Playing through the excellent new Tomb Raider game, it suddenly struck me that we're living
in the future.
What would my 12 year-old self have thought if he had seen this game?
Could he even have imagined Tomb Raider breaking free of its blocky, linear nature and becoming
such an enjoyable experience?
It's hard to explain the appeal of the original series to newer gamers.
They look bad, don't play particularly well and retain the unfair and unforgiving nature
of games well before the Playstation 1.
But there was something magical about them that's worth remembering and it's that which
I will be talking about in this video.
This review isn't going to be fair.
It's going to be biased and heavily influenced by the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia.
As was usual back then, I first saw the original Tomb Raider at a friend's house.
What a revelation it was!
A fully 3D game where you played as the acrobatic Lara Croft as she plundered tombs and raided
outposts.
I wasn't too interested in this part of the game as it was 2 spooky 4 me.
Instead, I liked to boot up her mansion and explore it for hours on end.
Croft manor was magical.
Here I was, controlling the sexiest and most bad-ass female character of any game ever
as she ran around her very own estate, complete with farting butler!
It's at that point that you know you're a success in life.
I must have been a right cry-baby because I even found this level eerie.
I'd hide from the butler, only to hear the clinking of cups and rumbling bowels as he
approached.
Like some inept monster in a horror film, he always knew where I was.
But never fear- he suffered from one great weakness...
fridges.
This was the source of a lot of jokes when I was a child but it's a lot more profound
than that.
Everybody I've spoken to who played this game discovered the same thing.
Think about that- everybody found that you could lock the Butler in the fridge in a croft
manor training level!
How many training levels do you know that have been so fondly played?
It's funny that I was happy to spend so many hours on this one level yet never got very
far in the main campaign.
Those levels were HARD.
Even if you could save at any point, I rarely got past the second or third levels.
Tomb Raider was a lesson in frustration.
You'd get lost.
You'd hear an enemy yet wouldn't be able to find them.
And even if you did, the sheer aggression the enemies show towards you is terrifying.
Everything's out to get Lara, from tigers to crows to spiders to DINOSAURS.
And that's only the first level!
Those games were long.
Like I said, I was a bit of a coward and only dared play through the campaign with cheats
to give me unlimited ammo and health kits.
There was another cheat code that skipped the current level and another that blew Lara
up.
It was important to enter the codes correctly as they were all very similar.
But even with those cheats, the game is still difficult.
Half way through the second game is a level named '40 fathoms' where you start under the
water and are therefore unable to enter the cheat codes!
I kept Lara alive by administering health kit after health kit as she was drowning and
eventually found my destination and carried on my way!
Graphics were never Tomb Raider's strong point.
You'd come out at a seemingly beautiful vantage point only for most of it to be cloaked with
a dark shroud.
Frame-rates would regularly plummet to unacceptable levels and everything was blocky, like an
early version of Minecraft.
That being said, there's something mysterious about the environments Lara found herself
in.
Your mind fills in the gaps- of which there are many- and suddenly you find yourself in
the darkest caves of China or in the middle of a dense jungle.
The howling wind and echoing ambient sounds send shivers down my spine to this day and
the theme song will always be associated with adventure.
Listening to it now reminds me of all the little details that made Lara special.
Everybody made her plummet to her death at some point and took delight in the sound of
broken bones.
Lara's moans, groans and ventriloquist acts became a disturbing joke between my friends
at school and it's because of her that I would jump constantly in sports day races, believing
that it gave me extra speed.
Modern gamers just wouldn't understand.
Which is why I was so pleased when my friend Vexxsie remade the manor for Counter Strike,
in all its pixellated glory.
I excitedly explored it for the first time in a decade but remembered it as though it
was yesterday.
As we played, more and more people joined and for a fleeting moment it reunited the
gamers who had been there when the games were first released.
For the rest it was just a pixellated map that didn't play very well.
So as you're trekking through the beautiful mountains of the new game, stop for a moment
to remember how Lara reached this point.
How many blocks she had to move with her fingertips, how many endangered creatures she's slaughtered
and how many seductive moans have left her lips.
And let's not forget that she couldn't have made it were it not for her manor or for that
poor old Butler who's been the butt of so many jokes through the years.
May him let RIP in peace.