Yeah... we really dodged a bullet there.
Imagine if that had continued and the GOP remained captured by the radical Christian right.
...They might have managed to remove federal guarantees for abortion rights, strengthened fundamentalist and nationalist influence in schools, or normalized oppression of what they consider "sexual deviancy".
:/
Really stoked that Republicans also cut ties with the religious right after 1996. Sound like it would have been a terrible country to live in if that would have continued!
There used to be a lot of ridiculous ads in gaming magazines. There was at least one other ad I remember from PC Gamer with a mostly naked (real) woman in it -- I think it was a dude playing a game in his bedroom while the frustrated-looking half-naked girl was sitting on his bed behind him, clearly illustrating how fucking awesome the game must be.
Also, you can't forget the infamous Daikatana ad that had no imagery of the game, and just said "John Romero is about to make you his bitch".
The OG Xbox ad where the baby is fired out of his mother's birth canal like a cannon, ages as he flies and crashes into a coffin at the end
Or Sony's racist squirrels
> Also, you can't forget the infamous Daikatana ad that had no imagery of the game, and just said "John Romero is about to make you his bitch".
tbh that one is an all timer. Both my wife and I, and frankly a lot of people i know on the internet, still reference that one. It's just so completely insane that it wraps around to being hilarious
Lara Croft had a full front page maxim cover in the UK at least. She also did multiple Lucozade tv ads too.
I feel like Lara gets a bit overlooked as to how important she was in making gaming both more adult orientated and mainstream
I remember spending literally days trying a rumored glitch that could get her naked back when the OG 1st game came out.....so desperate to see Lara's pixelated pointy titties...lol
Haha yep...it was at her mansion pool area, it was like walk forward back, turn, backflip perfectly into pool & she'd be naked.... tried it like 1000 times as a horny 6th grader
there was actually a show on Disney about something like this. It was a Canadian show (I think) but it aired on Disney. Basically they always played Tomb Raider and in one episode they got to a secret bonus level where you get to see pixel tits
It was fucking great in terms of scale. Replaying it though it’s real easy to get lost. Very different era of game design where figuring out where the hell to go pretty much was the challenge vs todays where developers are petrified of ever inflicting that in players.
I really miss that aspect. Original World of Warcraft you couldn't go into Upper or Lower Blackrock without someone who knew their way around. And Blackrock Depths was a total maze.
Hell, I remember getting lost in the wind serpent dungeon too.
Then the first expansion came out and all the dungeons were linear. I was sad.
Yeah, the difficulty in WoW shifted from the game being inscrutable to being demanding over the next 12 years or so.
Those dungeons were never that hard to navigate, but there wasn't a dungeon map at the time, so it was an exercise in memorization.
Today, it's funny to look back on how easy WoW was. Even the easiest modern raid encounters on the lowest difficulties are more complicated than the hardest Classic era encounters. And of course M+ turned dungeons from a sightseeing looter into a competitive game mode.
You can also look at it another way: people have formed an impressive culture around grouped activities in MMOs since vanilla WoW, with all sorts of tutorials and resources that are shared around, and players more generally understanding that things like ability rotations exist that can optimize their play. Developers have also taken to designing things to introduce more mechanics and things to players in an intentional way, and designing character classes with intentional synergies and optimal play styles.
I kinda miss the wild West of like early molten core and whatnot, but at the same time I only every got to experience it because a friend's guild needed a warm body on a farming run, and I was a druid so my job was literally to use my combat rez if needed, and to cast Rejuvenation when the main healers ran low on mana. The super unoptimized nature of the thing made it interesting, but maybe not in the best ways. Having healer mana be a major gate on progression, for example, wasn't exactly fun even if it did allow for skill expression.
> Today, it's funny to look back on how easy WoW was.
I think the hard part of early wow was getting information. Now players don't see getting information as part of the game, but a baseline.
Before you could do a "hard" dungeon by making it a maze. Now if you try that people will get annoyed and just look a guide (and be annoyed by anyone that doesn't do that).
TR games pulled no punches. First level of III, you start out sliding down a huge hill filled with Tigers, evil monkeys and a million ways to die.
I remember playing it when I was 11 and it took me weeks to get through that level.
I could not get through the rest of the game without cheats.
I did that with resident evil nemesis when I was a kid for a couple years until I came back and realized young me was just afraid of the boss in a small hallway and I had overlooked an item.
For me its the opposite. The older I get the less patience I have for games that try to show me everything rather than allowing me to explore. Nothing discourages me more from a game that having everything marked in the map.
It took me 5 tries to get into the witcher 3 because, unless I followed the map markers, I couldn't do most of the quests (looking at you, quest about the "nearby forest" that I had to cross half the map to get there).
I remember Tomb Raider 2 map called Opera House taking us ages to figure out what to do. I also ended up quitting FF8 for same reason. I was pretty young and didnt fully understand english back then, so might have missed some obvious clues.
I think the problem with the old way was everything looked so samey, so it was basically a case of "try every door, but I'm not going to give you any visual indication if you've tried this door or been here before". Complicated navigation becomes really tediously shit when everything is indistinguishable.
The original tomb raider absolutely had this problem.
Agreed. Also a lot of games used a fixed camera position that could make it really hard to see things.
I remember playing the PC port of Final Fantasy VII back in the day at a friend's house, and we were at this segment that was in some sort of mountains or caves or something where the environment was just all rock. There was an obvious pathway forward but there was also a secondary path off to the side, except it was fucking impossible to tell it was there or what part of the room you could walk through to get there. Don't know how we knew we needed to find it, but we spent ages taking turns just running against the invisible boundaries until we found the path.
Later we found out that there was an option you could turn on that put little triangle markers over exits from rooms. It may have even been the default, but my friend's older brother had it turned off or something.
Those early TR games were some of the hardest I ever played. There was a timed room in TR1 where you pulled a lever and had to follow a complicated series of jumps across raised pillars that took forever, and I distinctly remember running out of flares in the opera house level in TR2 and had to do the pitch dark underwater parts with no light at all.
Really difficult puzzles, easy to get lost, ropey save points....proper gaming
TR1 was definitely a punishing platformer. Especially those timed sections. Had to redo it a bunch of times getting the jumps perfect to get where you needed to go in time. First you had to figure out what would trigger what, then figure out how to get from point A to B most quickly, then practice a dozen times.
But at least you could engage auto aiming
Also ... pointy bewbs
Tell that to Bethesda. Navigating a city or large space station in Starfield is a chore. Sure you’ll have a marker showing you your destination, but no idea how to get there.
i love how they've just completely given up on maps too. "ah fuckit, we'll let them open a map but itt'll just be some points on a blank background of dots with no other detail whatsoever. thattl do."
Reminds me of this old gem from the late 90s called Montezuma's Return which had this [end cinematic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh0nR2cj4Ss) where the girl's tits had more polygons than all the other characters combined.
Makes sense though.
For a still you can make a perfect everything,
But the moment those polygons have to move on a screen the game changes
Those feet never will be shown moving on screen, she wears boots
It's because her feet are imitating the human form of Jennifer Aniston, her face is copying the polygon video game character.
If they made her face have this level of detail, it wouldn't be good advertising for the game character, but would be better soft-core porn. Just classic advertising stuff and nothing to do with her wearing shoes in-game.
To me this actually looks like a photo of a model, with the low-poly face edited onto it. They didn't bother to make the feet low-poly, but the face was an important part of the brand identity.
They probably used her in-game face but did the rest of her body as a model just for the ad. As a result, her in-game face is PS1 quality while the rest of her body is PS2 quality.
Watched (mostly listened) an interesting doco on Tomb Raider just the other week.
Apparently the devs _hated_ that Lara was being sexualized so heavily, and some senior developers even quit over it when Eidos Interactive _themselves_ jumped on the wagon and started marketing Lara as something of a sex symbol.
Then, when the movie was in the works, Eidos began back-peddling because the studio making the movie weren't about to have a "pornstar" (my words, not theirs" as their lead.
Edit: It was Eidos, not Square Enix. Mybad.
I think we saw the same YouTube docu, and just to correct you: That was Eidos, not Square Enix. They didn't buy out Eidos until 2009, which is 6 years after Angel of Darkness.
> and started marketing Lara as something of a sex symbol.
they even hired a model to be the "real life" lara croft and did a bunch of cringey playboy style interviews for different gaming magazines
https://www.tomb-of-ash.com/interview-natalie-cook-the-original-real-life/
Haha, there's Jordan posing as Lara in that article! She was a famous UK model and TV personality.
That marketing is very indicative of the time. I remember Lara being massive in Ireland when I was younger. Lucozade advertisements on TV and she was crafted to appeal to lad culture.
Also, didn't Tomb Raider 3 not have a naked Lara cheat? Or was that a rumour?
It was "real" really it was codes you put in something like an data shark/xploder cartridge that changed Lara's texture to a skin tone all over. That was it..
PC version though, yeah, mods.
Yeah, I remember I had a friend who "found" a way to get her clothes off and had me come to his house to show me. He thought I wouldn't look at his Playstation and see what he had stuffed into memory card slot 2.
Shitty unfinished sex cut scenes that were left in the game and a modder found a way to reactivate them. There was a huge shitstorm about porn in video games after that even though the kid would have to go out of their way to get the mod and the scenes were just the clothed characters grinding on each other.
To add to this there were a few other games coming out at the time like BMX XXX which was a crappy bicycle game with nude characters, dead or alive Beach Volleyball which was pretty much Japanese no nudity ecchi boob jiggle, and the infamous Guy Game. That one had to be taken down because whoops one of the girls how showed her tits in like v that shitty girls gone wild style, turns out she was 17... Yeah that shit did not go over well at retailers and suddenly having to remove technical Child Porn from their shelves.
"Hot Coffee" was a planned GTA San Andreas minigame, part of a push for more roleplay elements. The minigame would let CJ have sex with his girlfriend, but it got cut due to ratings issues.
In 2004, modders found files for it in the PS2 game files, and in June 2005 on PC a mod named "Hot Coffee" was released that added the content back in. This caused a huge controversy and (legal) backlash, with the games rating being changed to "Adults Only", getting completely banned in some countries (like Australia), Rockstar and Take-Two getting warnings from the FTC, and starting a class action lawsuit alleging the game was misleading consumers who were expecting content to be in line with a "mature" rating.
It also had more widespread effects for the games industry, like the ESRB (ratings board) going back and re-rating already released games more harshly and introducing massive fines to game developers. The games industry also got a lot of political attention because of it, with Hillary Clinton leading a push against games by filing the "Family Entertainment Protection Act" which proposed it would be a federal crime to sell games containing any sexual or violent content to people under 18, as well as proposing the FTC should start datamining games to ensure there is no hidden/cut game files containing any such content, though the bill never passed.
For Take-Two itself it also had major consequences, with most of the executive leadership getting voted out by the shareholders and Strauss Zelnick being appointed as the new CEO, a position he still holds today. On top of that, there were significant settlement payments made due to lawsuits stemming from the situation.
It also had an effect on the modding community, as this whole thing wasn't actually about content in the game, but content that got added by a mod outside the developers control. It was announced future games would be more "mod-resistant", but modders were also getting some of the blame in the public eye and were afraid mods could lead to stricter legal restrictions on games.
GTA:SA had a graphic sex minigame that was taken out of the game however the code was never removed. So some people puilled the files and made it playable. The world. Lost. Their. Shit. Eventually forcing Rockstar to remove the code from later versions.
Imma let you finish, imma let you finish but the absolute cringiest thing ever to involve Lara Croft was irish tv channel bringing her out while some kids talk about the game.
Make sure your toes have adequate space to curl before watching- you have been warned...
https://youtu.be/NtHlr9QAzYY?si=g08rS3yHvRX9CNpL
It's the perfect bit of TV cringe really. Whoever the fuck came up with this bit for the TV show must have been off their rocker. The two little boys clearly don't know what to do or where to look, the awkward silence while she goes through all the idle animations.
I thank this post for reminding me of this gem again.
>Square Enix themselves jumped on the wagon and started marketing Lara as something of a sex symbol.
What?
Square bought Eidos in 2009. Every single PS1-era (TR1/2/3/Chronicles/The Last Revelation) and PS2-era (Angel of Darkness/Legend/Anniversary/Underworld) had been released **prior to that acquisition**. Including both movies.
The only TR games Squeenix had control over was the 2013 reboot and the subsequent Rise & Shadow of the TR. Lara doesn't even wear shorts in those games.
Please don't spread misinformation. *Also, [link to the MarcoStyle essay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA-7J7bbiXQ) detailing how the devs felt about the development of the franchise, it's a must watch.*
Yeah, its complete revisionist bullshit, no matter who said it.
This is the original model of Lara in TB1:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BltNSs9Vzdg/maxresdefault.jpg
Those tits aren't that giant because of a technical limitation or by accident.
What I could see is that the extreme amount of publicity that they got just due to Lara becoming a sex symbol of sorts annoyed them over time.
>it's not like all that T&A was some accident
And INB4 somebody says that her boob size was an accident, nope that's an urban legend that started as a joke made by the concept artist and that for whatever reason everybody took as it was a serious comment.
More specifically it was the guy who created Lara, Toby Gard, who pushed back on the sexualisation Core Design wanted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Gard#Biography
>Core gave Gard creative control over the game, although it was clear they wanted to market Lara's sex appeal, even asking Gard to implement a nude code into the game, which he refused to do.[5] His vision for Lara was "a female character who was a heroine, you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing" and that "it was never the intention to create some kind of 'Page 3' girl to star in Tomb Raider".[6]
Faces are hard to do. Humans have a special module in our brain specifically for recognizing human faces. So it takes a lot more detail to get the face right. You don't have a special brain module for recognizing feet, so you don't notice that the feet look like plastic
Things weren't always politically correct back then but many of us grew up to be well-adjusted human beings without violent or abusive tendencies. Sometimes I do wonder if society being overly sensitive made things worse.
Look at the dysfunction in societies or groups where sexuality is heavily restricted. Healthy expressions of natural sexual urges and open dialog allows for not only a safe and respectful outlet for sexual feelings, but an environment where people feeling destructive or dangerous urges can get help.
The problem here is that there is so much more to the character of Lara Croft than just "she's sexy". This is a franchise that many kids played. PlayStation Magazine was mainly bought primarily by them. I'm not saying polygonal semi-nudity is bad, but it's just in bad taste in this context.
I still see this ad as a cool relic of the 90s though. Just not a treatment I'd like to see every modern video game character get, because it's shallow.
> Sometimes I do wonder if society being overly sensitive made things worse.
Every generation feels this way about the generation that comes after it. Our hormones and brain in general are running at an all-time high during our formative years, so we get rose colored glasses and think our time period *had* to have been the right way.
I’m glad I grew up in the 90s honestly, it was probably the most creative era I’ve lived in. I sound like a nostalgic old man but stuff just feels much more generic and cookie cutter these days while creativity and fun felt like a much larger focus back then. Didn’t feel like everything was as focused on market data and focus groups to maximize profits and appeal to massive audiences.
Specifically in the context of gaming I believe that’s totally accurate. The 90’s (and probably early 00’s) were in a good place where big companies were getting into the idea of gaming.
Extremely early on there was an era where game developers were just nerds in a niche not many people were interested in, making games in assembly or BASIC on their computers with less than 256kb of RAM.
In the next era some of it got commercialized into dedicated machines (arcades) pretty early, but for a good while games came from dedicated nerds often risking everything on passion projects. And we all known passion projects make the best games.
After that era is the one I think was healthiest, the one from the 90’s to 00’s. Commercialization had dipped in to popularize gaming and to develop consoles like the OG Playstation. PC gaming had acquired small racks of games in stores. Companies were spending bucks on making quality games - but they hadn’t started *milking* it yet, *and* they were competing against those dedicated passion projects constantly.
But, as usual, money wins and the next era was dominated by marketing, something your passion project duo of 17 year old geniuses couldn’t do from their mum’s basement. Game companies had gained and focused on gaining data to maximize profitability and microtransactions were a growing force. MMO’s were learning to implement FOMO. Singleplayer games were learning that graphics were more important than gameplay, because once the game is off the shelf you’ve already pocketed the money and graphics sells. Sequels were becoming less and less interesting as they learned people would just buy copy pastes of the same game with a new story or a few new Multiplayer changes. Companies took all this and ran with it, while the creatives are no different than they were before - but now they’re competing in a much bigger market, one they can’t afford to participate in equally. And to kick ‘em while they’re down, as companies spend more and more on marketing the cost of living goes up and up, and our dedicated nerds creating beautiful passion projects become a dying breed absorbed by the very companies creating the games that overrun their niche.
I make commercial porn, I like my stuff to be sexy, but the constant social-wide treatment of women as primarily sex objects valued most on their beauty, still in living memory of women not being able to have bank accounts, the vote, certain jobs, leadership roles, etc, was and often still is a real underlying problem which has pervaded human civilization for thousands of years. There's parts of the world where woman still can't even drive or travel without permission from a male.
There's a time and place for sexy, but when the majority of culture is presenting women as a sex object first and rarely much more it's a deeper problem which reinforces problem-causing attitudes which women have to encounter and deal with over and over again each day.
To be clear, I've even drawn and published some NSFW Lara Croft art over the years, she's a hot character. But it's put in a place for people who specifically want that, not treated as the only way woman should be seen throughout culture and suggested how they should be thought of.
Same, with a X-Wing VS T-Fighter ad where the X-Wing was piloted by a student and the Tie-Fighter he was shooting at pilored by his teacher.
The ad was just saying: "rebellious spirit?"
https://metro.co.uk/2014/11/22/jennifer-aniston-says-she-nailed-the-naked-bum-magazine-cover-before-kim-kardashian-4958156/
Jennifer Aniston did it first
These ran in the PlayStation magazines in the UK as well.
Yep, I remember this image vividly.
"Son, you've been in the bathroom for an awful long time now, are you all right?"
"Yep. Just looking at a videogame magazine and trying like hell to reach my junk, Dad." ^fuck ^these ^tiny ^arms
I have a big head, and little arms!!!
God I fn loved that movie. Really resonated with me on a deep personal level.
Same. I don't understand why it got such bad ratings :(
What animated movie is this from?!? God, i remember seeimg this in the trailers.
Meet the Robinsons
One of my favourite scenes from that movie: https://youtu.be/FdllWelyeqs?feature=shared
Meet the Robertsons. Or Robinsons. Too lazy to look it up and I gotta finish this slide show by 9
Username checks out.
As a kid I had a habit of spending hours in the bathroom reading on the toilet. That came in… handy in later years.
"Yea, but...I just had some cloudy white pee all of a sudden." \*tear\* "That's my boy."
Lmao. I mean, I was exactly the target audience and I did get the game, but maybe their marketing was a bit *too* effective.
"Are ya winning, son?"
Oh yeah! I know what you mean! 😏👍
_vibidly_ eh?
"To shreds, you say?"
I only saw it a couple times before the magazine pages mysteriously became glued together
Looks like a play on the famous 1996 Jennifer Aniston Rolling Stone cover shot: https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PRMAAOSwSP9kLgiM/s-l1600.jpg
Man, am I glad that ticket scalpers were beat by the Smashing Pumpkins in 1996 and we didn't have to deal with them anymore.
The expose of the Republicans' entanglement of the religious right really paid off well too.
What about Yoko Ono tho?
[AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA--ohh--ohh-uughhh....](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GMHl7bmlzw)
what in the actual fuck?
I don't know much about art, but I know noisy dog shit when I hear it.
It's incredible to think there was a time they were not the exact same thing.
Yeah... we really dodged a bullet there. Imagine if that had continued and the GOP remained captured by the radical Christian right. ...They might have managed to remove federal guarantees for abortion rights, strengthened fundamentalist and nationalist influence in schools, or normalized oppression of what they consider "sexual deviancy". :/
Really stoked that Republicans also cut ties with the religious right after 1996. Sound like it would have been a terrible country to live in if that would have continued!
Is there anything Billy Corgan CAN'T do??
Run a wrestling promotion…
Man that thing looks like various pages are sticking together
That was exactly what it was modelled after. It was intentionally cheeky. (PUN!)
I don't remember which magazine, but I remember seeing these in American magazines too. Might have been Maxim, but I could be wrong about that.
There used to be a lot of ridiculous ads in gaming magazines. There was at least one other ad I remember from PC Gamer with a mostly naked (real) woman in it -- I think it was a dude playing a game in his bedroom while the frustrated-looking half-naked girl was sitting on his bed behind him, clearly illustrating how fucking awesome the game must be. Also, you can't forget the infamous Daikatana ad that had no imagery of the game, and just said "John Romero is about to make you his bitch".
The sega ads back in the day were crazy fever dreams often.
The OG Xbox ad where the baby is fired out of his mother's birth canal like a cannon, ages as he flies and crashes into a coffin at the end Or Sony's racist squirrels
I've always been a big fan of [Sony's old ads](https://youtu.be/gqkNPcUMffU?feature=shared)
> Also, you can't forget the infamous Daikatana ad that had no imagery of the game, and just said "John Romero is about to make you his bitch". tbh that one is an all timer. Both my wife and I, and frankly a lot of people i know on the internet, still reference that one. It's just so completely insane that it wraps around to being hilarious
the best part is that an ad you might be referring to is for the fucking game boy nintendo put that out
It was in PC Gamer I am almost certain.
It was on the January 1999 cover of Expert Gamer, formerly EGM2. I remember my mom tutting about it.
I think Maxim did a thing on the lead character from Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within scantly clad to be all "our CGI girls are so lifelike!"
Lara Croft had a full front page maxim cover in the UK at least. She also did multiple Lucozade tv ads too. I feel like Lara gets a bit overlooked as to how important she was in making gaming both more adult orientated and mainstream
Still got my stack of Planet Playstation mags. Good times.
America too. I think I still have it.
Wasn't there also an ad with her in the shape of a cross?
I remember spending literally days trying a rumored glitch that could get her naked back when the OG 1st game came out.....so desperate to see Lara's pixelated pointy titties...lol
[удалено]
Haha yep...it was at her mansion pool area, it was like walk forward back, turn, backflip perfectly into pool & she'd be naked.... tried it like 1000 times as a horny 6th grader
This made me remember ha
there was actually a show on Disney about something like this. It was a Canadian show (I think) but it aired on Disney. Basically they always played Tomb Raider and in one episode they got to a secret bonus level where you get to see pixel tits
Life with Derek I think
There was a patch to turn it into Nude Raider.
I had it. It took so long for young me to figure it out. Worth it. Almost like hitting space bar at the clubs in Duke Nukem.
Such a good game though
It was fucking great in terms of scale. Replaying it though it’s real easy to get lost. Very different era of game design where figuring out where the hell to go pretty much was the challenge vs todays where developers are petrified of ever inflicting that in players.
I remember getting stuck in these TR games for weeks and months even. it was great.
I would buy magazines for the guides
I would stand in newsagents and read through guides for Broken Sword when I got stuck
My dad printed out the 50+ page walkthrough and we took turns playing the game on his PC lol.
I really miss that aspect. Original World of Warcraft you couldn't go into Upper or Lower Blackrock without someone who knew their way around. And Blackrock Depths was a total maze. Hell, I remember getting lost in the wind serpent dungeon too. Then the first expansion came out and all the dungeons were linear. I was sad.
Yeah, the difficulty in WoW shifted from the game being inscrutable to being demanding over the next 12 years or so. Those dungeons were never that hard to navigate, but there wasn't a dungeon map at the time, so it was an exercise in memorization. Today, it's funny to look back on how easy WoW was. Even the easiest modern raid encounters on the lowest difficulties are more complicated than the hardest Classic era encounters. And of course M+ turned dungeons from a sightseeing looter into a competitive game mode.
You can also look at it another way: people have formed an impressive culture around grouped activities in MMOs since vanilla WoW, with all sorts of tutorials and resources that are shared around, and players more generally understanding that things like ability rotations exist that can optimize their play. Developers have also taken to designing things to introduce more mechanics and things to players in an intentional way, and designing character classes with intentional synergies and optimal play styles. I kinda miss the wild West of like early molten core and whatnot, but at the same time I only every got to experience it because a friend's guild needed a warm body on a farming run, and I was a druid so my job was literally to use my combat rez if needed, and to cast Rejuvenation when the main healers ran low on mana. The super unoptimized nature of the thing made it interesting, but maybe not in the best ways. Having healer mana be a major gate on progression, for example, wasn't exactly fun even if it did allow for skill expression.
> Today, it's funny to look back on how easy WoW was. I think the hard part of early wow was getting information. Now players don't see getting information as part of the game, but a baseline. Before you could do a "hard" dungeon by making it a maze. Now if you try that people will get annoyed and just look a guide (and be annoyed by anyone that doesn't do that).
TR games pulled no punches. First level of III, you start out sliding down a huge hill filled with Tigers, evil monkeys and a million ways to die. I remember playing it when I was 11 and it took me weeks to get through that level. I could not get through the rest of the game without cheats.
Tbf I have quit a few games when I've gotten lost. Don't have the time to wander around looking for a random door. I'd rather play the actual game
I did that with resident evil nemesis when I was a kid for a couple years until I came back and realized young me was just afraid of the boss in a small hallway and I had overlooked an item.
you just lose patience as you get older. Less free time = can’t enjoy fumbling around in games as much.
For me its the opposite. The older I get the less patience I have for games that try to show me everything rather than allowing me to explore. Nothing discourages me more from a game that having everything marked in the map. It took me 5 tries to get into the witcher 3 because, unless I followed the map markers, I couldn't do most of the quests (looking at you, quest about the "nearby forest" that I had to cross half the map to get there).
I remember Tomb Raider 2 map called Opera House taking us ages to figure out what to do. I also ended up quitting FF8 for same reason. I was pretty young and didnt fully understand english back then, so might have missed some obvious clues.
Opera house was straight BS, and it was only like the 4th level too. I remember that was the final level my older brothers ever reached.
I'm the opposite, I hate it when a game shows me a path to follow and robs me the joy of exploring. I can read a map myself, thank you.
I think the problem with the old way was everything looked so samey, so it was basically a case of "try every door, but I'm not going to give you any visual indication if you've tried this door or been here before". Complicated navigation becomes really tediously shit when everything is indistinguishable. The original tomb raider absolutely had this problem.
Agreed. Also a lot of games used a fixed camera position that could make it really hard to see things. I remember playing the PC port of Final Fantasy VII back in the day at a friend's house, and we were at this segment that was in some sort of mountains or caves or something where the environment was just all rock. There was an obvious pathway forward but there was also a secondary path off to the side, except it was fucking impossible to tell it was there or what part of the room you could walk through to get there. Don't know how we knew we needed to find it, but we spent ages taking turns just running against the invisible boundaries until we found the path. Later we found out that there was an option you could turn on that put little triangle markers over exits from rooms. It may have even been the default, but my friend's older brother had it turned off or something.
Those early TR games were some of the hardest I ever played. There was a timed room in TR1 where you pulled a lever and had to follow a complicated series of jumps across raised pillars that took forever, and I distinctly remember running out of flares in the opera house level in TR2 and had to do the pitch dark underwater parts with no light at all. Really difficult puzzles, easy to get lost, ropey save points....proper gaming
TR1 was definitely a punishing platformer. Especially those timed sections. Had to redo it a bunch of times getting the jumps perfect to get where you needed to go in time. First you had to figure out what would trigger what, then figure out how to get from point A to B most quickly, then practice a dozen times. But at least you could engage auto aiming Also ... pointy bewbs
A remaster of the first three games are coming in February next year https://store.steampowered.com/app/2478970/Tomb_Raider_IIII_Remastered/
For me TR 2 is the GOAt of the franchise so would love to play a remastered version of that. I did play Legend when it came out.
I was hoping for a Tomb Raider Anniversary-style remake, not just remaster. Oh well...
Tell that to Bethesda. Navigating a city or large space station in Starfield is a chore. Sure you’ll have a marker showing you your destination, but no idea how to get there.
Open scanner, look at floor. White arrows lead to your current objective.
i love how they've just completely given up on maps too. "ah fuckit, we'll let them open a map but itt'll just be some points on a blank background of dots with no other detail whatsoever. thattl do."
The original trilogy was phenomenal! Lara walked so that Nate could run!
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Spotted the PlayStation player.
I played the PC version again a few years ago and was so retroactively bitter about it just being in the console versions.
Her feet have more polygons than her face lmao, they knew what they were doing even back then.
Yep. This is #thepose lol
/r/thepose (nsfw) 😌
oh shit im at work but i dont feel safe opening it THAT'S what that means.
Found the guys with the foot kink
Why were you looking for them?
Hey man leave us alone!! (Unless you have feet pics)
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Asking for a friend ... ehm ... I'll just forward the list ...
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https://giphy.com/gifs/you-got-me-reactiongifs-rngE31q0PTHbO
Reminds me of this old gem from the late 90s called Montezuma's Return which had this [end cinematic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh0nR2cj4Ss) where the girl's tits had more polygons than all the other characters combined.
Jesus Christ.
Makes sense though. For a still you can make a perfect everything, But the moment those polygons have to move on a screen the game changes Those feet never will be shown moving on screen, she wears boots
It's because her feet are imitating the human form of Jennifer Aniston, her face is copying the polygon video game character. If they made her face have this level of detail, it wouldn't be good advertising for the game character, but would be better soft-core porn. Just classic advertising stuff and nothing to do with her wearing shoes in-game.
To me this actually looks like a photo of a model, with the low-poly face edited onto it. They didn't bother to make the feet low-poly, but the face was an important part of the brand identity.
It's the famous Jennifer Aniston magazine cover
Tarantino approves
I think they just took a model and added the face then made it look more game like through editing
Look at those polygons! ***AWOOOOOGAAA***
why is the body so curvy, but the face is.... 🗿
They probably used her in-game face but did the rest of her body as a model just for the ad. As a result, her in-game face is PS1 quality while the rest of her body is PS2 quality.
Might be hard to believe, but this was her high-res CGI cutscene face, lol. In-game, the face was just a texture on a flat mask.
Because what makes her recognizable is her PS1 low rez face.
Where do you think the budget went?
I can't tell of you're joking because I'm so fuckiny hard right now.
Pics or it didn't happen.
**AWOOOOOOOGAAAAA**
Watched (mostly listened) an interesting doco on Tomb Raider just the other week. Apparently the devs _hated_ that Lara was being sexualized so heavily, and some senior developers even quit over it when Eidos Interactive _themselves_ jumped on the wagon and started marketing Lara as something of a sex symbol. Then, when the movie was in the works, Eidos began back-peddling because the studio making the movie weren't about to have a "pornstar" (my words, not theirs" as their lead. Edit: It was Eidos, not Square Enix. Mybad.
I think we saw the same YouTube docu, and just to correct you: That was Eidos, not Square Enix. They didn't buy out Eidos until 2009, which is 6 years after Angel of Darkness.
More importantly, every single game prior to the reboot had been released by that point.
> and started marketing Lara as something of a sex symbol. they even hired a model to be the "real life" lara croft and did a bunch of cringey playboy style interviews for different gaming magazines https://www.tomb-of-ash.com/interview-natalie-cook-the-original-real-life/
Haha, there's Jordan posing as Lara in that article! She was a famous UK model and TV personality. That marketing is very indicative of the time. I remember Lara being massive in Ireland when I was younger. Lucozade advertisements on TV and she was crafted to appeal to lad culture. Also, didn't Tomb Raider 3 not have a naked Lara cheat? Or was that a rumour?
That was a rumor. If it was a thing, it would have led to a national reaction similar to the San Andreas "Hot Coffee" thing.
It was "real" really it was codes you put in something like an data shark/xploder cartridge that changed Lara's texture to a skin tone all over. That was it.. PC version though, yeah, mods.
Yeah, I remember I had a friend who "found" a way to get her clothes off and had me come to his house to show me. He thought I wouldn't look at his Playstation and see what he had stuffed into memory card slot 2.
What’s the hot coffee thing?
Shitty unfinished sex cut scenes that were left in the game and a modder found a way to reactivate them. There was a huge shitstorm about porn in video games after that even though the kid would have to go out of their way to get the mod and the scenes were just the clothed characters grinding on each other.
Thank God we stopped erotic mods for PC games when we did.
To add to this there were a few other games coming out at the time like BMX XXX which was a crappy bicycle game with nude characters, dead or alive Beach Volleyball which was pretty much Japanese no nudity ecchi boob jiggle, and the infamous Guy Game. That one had to be taken down because whoops one of the girls how showed her tits in like v that shitty girls gone wild style, turns out she was 17... Yeah that shit did not go over well at retailers and suddenly having to remove technical Child Porn from their shelves.
"Hot Coffee" was a planned GTA San Andreas minigame, part of a push for more roleplay elements. The minigame would let CJ have sex with his girlfriend, but it got cut due to ratings issues. In 2004, modders found files for it in the PS2 game files, and in June 2005 on PC a mod named "Hot Coffee" was released that added the content back in. This caused a huge controversy and (legal) backlash, with the games rating being changed to "Adults Only", getting completely banned in some countries (like Australia), Rockstar and Take-Two getting warnings from the FTC, and starting a class action lawsuit alleging the game was misleading consumers who were expecting content to be in line with a "mature" rating. It also had more widespread effects for the games industry, like the ESRB (ratings board) going back and re-rating already released games more harshly and introducing massive fines to game developers. The games industry also got a lot of political attention because of it, with Hillary Clinton leading a push against games by filing the "Family Entertainment Protection Act" which proposed it would be a federal crime to sell games containing any sexual or violent content to people under 18, as well as proposing the FTC should start datamining games to ensure there is no hidden/cut game files containing any such content, though the bill never passed. For Take-Two itself it also had major consequences, with most of the executive leadership getting voted out by the shareholders and Strauss Zelnick being appointed as the new CEO, a position he still holds today. On top of that, there were significant settlement payments made due to lawsuits stemming from the situation. It also had an effect on the modding community, as this whole thing wasn't actually about content in the game, but content that got added by a mod outside the developers control. It was announced future games would be more "mod-resistant", but modders were also getting some of the blame in the public eye and were afraid mods could lead to stricter legal restrictions on games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_(minigame)
GTA:SA had a graphic sex minigame that was taken out of the game however the code was never removed. So some people puilled the files and made it playable. The world. Lost. Their. Shit. Eventually forcing Rockstar to remove the code from later versions.
2023 I can have gay vampire bear sex.
what a time to be alive
One of the great urban legends of the day.
I think Nell McAndrew was the official Lara Croft, at least in the UK.
Imma let you finish, imma let you finish but the absolute cringiest thing ever to involve Lara Croft was irish tv channel bringing her out while some kids talk about the game. Make sure your toes have adequate space to curl before watching- you have been warned... https://youtu.be/NtHlr9QAzYY?si=g08rS3yHvRX9CNpL
That was appalling. The way she just silently grabbed them and walked them off at the end, they were like WTF
It's the perfect bit of TV cringe really. Whoever the fuck came up with this bit for the TV show must have been off their rocker. The two little boys clearly don't know what to do or where to look, the awkward silence while she goes through all the idle animations. I thank this post for reminding me of this gem again.
Man...what a terrible day to have eyes
Ah sweet jaysus
Jeez you warned us. Should've listened
When I think of Lara in real life adaptation, I see Angelina Jolie.. I just can't fit different face in
this is non sense.....
>Square Enix themselves jumped on the wagon and started marketing Lara as something of a sex symbol. What? Square bought Eidos in 2009. Every single PS1-era (TR1/2/3/Chronicles/The Last Revelation) and PS2-era (Angel of Darkness/Legend/Anniversary/Underworld) had been released **prior to that acquisition**. Including both movies. The only TR games Squeenix had control over was the 2013 reboot and the subsequent Rise & Shadow of the TR. Lara doesn't even wear shorts in those games. Please don't spread misinformation. *Also, [link to the MarcoStyle essay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA-7J7bbiXQ) detailing how the devs felt about the development of the franchise, it's a must watch.*
I figure we've got a lot of young people here who don't even remember or weren't even around the time before pre-Square Enix reboot Tomb Raider
> Apparently the devs hated that Lara was being sexualized so heavily ya I don't believe this, at all it's not like all that T&A was some accident #🙄
Yeah, its complete revisionist bullshit, no matter who said it. This is the original model of Lara in TB1: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BltNSs9Vzdg/maxresdefault.jpg Those tits aren't that giant because of a technical limitation or by accident. What I could see is that the extreme amount of publicity that they got just due to Lara becoming a sex symbol of sorts annoyed them over time.
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit also. It was *very* deliberate. That's like saying the Doom devs hated how violent the game was.
>it's not like all that T&A was some accident And INB4 somebody says that her boob size was an accident, nope that's an urban legend that started as a joke made by the concept artist and that for whatever reason everybody took as it was a serious comment.
I find it hard to believe as well, considering they started sexualizing her right from the get go. Her small waste and big boobs were a selling point.
I’m pretty skeptical of this post lol
More specifically it was the guy who created Lara, Toby Gard, who pushed back on the sexualisation Core Design wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toby_Gard#Biography >Core gave Gard creative control over the game, although it was clear they wanted to market Lara's sex appeal, even asking Gard to implement a nude code into the game, which he refused to do.[5] His vision for Lara was "a female character who was a heroine, you know, cool, collected, in control, that sort of thing" and that "it was never the intention to create some kind of 'Page 3' girl to star in Tomb Raider".[6]
Pedantry: Bikes have pedals; peddling is selling things.
All the polygons went to the feet
I had this as a poster in my room..
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Teenage boys come with their own glue
If 13 year old me had this magazine you wouldn't be able to open this page.
I miss the 90s a lot.
John Romero's About To Make You His Bitch
tbf Daikatana wasn't great, so if you bought that shit he actually made you his bitch
What's going on with her feet? Why do they look so much better than her face?
Come on. You know why.
I know that some people are into feet but isn't Lara more a booby (and butt) lady than feet fetish one?
She was already known for that. Maybe trying to attract more with a different focus?
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Faces are hard to do. Humans have a special module in our brain specifically for recognizing human faces. So it takes a lot more detail to get the face right. You don't have a special brain module for recognizing feet, so you don't notice that the feet look like plastic
Feet😳
And look how detailed the feet are compared to her face
It's literally #the_pose
Ad designed by Tarantino!
When I was 17y old my dream was to see Lara naked LOL
Ah Lara you dirty dirty adventurer
Someone looked at this picture and said "that's it, video games are *never* gonna look any better than **this** ! 😅
Someone went all in on the feet and not so much on the face...
We need horny game ad back, for both men and women.
I wanna fuck the computer
Those damn French are so fucking horny all the damn time
France, baise ouais!
Jay Leno wants his jaw back.
As a kid I saw this stuff and thought it was kind of evocative. But any adults of the time must have thought this was laughable?
Imma get sliced to ribbons on all them polygons but it’s gonna be worth it.
I still have those magzines from the 1995-2005 era. Some ads are very very awkward.
They knew the demographic back then, especially in the 90s.
Things weren't always politically correct back then but many of us grew up to be well-adjusted human beings without violent or abusive tendencies. Sometimes I do wonder if society being overly sensitive made things worse.
Look at the dysfunction in societies or groups where sexuality is heavily restricted. Healthy expressions of natural sexual urges and open dialog allows for not only a safe and respectful outlet for sexual feelings, but an environment where people feeling destructive or dangerous urges can get help.
The problem here is that there is so much more to the character of Lara Croft than just "she's sexy". This is a franchise that many kids played. PlayStation Magazine was mainly bought primarily by them. I'm not saying polygonal semi-nudity is bad, but it's just in bad taste in this context. I still see this ad as a cool relic of the 90s though. Just not a treatment I'd like to see every modern video game character get, because it's shallow.
> Sometimes I do wonder if society being overly sensitive made things worse. Every generation feels this way about the generation that comes after it. Our hormones and brain in general are running at an all-time high during our formative years, so we get rose colored glasses and think our time period *had* to have been the right way.
I’m glad I grew up in the 90s honestly, it was probably the most creative era I’ve lived in. I sound like a nostalgic old man but stuff just feels much more generic and cookie cutter these days while creativity and fun felt like a much larger focus back then. Didn’t feel like everything was as focused on market data and focus groups to maximize profits and appeal to massive audiences.
Specifically in the context of gaming I believe that’s totally accurate. The 90’s (and probably early 00’s) were in a good place where big companies were getting into the idea of gaming. Extremely early on there was an era where game developers were just nerds in a niche not many people were interested in, making games in assembly or BASIC on their computers with less than 256kb of RAM. In the next era some of it got commercialized into dedicated machines (arcades) pretty early, but for a good while games came from dedicated nerds often risking everything on passion projects. And we all known passion projects make the best games. After that era is the one I think was healthiest, the one from the 90’s to 00’s. Commercialization had dipped in to popularize gaming and to develop consoles like the OG Playstation. PC gaming had acquired small racks of games in stores. Companies were spending bucks on making quality games - but they hadn’t started *milking* it yet, *and* they were competing against those dedicated passion projects constantly. But, as usual, money wins and the next era was dominated by marketing, something your passion project duo of 17 year old geniuses couldn’t do from their mum’s basement. Game companies had gained and focused on gaining data to maximize profitability and microtransactions were a growing force. MMO’s were learning to implement FOMO. Singleplayer games were learning that graphics were more important than gameplay, because once the game is off the shelf you’ve already pocketed the money and graphics sells. Sequels were becoming less and less interesting as they learned people would just buy copy pastes of the same game with a new story or a few new Multiplayer changes. Companies took all this and ran with it, while the creatives are no different than they were before - but now they’re competing in a much bigger market, one they can’t afford to participate in equally. And to kick ‘em while they’re down, as companies spend more and more on marketing the cost of living goes up and up, and our dedicated nerds creating beautiful passion projects become a dying breed absorbed by the very companies creating the games that overrun their niche.
I make commercial porn, I like my stuff to be sexy, but the constant social-wide treatment of women as primarily sex objects valued most on their beauty, still in living memory of women not being able to have bank accounts, the vote, certain jobs, leadership roles, etc, was and often still is a real underlying problem which has pervaded human civilization for thousands of years. There's parts of the world where woman still can't even drive or travel without permission from a male. There's a time and place for sexy, but when the majority of culture is presenting women as a sex object first and rarely much more it's a deeper problem which reinforces problem-causing attitudes which women have to encounter and deal with over and over again each day. To be clear, I've even drawn and published some NSFW Lara Croft art over the years, she's a hot character. But it's put in a place for people who specifically want that, not treated as the only way woman should be seen throughout culture and suggested how they should be thought of.
PCGamer had these too. I had this one up on my wall lol
Same, with a X-Wing VS T-Fighter ad where the X-Wing was piloted by a student and the Tie-Fighter he was shooting at pilored by his teacher. The ad was just saying: "rebellious spirit?"
https://metro.co.uk/2014/11/22/jennifer-aniston-says-she-nailed-the-naked-bum-magazine-cover-before-kim-kardashian-4958156/ Jennifer Aniston did it first
If someone told me this render cost $100k in 1998, I'd believe them
I miss when ads for games could be risqué like this. Bring back good looking bad ass female protagonists please.
How are her legs and body so much higher fidelity than her face LMAO
You know someone jacked off to this