Ah ha! Tomb Raider Remastered

Heard a number of complaints about the lack of platinum on PS5. Have you seen some of the trophies on this though.. yeah.. good luck with that.

Dare I say it, the original is possibly top 3 gaming memories for me. Still remember getting it for my Saturn, was such a huge leap forward for 3D games in general at the time. The atmosphere and general feeling of isolation you got from the locations and the excellent soundtrack were second to none.

I played through a fairly large portion of it on an Android tablet with wrist slittingly bad touch screen controls about 9 years ago when me and my wife were stuck in hospital for 3 days with the birth of our first. Still loved it even then.

Not sure how these will play for the unitiated today though. The platforming and puzzles are fairly simplistic by today's standards to be honest, the difficulty always came from how exacting and laborious the controls were.

Proper sweaty palms stuff back in the day with the save crystals as well. Going for a sizable jump to something you *thought* was a ledge when you hadn't saved for what felt like an eternity was a bonafide arse clencher.

Yeah, definitely buying this later.

Yeah, I have vague memories of having to make decisions regarding when to save and when to push my luck. It really amplified the tension.

Or alternatively, Dark Souls basically just ignored all the progress that had been made in terms of saving and went back to the way that games used to be.

Anyway, I'm interested in how these play, but I'm worried that the old controls are going to be annoying, and the new controls will break how the game was designed to be played. So I'll wait a while and see what you guys think.

Huh, odd and arbitrary for sure, not that it affects me.

I'm going in and taking the bait!

But, no. Dark Souls does not have a saving system from the era of limited save space and fixed savings points. In fact, it saves all the time. You will never lose any progress in a Dark Souls game. You are free to quit at any point and the game will return you to exactly where you were when you left. If you die, you will be returned with exactly the same items and weapons that you had when you died, as well as the same stats. You lose the souls you have, but those still exist in the world and can be retrieved. The game will only delete them and forget they ever existed if you die a second time.

There might be some vague similarities to save systems of old and it certainly is trying to evoke that style, but mechanically it is very distinct.

I never got the appeal of Syphon Filter. I rented from Blockbusters and it felt it was way behind the times, as MGS was already out.

I'm reminded of that infamous Gamespot review of Alien Resurrection on PS1:

Quite a big part of the satisfaction of the original games came from the controls being so unforgiving. It was SO easy to fuck up. Scaling a treacherous climb felt almost real in the tension it created. And when you finally pulled it off it felt so good.

I wonder how much that was originally intended or if it was just an unforeseen benefit of the clunky controls and shonky camera.

Remember loving 1 but getting stuck in Atlantis and not playing 2 or 3. Might get this on Switch as it’s 60fps and I have some long journeys coming up.

Oh, and Syphon Filter 2 had a vertical split screen versus mode, which my mates and I adored. I'm sure it was terrible but we had a blast (pun intended, the M79 was my favourite weapon).

We even used to stick cardboard down the middle of the TV to limit the cheating.

As I recall, there were a load of unlockables for the MP mode; levels and characters that could be unlocked through doing various things in the main game - I think it was probably the first time I used GameFAQs as I wanted everything.

I seem to recall one review saying he ran like he had just filled his nappy. Hard to unsee or unthink that.