female protagonists in games. Granted she was sexed up beyond belief to attract gaming's core male audience, a development that apparently didn't go over to well with Toby Gard, upon whose sister the character was based. However she was still portrayed as an extremely capable character, which was a rarity in gaming at the time for a woman. This helped make her a star and she eventually went on to promote the Lucozade soft drink and get her own set of comic books before being portrayed on the silver screen by Angelina Jolie in two Tomb Raider movies. Few gaming characters have penetrated mainstream society like Lara Croft, and for a while in the late 1990's she was the face of gaming.

As for Core, their focus pretty much became Tomb Raider until the series was yanked out of their hands by Eidos after the disappointing Angel of Darkness. Most of the Core team now work under the banner Rebellion, and have worked on a number of titles since losing the Tomb Raider franchise. However the Core name and all IP associated with it are still in Eidos' possession, which many would see as a slap in the face of a group of extremely talented developers.

Eidos went from strength to strength as a developer on the back of the Tomb Raider franchise. After posting a pre-tax loss of $2.6 million in 1995, the release of Tomb Raider allowed Eidos to post a $14.5 million profit in only one year. Eidos went on to become a huge name in the games publishing industry, and was astonishingly the fastest growing company of the 1990's, much of this success coming off the back of Tomb Raider and Core Design's hard work.

Eidos themselves later found a lot of financial hardship. After numerous takeover bids, and a posted loss of $100 million in 2008, Eidos was eventually bought out by Square-Enix for nearly $85 million. Square initially stated that they would retain the Eidos brand, however they have since stated that their intention is to morph the brand into Square-Enix Europe, thus essentially ridding the gaming world of one of its largest publishers.

The Price is Right

There were a couple of versions of Tomb Raider released, though the main ones you need to worry about are the Saturn and PS1 version. Still, here's your prices. As usual, more dosh if the game is more posh.

UK

Saturn: Approx £5.
PlayStation: Approx £5.
PC: £3 – 5.
N-Gage: £2 – 5.
PSN: £9.99.

US

Saturn: $5 – 10.
PlayStation: $2 – 5.
PC: Approx $10.
N-Gage: $5 – 10.
PSN: $10.

The Guy Who Can do it Better Than You

Before we get to the vid, I must remind you all to check out the 411 Games twitter right HERE.

Okay then, simple clip for you today. This one shows off one of the more inventive ways that Core came up with to put you out of your misery, the Midas Hand death.



Enjoy and see you next week.