A look back at Tomb Raider: Unfinished Business

This blog piece originally appeared in my Favourite Tomb Raider games entry.  I thought I would also post it as a single entry.

Tomb Raider is my favourite Tomb Raider of all time, and possibly my favourite game of all time, yes a lot of this is nostalgia, but no matter how much future Tomb Raider games improve (or games in general), the original Tomb Raider will always mean a lot to me.

It ticked all the right boxes for me when it came out. It was one of the first games that I ever played in 3D, at a time when I was used to playing a lot of 2D games, it is hard to describe how amazing the feeling was when you could go any way you wanted, as opposed to just being able to go left and right in 2D games;  It was like playing an Indiana Jones movie, films I was a big fan of as a child (and still am a fan of) and also I was somewhat interested in ancient cultures and myths - so the story of Tomb Raider which was focussed on exploring the ruins of different ancient cultures and the myth of Atlantis also grabbed my interest.

A key moment of the game was the T-Rex encounter where the screen starts to shake, the thunderous music begins to play and then the giant T-Rex is revealed to the player.  In later play-throughs, I would not attack the T-Rex and would try to complete the level attempting to avoid being eaten by the T-Rex, thus making it more intense and fun (I am sure I am not the only one that did this).

Some other moments that stood out for me were St Francis Folly, The coliseum, turning to gold in Palace Midas, Larson and Pierre pursuing Lara throughout her journey, facing a grizzly bear in the City of Vilcabamba, discovering each part of the Scion, standing on top of the giant sphinx in Egypt, the first encounter with an Atlantiean guard and the final battle/escape.

The first Tomb Raider also has my favourite music of the Tomb Raider series, other entries in the series also have excellent music, but my favourite tracks are in the first Tomb Raider game.  The main theme sets the tone and sends a chill down my spine.  To me, the haunting vocals sounded like the  remnants of the past lives that once thrived and lived thousands of years ago in the now empty locations.

There was not a lot of music during the first Tomb Raider which helped emphasise the isolation of the character which, was also projected onto the player - as it has to be remembered, Lara/the player was the first human life to step into these locations in thousands of years.

Also, the PC edition features four exclusive levels that were never released on the console version - not even the recent digital Good Old Games releases include the expansion.  The expansion pack contains two chapters with two levels each, Return to Egypt and Shadow of the Cat.

Return to Egypt is the first chapter and takes place a few months after the events of Tomb Raider, in which Lara returns to the City of Khamoon to investigate a mysterious statue of the cat deity Bastet.  The second chapter actually happens immediately after the last level of Tomb Raider and Lara is tasked with destroying the final inhabitants of Atlantis.

I only played the Unfinished Business section of Tomb Raider a few months ago, for the first time.  This was because the only way I could previous play the game was on an older version of Windows and even then I would only be able to control the game with a keyboard (which makes the game unplayable for me).  Thankfully, I found out about the existence of a fan made installer that makes the game compatible with Windows 7 (both 32/64 bit) Operating Systems.  I was also able to control the game with my Xbox 360 for Windows controller thanks to Xpadder (a program that allows controller buttons to emulate the keys of a keyboard).

So, I managed to recently play extra levels for my favourite Tomb Raider game around 12ish years after its initial release.  It was great to finally be able to play those levels, the only problem I had with Unfinished Business was that the chapters were in the wrong chronological order, but in the correct order in terms of difficulty.

The first Tomb Raider is rather slow compared to the other four titles that run on the original PlayStation.  I find playing the first Tomb Raider on the PC matches the speed of playing the subsequent releases on the PlayStation.

The original Tomb Raider games have recently been released digitally on the PC, through Good Old Games, for an affordable price and have Windows 7 compatibility - there has never been a better time to pick them up on PC (Just a shame that the expansion packs for Tomb Raider 1 - 3 were not released - maybe one day they will be).