I’ll cheat my way through most of it (let’s face it, I haven’t got 20 hours lying around), only planning to stop to explore. This ruined my first playthrough back in the day. It’s still possible to accidentally press quicksave instead of quickload, thus trapping you forever in a possibly inescapable situation.Just rifling (ha) through your backpack feels fun. The menu-system is still one of the most beautiful things in existence, combining elegance and satisfaction.After years of post-Lara conditioning I press space instead of ctrl to execute actions.Seems it payed off to drill the control-scheme into my head. It am able to recall all special and cool maneuvers, and jump around caves without any problems.
Funnily enough, it feels like it hasn’t been 12 years since I last played. To gamers with a low rage-quit threshold they are incomprehensible. To beginners they are still incomprehensible. The graphic scales wonderfully to todays resolutions and widescreens.I still can’t get my head around the idea of Lara having a british accent, even though I like those. There are accompanied usually by several insta-deaths, re-loads, and realizations that the game is cheating (like spawning infinite avalanches), until you notice that this isn’t a game, it’s a movie, and you haven’t been handed the script. There is a back-breaking amount of “borderline cinematic” scenes.Just as I think “yetis can climb stuff, cool” I stumble upon another frustrating issue. Game-design alternates between brilliant and laughably stupid.It creates them anywhere, anytime, even in already secure places, and I still jump when that happens. The game still tends to spawn enemies in places you have been to already, accompanied by a short burst of “danger music”.Sometimes it’s an avalanche that’s impossible to predict, other times the level drops a guy with a flamethrower behind you. I also had the possibility to see how it played more than a decade later. Yesterday I remembered these plans to return. I was only 10, it was dark, and Tomb Raider 2 had a tendency to insta-kill you often, which made me jump in my chair. Was I tired? Eager to move on, only to return to these places later? Afraid? Well yes actually, I was quite scared. There were some corners, however, which I have never explored. I found all the secrets, I mastered the even then ridiculous controls, I fell in love with Lara, and I had loads of fun. That was Redline Racer, but that I got for free with the computer, so it doesn’t count.
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