Over the years, we've seen the Indiana Jane styled Lara Croft go through a wide variety of changes. Once a cliff-diving bad ass who shotgunned velicoraptors and fed grenades to sharks with two hit movies, she fell from grace with some poorly received and bizarre sequels before finally being rebooted as a considerably more fragile heroine in the recent Tomb Raider revamp. But for anyone who wants to remember Tomb Raider as it once was, you now have the option of giving the archaeologist a spin old-school style.
The PSone version of Tomb Raider, first released all the way back when the console was called simply "PlayStation," is now available on iOS and its wide array of devices for quite the affordable price - 99¢ is all you need for this one.
Tomb Raider was easily one of the more challenging games of its time, so it'll be interesting to see how it holds up today, if at all. I can only imagine how much more difficult this will be using touchscreen controls.
Still, despite being pretty damn difficult, the game carved out a legacy for itself and the Croft name. Following in the footsteps of Street Fighter's Chun-Li and Metroid's Samus, Tomb Raider's Lara showed the next generation of gamers that women were a viable choice as a heroic, strong, and intelligent protagonist (who also doubled as a sex symbol, which arguably put a hamper on things, but that's a whole other discussion), surpassing her female forerunners. She's even been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the "Most Successful Human Virtual Game Heroine." With this game and 7 million in sales, a new franchise was born.
The game also helped make Sony a serious competitor against Sega and Nintendo, something thought to be an impossible feat at the time, as the two companies were THE names in gaming from the mid-80s to the late-90s. The game debuted on the PlayStation, helping to ship over 100 million consoles. It was later remade as Tomb Raider: Anniversary with improved visuals and controls thanks to an upgraded version of the engine behind Tomb Raider: Legend.
But you'll find none of that here, this port is strictly old-school with the blocky polygons, unforgiving gameplay, and grid like level layout. The lone improvement is added optimization for the iPhone 5. If you don't have the phone, the game will also work on a variety of other i-gadgets (iPad, iPod Touch, etc.), provided they're running iOS 7.0 or highter.
