One very interesting computer game is Tomb Raider, created by Core Design, a subdivision of Eidos Interactive; something like first-person shooters such as Marathon and Quake, but third-person instead: one sees one's player character instead of taking that character's viewpoint.
Here is an archive of MacOS Tomb Raider 1 and 2 savegames I have made; the saved games are at the beginning of each level and before each cutscene. And also check out some MacOS-native utilities in my Tomb Raider Utilities Page, some comments on running Tomb Raider in alternative operating systems, and my speculations on how Tomb Raider: Chronicles might be called a case of the Marathon Infinity gambit.
Though the games have originally come out on the PeeCee and the Playstation, and more recently on the Dreamcast, they have been ported to the MacOS by Westlake Interactive, and published by Aspyr Media; here is an approximate chronology:
When playing TR2 Gold, the first level's aurora may look washed-out lavender when in RAVE mode. So to make it beautiful yellow/green/turquoise, one can use my Tomb Raider 2 8/16-bit Texture Twiddler after changing any RAVE-move settings.
Also, Aspyr had said nothing about Tomb Raider 3 Gold for a long time; I had wondered why that was the case. One problem is that the PeeCee version is payware instead of the freeware state of TR2 Gold; Aspyr might have difficulty in finding some suitable commercial way of releasing it in that fashion. However, Aspyr could package TR3 Gold in some special edition of TR3, or might have it included with the Macintosh version of TR5, or else could make TR3 Gold a payware download. Or might even authorize the Westlake team to port the TR3 Gold app, which can then be run with the PC version of the TR3 Gold files. It is possible to run TR3 Gold with plain Mac TR3, but one does have to do the level-skip cheat in a few spots, and for best results, one ought to use an appropritely-hacked "tombpc.dat" file. However, Aspyr finally decided on a good release format: a Macintosh version of the Tomb Raider Trilogy package, which includes all the "Gold" extras.
The picture at the top was made from a screenshot I had taken running Tomb Raider 2 on my old Power Computing PowerTower Pro 250 Mac clone with an ATI Xclaim 3D accelerator card (ATI Rage Pro chipset with 8 megabytes of onboard memory). This was the first such card I ever bought, after a long period of considering such cards to be somewhat frivolous. However, I more recently acquired an ATI Rage Orion (Rage 128 chipset with 16 megabytes of onboard memory), which is much fancier in some ways, and my current Mac, as I write this, has an ATI Radeon. And in honor of the more recent games' usage of OpenGL, I have created this composite picture, working from one of Core's numerous high-quality stills:
The game implements the third-person strategy very well; the player character has numerous beautifully-done animations, and even several cute sounds. The camera does a fairly good job of following the player character around, though I sometimes wish it was independently controllable, however. I had not originally expected to like this style; fortunately, I was willing to give it a try.
The player character is a female Indiana Jones named Lara Croft; the game's creators have gone so far as to create a detailed biography of her. The personality she projects in the game reminds me of how the classical Greek deity Artemis was depicted -- always single, roaming the wilderness, and with a bow and arrow (what her worshippers were familiar with). Ms. Croft, of course, packs some more recent heat. And when Artemis was seen bathing in a stream by the hunter Actaeon, she turned him into a deer, whereupon he was attacked by his dogs. The ending of Tomb Raider 2 seems reminiscient of that story.
But such is her creators' official cult of her personality that they have not only created several high-quality 3D-model snapshots of her, they have also hired some human models to portray this 3D-software model. ("Personality cult" is what Khrushchev had called Stalin's officially-promoted hero-worship of him). There is also a cult of her personality among her fans, some of whom have created artwork of her and even fan stories featuring her -- some of her fans call her "The Divine Ponytail" (in all but the first TR, the game implements ponytail physics).
Although a female Indiana Jones is certainly a good concept, and this concept is implemented fairly well, the character's creators have spoiled it with grotesquely bulging breasts and a wasp waist. Athletic women simply do not have such breasts (and to me at least, smaller breasts would look more graceful and streamlined) -- do her creators want Ms. Croft to be some computerized bimbo? Also, she gets posed in various seductive poses, which IMO is rather inappropriate for that character. In the aforementioned mythological terms, she's not Aphrodite. That sort of thing has sometimes made me nickname the game "Womb Raider", with suggestions of grotesque femininity (that nickname is probably not original with me, however).
In fairness, I'd like to point out that one thing good about her is that she is usually appropriately-clothed, with shirt and pants, even down to wearing hiking boots much of the time. It's nice to see some female character who wears sensible shoes instead of high heels. She also wears a backpack instead of carrying a purse, even if the backpack sometimes seems like a Tardis from Dr. Who -- more voluminous on the inside than on the outside.
The series is lacking in female characters in general, however, with the only two other ones so far being Jacqueline Natla of Tomb Raider 1 and Sophia Lee of Tomb Raider 3, both of whom are villainous businesswomen who had been creating populations of freaks. These characters are much like Elexis Sinclaire of Ritual's "Sin", but while Ms. Sinclaire is clothed in strategic-covering fashion, both Ms. Natla and Ms. Lee are dressed in more reasonable businesswoman fashion.
Now back to the main subject. Lara Croft would have to be one of the strongest characters created in the world of real-time-3D games. Her most direct competition would be Duke Nukem, a big macho lunk, but the Duke does manage to be rather funny, with taunts like "Your face or your ass: what's the difference?". Doom and Quake have never had any such attention to their player characters, and even in the Marathon series, the player character has not been as interesting to the series' fans as several of the non-player characters, such as the Bobs (the game's other human characters), or even such behind-the-scenes characters as Durandal. However, the nature of the game's player character was made into an ingenious puzzle, which some of the series' fans have been willing to try to solve.
I note in passing that Ms. Croft does not seem to read very much in the game; I missed that feature from the Marathon series. Why not read something on a wall? Why not pick up a document? Why not do more with that laptop at the end of "The Great Wall"? (it's what is shown in the above picture) This fault is hardly specific to the Tomb Raider series, however; I was annoyed that Duke Nukem, despite its fancy features (surveillance cameras and some very creative weapons), lacked anything readable, and I was also annoyed at what a poor job Unreal's creators had done with their Universal Translator and its messages.
And there is another illogical thing. Tomb Raider's creators had long refused to release game editors or even to release the data-file specs; this has gotten in the way of many fans who have wanted to do for Tomb Raider what they have been able to do for several other games, such as Marathon and Quake. In fact, the Marathon series is a good demonstration of how a strong storyline and editability can coexist; some fans simply create their own stories for their maps, if they decide to do so at all.
But they have kept their promise to release editors for TR5, though only the level-geometry editor (the Room Editor) and a few associated utilities been released. And it had not been clear whether that will also be ported to the MacOS. One interesting conundrum of game porting is that editors are often less portable than the games whose data they edit, meaning that the editors often do not follow the games. This is because they are very user-interface-dependent, often using platform-native GUI toolkits; the typical one for many Windows-based editors is the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). If one wishes to make a Macintosh port, one has to translate it into something like Metrowerks PowerPlant, and if one wishes to make a Linux port, one has to translate it into something like GTK; neither is a trivial task, meaning that Linux as well as the Macintosh is often editor-less. However, Westlake has come through with a port of that editor, and it runs in OpenGL in a window at one's favorite color depth, unlike the PeeCee version, which is limited to 1024*768 and 16-bit color.
In addition to this effort, some fans have been attempting to create editors for the games, some of which may eventually be ported to the MacOS.
Finally, here are some nice TR fan sites:
To my game-room page.