Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

I grew up without an allowance, so I couldn't play all the new and amazing titles that game companies released every year. There were some great names that I missed out on not just because I didn't have the money, but I didn't have game magazine subscriptions either. I was home schooled too so I couldn't hear about any of the really good and popular titles. I found games that I wanted by seeing attractive box art and reading information about the game on the back cover. The most memorable of the games I bought this way was Harvest Moon 64.
Fast forward to 2013. After hearing about all the must play games from console generations ago I started Late Impressions gaming on Youtube. The focus was to finally look at games other people had fond memories of and see whether it was nostalgia keeping these games alive or if they really were worth what people seemed to believe. The results since then have been mixed, yet every time I've been happy to say that I've played them at last.
Time skip again to December of 2014. With no interest in the series and playing it only because of the suggestion of a viewer I start recording the original Tomb Raider for PS1. It felt dated and the controls both physical and in game hadn't aged well, but I had a lot of fun. It was a game that definitely held up to the praise everyone still gives it. In April I finished the game and gave it both high praise and honor for being a game that, while showing it's age a lot, still held up as an amazing piece of work years later.
Playing old games like these puts me in an interesting position now. The TR series has gone through more than its fair share of rereleases, reboots, and remakes over the years and I didn't care about all the claims of foul from fans that I eventually saw. Bonus points for alliteration.
However I believe this has given me additional opportunity that I haven't seen available to anyone else. Now that the first game in the series is complete I'm going to play the most recent Tomb Raider game, the new reboot released in 2013. I haven't seen everything in between, I never had a reason to care about everything in between, but the first game made me curious about what there was that I missed out on. Should I play all the other games first to take the same trip of experience and emotions the other fans went through to get to this point? Probably, but I have an opportunity from this that nobody else ever had. I'm going to jump ahead to the present and see where the series is now. From the standpoint of someone who isn't a long time fan of the series, someone who doesn't have the ties to everything that has supposedly made the Tomb Raider formula last this long, someone who has no idea what to expect from the ongoing improvements and failures of the series, it's time to see what this game has to offer while comparing it to nothing but the first entry.
Time to find out what my late impression will be.