Killing Lara Croft
quarterly.camposanto.com
quarterly.camposanto.com
Laura Croft was a 3D version of James Bond and Indiana Jones' love child. The hook was that it was one of the first 3D games were things looked kind-of, sort-of, maybe-if-you-squinted-at-them realistic. And also the first 3D game that I saw with realistic translations between animation states.
It's probably a lost cause trying to explain it to people who have grown up with high fidelity graphics, but there's a certain magic to "Wow, that hedge looks like a hedge!"
PS: So much hate for TR2's canal level https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dA0r_Wp-EtU&t=8m30s
^For reference, 1996 was Duke Nukem 3D, Civ 2, Time Crisis, Super Mario RPG, Resident Evil, Metal Slug, Pokemon, Quake, Super Mario 64, NiGHTS, TES II: Daggerfall, Pilotwings 64, Wipeout 2097/XL, Marathon Infinity, MoO2, C&C:RA, DoA, and Diablo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_in_video_gaming )
The video is pretty on point otherwise with regards to how dumbed down controls are these days. It seems to me that games with good movement controls are few and far between. The one game I play these days that has excellent controls is NHL (16 and 17) – you really do feel in control, even if you play with beginner controls where the assist is ramped up.
At a certain point, I think TR (and a lot of other old games) benefitted from the requirement that a game get at least one thing right. If your animations are shoddy, you need realistic motion because exaggeration will just look deranged. If your graphics are ugly, you need good storytelling because visuals won't get players invested. And so on. If your textures and context sensitivity are lacking, you need tight controls so characters don't commit suicide.
SO I guess I'm part of the crowd arguing older games were better in those ways. Not because the past was better, but because they had fewer ways to ensure success in at least one aspect of control, or immersion, or realism.
They pre-baked all these animation states based on the angle Drake was moving to (or the difference in angles between his former and current trajectories; I;m not sure) and used the game engine to look them up and interpolate between them. In Uncharted 4 things get even more nuts: move to the edge of a ledge or crevice and you can use the left analog stick to make Drake's hand reach at any angle; if he finds a handhold there will be a smooth realistic transition as he climbs to the new handhold -- no jump button necessary.
I would say that the series is getting tired but they keep doing new and better things with each game. And they even gave Drake a satisfying ending without killing him off. Quite unlike the rerun city that Eidos made those poor Tomb Raider devs crank out.
Changing direction in a sprint would leave you sliding as your momentum carried you; Banjo would throw his hands out and wobble on a ledge but pull balance back (certainly a mechanism to ease the difficulty level for players).
Overall no one mechanism was overpowering, but it made switching to other games seem strange and clipped, the artificial instant start-stop now out of place and unreal.
> For reference, 1996 was Duke Nukem 3D, Civ 2, Time Crisis, Super Mario RPG, Resident Evil, Metal Slug, Pokemon, Quake, Super Mario 64, NiGHTS, TES II: Daggerfall, Pilotwings 64, Wipeout 2097/XL, Marathon Infinity, MoO2, C&C:RA, DoA, and Diablo
That's a really good observation, haven't thought about that.
In retrospect, many of the first 3D games don't look that bad actually, I have to say. Maybe it's because when doing it for the first time, people were more aware of the technical limits of the medium (in the same way as many 80s 2D games are often making clever use of the limitations). That kind of constraint creates a lot of creativity. To me much what happened inbetween those early years and today's photorealistic graphics just didn't age that well, for some reason.
One of my favorite early-3D games was Interstate 76 (1997), apparently built on the MW2 engine.
Vehicle games were oddly popular in that period (Twisted Metal?). Maybe lower-poly no-animation cars were easier to render?
The graphics in general were not ground breaking (for me earlier games like Quake, Magic Carpet, Heretic, Descent, Tie Fighter, etc. were just as good if not better - Duke Nukem 3d was far behind the 8 ball), it was the movement mechanics which really sold it - definitely the first 3d character who moved with a degree of realism. I don't think even today movement is always handled quite so well - too many glitches where you suddenly zip through a movement at lightning speed.
I'd like to also point out that, from an artistic perspective, the game had a coherent atmosphere and story. It was the first game I've seen where you could see the beginnings of games borrowing a little from movies. Visuals, story, and music told the same message and expressed the same spirit.
It was an early preview of a concept that would be pushed further by later game series such as Uncharted and Mass Effect. I think it was the very beginning of the big eventual merger between games and movies that's still a ways ahead in the future.
Maybe one of the first 3D games in its genre, but not the only game that had such things.
There were other games at the time or before that had similar aspects:
- Diablo (1996)
- Resident Evil (1996)
- The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996)
- Warcraft II (1995)
- Command & Conquer (1995)
- Star Wars: Dark Forces (1995)
- X-COM (1994)
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992)
There's a certain artistic license you can bank on when you're working in a fantasy setting.
ps: Youtube scanned my HN comments and suggested this to me; felt almost on point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbjYkPKRm-8
Apparently a lot of the game controls changed to become easier and more mainstream, I just watched this video a while ago which (among other games) contrasts game controls and movement in early and more recent TR games:
Going on to play Quake (World) extensively, what was the most impressive (at least to me) when it first came out was the lighting and immersive/ambient sound, as well as proper 3D as opposed to Duke3D.
Red Alert had some of the earliest video cut scenes in a game I remember seeing, even if it was terribly interlaced and the acting was atrocious.
Diablo is still my favorite Diablo and Blizzard game. The music, the gameplay, the gothic design to me only got watered down in later iterations.
Thanks for reminding me of the classics. The leaps in technology back then was staggering. I always notice something here and there nowadays too, but I feel I haven't seen a leap since Half-Life 2 back in 2004.
This (1996) was a pivotal time for me as a gamer, even if we had Ataris and a Sinclair at home before that. It makes me very nostalgic.
"From God, to Kane, to Seth, I am his right hand man" ~ Seth, Brotherhood of Nod, Command & Conquer, 1995
(People always give C&C:RA too much credit IMO, the original C&C was overlooked. But then I imagine Dune 2 players saying the same about C&C!)
In Dune 2 you could wall-in your repair center (or build other buildings around it); if you did so transport aircraft would come and get damaged vehicles from the battlefield, bring them to repair center and bring them back. Too bad I never found anything like that in any other relevant RTS since then.
There were some attempts to make RA1 an actual prequel in the C&C timeline but its success resulted in the timelines diverging too much.
I actually also kinda liked C&C Generals despite it having no relation to C&C other than the branding but sadly that series was pretty much doomed from the start.
I played C&C through 3, but really hated the 4th. They ruined it by trying to make it some half-baked MOBA type thing. I still haven't even finished it.
The original C&C was released as "Command & Conquer Teil 1: Der Tiberiumkonflikt" ("tiberium conflict", instead of "tiberian dawn")
The original RA was released as "Command & Conquer Teil 2: Alarmstufe Rot" ("code red", instead of "red alert")
C&C2 was then released as "Command & Conquer Teil 3: Operation Tiberian Sun" (instead of simply "tiberian sun")
By the time C&C2 had been released the Internet was becoming a thing and still predominantly English so the different numbering schemes began causing trouble for English-speaking Germans.
I think they gave up on consistent numbering by the time RA2 came out (it wasn't actually called "Teil 4" IIRC) and if I recall correctly they just stuck to the English numbers with C&C3 onwards (yes, that means technically "C&C3" was ambiguous in Germany at that point).
<spoilers> In Red Alert there are some clues that the setting is tied to that of the original Command & Conquer however. For example Kane shows up on the Soviet side and it's strongly hinted that he is the same Kane as in Tiberian Dawn. This led to some fan theories that Kane is immortal because he's literally the Biblical character Cain, which was pretty plausible if you consider the other Biblical references ("the land of Nod" is where Cain was exiled and Kane is the leader of the Nod Brotherhood; Seth is Kane's second in command and also the name of Cain's and Abel's brother). I think there were also some conspiracies based on the re-use of German voice actors (I think Einstein's assistant was voiced by the voice actor who also voiced Kane? I don't think this is the case in the English version). </spoilers>
Ultimately this probably has more to do with budget constraints and that Biblical imagery is a cheap way to introduce some drama and I'm not sure whether this was ever intended as more than a not-so-subtle nod (heh) to Tiberian Dawn.
Fun fact: one major criticism of Tiberian Sun was that the publisher cast a new voice actor for Kane who sounded nothing like the first one fans had grown to love (his voice was also much lighter, leading many to joke that he sounded a bit emasculated). IIRC the official explanation was that the original voice actor had demanded too much money. In addition to the disproportionate hype the game had received prior to release that was also often pointed out as one of the major reasons it wasn't as successful as anticipated.
Took too long and didn't bring much new stuff.
RA came shortly after TD. Not much had happend with strategy games till then and they just used the same engine and took everything for TD to the extreme (story, weapons etc.)
One year befor TS we got Starcraft, which took strategy games to another level, so they HAD to do more, but they didn't.
Anyway, the hype was probably enough to make enough money for the other titles, haha.
Whether TD and TD Gold were actually different engines I don't know but it must have been at least an improved version of the same engine.
I think you're right that SC doomed TS to fail. SC was lauded for having three factions that are actually fundamentally different to a much greater degree than had been done before (e.g. Dune 2000) and had great storytelling compared to the well-done but low-budget and often cheesy narration in TD and RA.
TS tried to one-up the genre with its cinematic cutscenes but they ended up creating an actual protagonist so the result felt much more like watching a movie than something you're actually involved in (especially when the protagonist does more than reacting and following orders -- which was the sole reason having a protagonist became necessary at all).
Also, the engine was different and they tried to cash in on technological superiority with big talk of "voxels" but the end result just looked fuzzy and often sterile. They also tried to do the "multi-faction" thing by introducing the mutants (though not as a playable race) which confused the setting even more. TD was about futuristic modern warfare, TS was 100% sci-fi. In that sense I guess Generals was a bit of a return to the roots.
I feel like the acting is so bad it's good. It's become a cult classic.
I think it was from later on (Red Alert 2 or 3?) but Tim Curry's "SPAAACE!" is a classic - even he is struggling to keep a straight face!
Awww, you missed Mark Hamill in Wing Commander 3?
Still waiting for all this VR hype to deliver a Time Crisis to my PS4.
I'm not even sure there were any games around that time that wouldn't have behaved this way for dynamic objects.
To this day, my wife and I still talk about that level, and trying to solve it together so many years ago.
(although, it might be that it was the first bit of any TR game I ever played)
This is funny since there were tons of scenes worse than decapitations in the 2013 reboot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyVHV7ct4gU
For example, the SoulsBorne games. (and at least Demon Souls and Bloodborne are console exclusives)
I even tried to get a different result on a case by "missing" the evidence that would have unraveled the scheme, to see if it would end differently, but then the coroner just tells you to "look harder" at one of the scenes.
I watched someone play "The Last of Us" and "Uncharted 4" the whole way through. It was very enjoyable (partially because I found someone who could keep their mouth shut through a lot of the cut scenes), and I knew I was probably never going to play through those games all the way through.
Then later it got remade for PS4 and I bought it and played it the whole way through. Despite having watched the entire thing, I really enjoyed playing it just as much as I assume I would have without watching it, and, interestingly enough, I enjoyed the gameplay much more than I was expecting.
But yes, for the most part, quick time events are annoying as hell. I feel like they were really bad in the early PS3/360 era, but have felt a little bit less forced in recent years. Or maybe I'm just used to them now.