Deathtrap Dungeon (PSX/Win, 1998) seems to use the TR1 engine (maybe?) at least, but is definitely not a cinematic platformer. (e: actually it’s probably not the same engine, but it’s definitely something trying to cash in on TR1)
Dragon’s Lair is definitely pretty different from e.g. Another World, but I don’t know if there’s anything before DL that is even remotely what i’m looking for. DL, narrowly defined, probably represents the genesis of the idea the games I’m looking for expounded.
i’m not sure i like the term cinematic platformer because, like
what’s keeping gex games out of that category
There was that dragon game in the late 90s that aped Tomb Raider, unfortunately I thought it was by Eidos, named Drakan or Drakhen and I’m all wrong
I don’t think I ever finished Fade to Black, and while it’s movement is still really _Flashback_y there’s not any/much jumping I remember.
Remebering it now it reminds me a bit of Hybrid Heaven, and that actually has fixed-length jumping and ledge-grabbing and stuff.
Hybrid Heaven has just a whole big pile of stuff though.
I’m not sure if Tomb Raider is particularly cinematic though. At least not in the sense that PoP and its successors are considered to be. It’s storytelling elements (FMV mostly) are typically isolated from the actual play area, if that makes sense, whereas Another World continually subverted my expectations of what might happen in a 2d side-scroller by taking away my control of the avatar for the purposes of narration. A lot of the mechanical similarity between the two is really just rooted in uninterruptable movement animations which was pretty much abandoned (“solved” as @username put it) in 3d gaming until Souls turned up.
A lot more could probably be said for the lack of a constant ost and the rather sparse hud applied in Tomb Raider, but this is more likely due to the six-person design team and their tight dev-schedule than any purposeful omage to these specific 2d games.
Yeah! I think part of the problem is that many developers looked at Tomb Raider and decided to imitate it’s combat approach and general move set without any regard for how these meshed with it’s intelligent level design. The PS1 is rife with comparable 3D action games in this respect (Urban Chaos etc.)
Core also pressured the original developers post-release for an obscene number of expansion packs and sequels which saturated the market. The emphases placed by the later games on combat, expanding the move-roster and integrating stealth-elements etc. is also indicative of the increased size of the dev team which I think was cumulative for each new release, culminating in two separate teams working on alternate entries which further diluted what made TR1 so special. No wonder the devs of TR4 tried to kill Lara.
Messiah on PC is pretty successful though because it understood verticality.
Yea, Another World was so seamless with its art direction that there is no separation of video and gameplay states. It also allowed for creating many interactive modes (scenes/events) with the same inputs through out the entire game. It has more variations of death than almost any other video game too.
All before the advent of Quick Time Events.
Drakan: Order of the Flame, I remember because I conveniently have the magazine demo disc with it on the cover sitting right beside me that hauled out a while back for some other demo. Never got around to the full thing, but IIRC other than busty ponytailed protagonist it indeed isn’t all that much like TR. It’s definitely more action oriented and traversing the environment isn’t much of a focus even when not airborne on the dragon.
Might I direct you to a little game called Bubsy 2.
I wouldn’t want to get stuck too much on the actual phrase “cinematic platformer”. What was cinematic about these platformers, as opposed to the regular non-cinematic platformers, was that they were much more heavily invested in smooth and realistic animations, which lent themselves to more complete “worlds” which were also identified by lots and lots of well-animated art. But of course complex animations take lots of frames and lots of time, which means they’re unresponsive, which means each action is a commitment (or in vidcon vocabulary, is uncancelable). Personally I think it’s that action-commitment that really defines cinematic platformers, as opposed to the attendant “cinematic feel” of the art and world, especially since that immersive feel can be applied to literally any genre.
So, if what makes cinematic platformers unique is sticking your avatar to uncancelable tile-based movement, yah, Tomb Raider is straight that, but in 3D.
It’s also though what I call an “exploratory 3D platformer” which actually shares features with a much smoother and reactive game like Mario 64, and which have almost entirely fell out of fashion. As this applies to the Tomb Raider series itself, I’ve actually talked about this a lot! It’s one of my favorite things to talk about!
played some more games on my little PSP Go:
What the shit! There was another sequel!? I only knew about the 3D sequel…
My friend recommended For Honor so I picked it up and giving it a whirl.
It’s fun, it will be interesting to see if some sort of competitive scene develops from it. Well, for the duel mode at least.
Dominion and Death Match are silly at times, fun, but silly.
This game not having local multiplayer is a god damn crime though. This game is made for the one v one aspect and the fact that there is no local vs mode is just terrible.
Yeah, I mean this was basically my point:
But is that really enough to define call it a straight up 3d Another World? I’m not convinced. I guess we can quibble about the genre title, but then there’s not much point drawing a line between what Tomb Raider and Another World have in common other than that single design decision. One could then just as easily call Bloodborne Tomb Raider without jumping. The art and music and use of story are at least as applicable in making a comparison or charting the lineage of design decisions in “cinematic platformers” I think.
Maybe we should forego that title and stick with ‘uncancellable tile-based platformers that also feature shooting’.
We’re not drawing straight lines, but webs. I mean, there is a pretty straight line that can be drawn from, say, Prince of Persia to Tomb Raider.
But ultimately tracing lineages in art is about illuminating qualities you want to focus on, not establishing some kind of pseudo-objective species. I think what meauxdal was originally interested in was 3D games with that TR-esque tile-locked movement? But maybe not.
yep, that’s exactly it. i’m not looking for holistic, discrete chains of influence, nor direct iteration. i’m interested in sketching elusive throughlines in gaming history for certain ideas and concepts that interest me
e.g. it doesn’t actually matter to me if the TR devs played or even knew of the existence of Another World
Yeah that makes sense, I probably took your first post quite literally.
Tomb Raider is definitely part of the web.
Ico?
parts of the original Half-Life give me weird Another World vibes. The plot is at least broadly similar and you get chased by big monsters that can ruin your shit quite a lot.
There was a third 2D sequel too. The Jaguar game is the third entry into the series.
I think Tomb Raider lifted a lot directly from the original Prince of Persia titles (I almost mentioned “Prince of Persia 3d” as a potential 3d game in this mold, but I have no experience with it to say for sure), and if there is a cinematic platformer subgenre then Prince of Persia has to be included as it is probably the most successful and influential of the bunch. It also goes in a fairly different direction than Out of This World, but they share enough DNA that I’d consider them to at least be cousins as opposed to brothers.
I picked up a digital copy of Tomb Raider II a few years back when it was on sale for a buck or so as I always heard that the sequels sorta missed the point of the original by focusing more on combat (which was probably the weakest element of the first), but as mentioned there just isn’t really much in that mold at all.