The Great Start To A Decent Gaming Series (Tomb Raider (PS))

Member Name: stephanieasmith

Product:	Tomb Raider (PS)
Date:	02/03/09 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good gameplay, great puzzles

Disadvantages: as an older game, the graphics are awful and it is hard to move Laura

Tomb Raider was one of the first games to come out on the Playstation. It was created in 1996 as a computer game(like most of the first PS1 games were) and the makers of it, Eidos and Core, decided to put it out on the Playstation when it came out.

I got this game off of Ebay for just a couple of dollars after shipping less than a year ago.

The Story:
You are Laura Croft, the famed archaeologist, and you have been contacted by a very rich woman named Natla. Natola wants you to find an artifact for her, and she's willing to pay for it to be found, only Laura doesn't look for artifacts for the money, so she turns down the job. However, she is curious and sets out looking for the artifact, the Scion, on her own. on the way, she discovers traps, enemies, a T-rex (these are in almost every Tomb Raider game that I have played so far), and her biggest enemy, a survivor of the lost city of Atlantis.

The Graphics:
By today's standards, Tomb Raider would absolutely suck in the graphics department. However, By 1996's (when Tomb Raider 1 originally came out)standards, this game had pretty good graphics. 3D graphics were still a newer way to game then. This game came out amid all the classics such as Sonic. Some problems with the graphics are: Laura can see through walls (a common problem in many games I have encountered), the edges of many movable things have square holes( I don't know what else to call them, but they look like this: |_|_|_|_|), and all characters are a little blocky. The graphics problems were not an issue with me, because they are normal for the time frame, and they could have been so much worse.

The Controls:
The controls took me a lot of getting used to. This game was created for a computer, which has no joystick, and neither did the PS1 console when it came out, so I had to learn how to use the directional buttons to move Laura around in the environments. Consequentially, there were many spectacular deaths. Another thing that I didn't like about the controls is the fact that the X button wasn't for jump in any of the possible controller configurations. I think it was action in all three configurations. So here I am, shooting when I mean to jump, and wasting all of my ammunition. I am one of thos epeople who like games that conform to the basic X is jump, R1 is shoot, etc. Once I got used to these very-different-than-I-am-used-to controls, The game went smoothly.

The Gameplay:
I think the gameplay was fine, however there were some things I would not have done, like finding the secrets for the sake of finding them, they were always just more ammo or a health pack, or having the whole screen shake really hard at the end of the game(that made my eyes cross!), or having several enemies in one place, and none the next (same with the puzzles). I was fine with the enemies and the puzzles( I figured the enemies all in one place was a puzzle, I had to try to figure out how to get rid of them all without getting myself killed), but I seriously could have lived without the earthquake and the secrets ( the secrets were actually cool, but they would have been multitudes better if they unlocked an extra level or something like that).

Sounds:
I actually had no problem with the sounds of the game, but I rarely do. many times, the sound that the enemies made would alert me to them being there and would help me get the advantage in killing them (especially with the Atlanian mutants towards the end).

Overall, this was a pretty good game, I am glad that they updated it with Anniversary, which will be one of my next aquisitions.

Summary: a pretty good game