I agree. I tried it for like 10 minutes and never again. Some of the worst controls ever.

Those games always played horrible.
Even back then when we were playing Resident Evil with tank controls, Tomb Raider trilogy was excessively bad because it required platforming.
I have tried to play them a few times but ever single time it was awful.
One of the most overrated stuff ever.

The games were always terrible and no one wanted to admit it because boobs/nostalgiia. The first was novel in showing off early 3D games on console but they controlled like dogshit. Poor shooting. Poor platforming. Poor camera.

It's a puzzle platformer, exploration, treasure hunting game... Combat is quarternary. Don't confuse it with modern TR games which have strayed so far from the original formula they're nothing but a tps with some distractions and silly light rpg mechanics.

@Leynos The new games are terrible but get defended cause of boobs / helpless little girl, graphics! Old Lara was bad ass without resorting to graphic nonsense. She didn't even have boobs in the first games, a triangular uni boob lol. Early TR games were not graphical power houses, the level design was the king.

I still prefer the tank controls in the remastered Grim Fandango as well. To me it simply makes more sense and is more immersive to control the character from the character's point of view, instead of by screen orientation. I never got confused which way to press with 'tank' controls, yet when Spider man is hanging upside down facing the camera, he always goes the wrong effing way lol.

They had Lara CGI model in PLayboy and were announcing a new real live model to model as her every year. Yes the appeal was boobs. Kids hearing about the nude rumor and tried manipulating the camera. I have regular gaming magazines from the 90s where she is topless but a sign is held over the nips. Her whole thing was sex appeal and shit gameplay. TR was an impressive demo on PC in 1994 and an impressive PS1 game at the time. The game was total donkey shit tho. Always has been. Series was shit from day 1 and never became good.

I actually didn't, and still don't, have any problems with classic Resident Evil. Resident Evil also didn't have platform jumping or any of the other issues that I didn't like about Tomb Raider. Resident Evil was my favorite series on PlayStation other than Final Fantasy, and I still love the games now. And I also judged Tomb Raider against the time it came out. Came away thoroughly unimpressed, especially against Super Mario 64 (which actually came out a month before the first TR) or Ocarina of Time. 

And even on the boobs issue, if I were wanting to ogle masses of pixels designed to simulate a female body in Playboy, Claire Redfield, Tifa, or the Tekken 3 ladies would have been my choice over Lara Croft, lol. 

That's marketing, not game play. TR1 and TR2 are still excellent games, then finally TR Anniversary again. The series had a lot of misses :(



Playing the game for the boobs is what it turned into.

It reminds me of a series of old 1990s IGN articles. They poked fun at the console wars of the time with parody listicles titled "Top Ten Signs You're Playing Too Much PlayStation/N64/Saturn." For the PlayStation list, one of the top ten was "You find yourself strangely turned on by sharp, triangular breasts."

Tomb Raider II and III leaned into that by name-dropping her on the cover art, at least on the PS1 US covers. Angel of Darkness even had her name at the top of the title, like a movie poster, with the Angelina Jolie movies being really popular at the time. There was also a King of the Hill episode that name-dropped Lara Croft. 

Haha, they're making a comeback too!