Thanks for giving me an extra incentive to buy these remasters. Anything triggering incels deserves getting my money ;)

So if somebody is selling poisonous junk food and people complain about it being poisonous and junk, you are gonna go ahead and call them "incels" and proceed to buy the junk food, thus supporting a bad corporate practice ?

Same analogy can be applied with your comment.

Censorship in video games just to fit a political agenda of modern developers is wrong.

Fair point, but to a limited audience, namely those who played them back in the day, looking better might not be a positive factor.

In this case indeed the remasters seem to be rather true to the originals, so it's not that much of an issue. But the only thing that will ever carry the full charm of a game you played "way back when" is the actual version you played at that time. If you have the luck to play it on age accurate hardware, then you're truly blessed.

To be honest probably the single feature that would get me to buy such a remaster at some point is better support for controllers, although it's not that big of a deal for me since I played it on mouse and keyboard more times than I can remember and am fine with that as well.

Of course, that's just how I see things, but no doubt it has a target audience and the quality seems to be top notch, so I have no doubt it will sell well.

Of course I can only speak for myself here, but having played and loved these games back in the day, and still in possession of the original boxes, looking better is indeed a positive factor.

I could play these games on original hardware (I still have and maintain all of my old computers just so I can do things like that) and in their original graphic state, and if that were my only option, I would be happy to do so. But I'm not immune to the visual benefits that a remaster provides.

And to address a point someone else made earlier, yes, I'm certain that all three of these games can be graphically upgraded for free. In fact, I have done so with the first game in order to gauge my interest in these remasters. I wanted to see if a graphic upgrade by itself would be enough to push me to play these games again. I used the Croft Engine, and was delighted with how it looked and played.

I cannot overstate how much it means to me that people have taken the time and effort to make these upgrades available for free to us. And for a lot of folks, me included, that's really all you need. You don't really NEED to spend the money for this remaster.

But another thing that makes these remasters worth the money for me, and I suspect many others, is ease of installation. You download it, click the installer, and you're set. While I do have just (barely) enough computer skills to install all that fan-made stuff, it takes time. Which makes the $24 I paid for a one-click install very much worth it for me. I buy new computers from time to time, and getting all of my games set up each time is a big enough pain in the butt to make all-in-one installers for my favorite games my default preference if one is available. Thus, I jumped on this one the moment pre-orders went live.

All that said, it's not perfect. While I haven't had a single issue with stuttering or any performance issues at all, I would very much love to see them patch in some graphics options. Supposedly, it's all automatic, but I don't want automatic when it comes to any options. I want ALL the options available. Sure, have it default to an automatic setting, but then give me the option to tweak it to my liking. As it is, I have a 3840 x 2160 monitor, and aside from my eyes, there is no way to tell what resolution it is actually running at, or which options it's using. Frustrating!

Also, a few more control options would be nice. I tried the modern controls in many different configurations, and hated them all. I ended up exactly where I was back in 1996, with tank controls, and where I'm not using the mouse at all, just the keyboard. That works best for me of anything I've tried, and I spent several hours trying many different things.

Yeah, the modern controls just feel weird. Not that I ever had much trouble with the tank controls. Still plays more comfortable on an Xbone pad with me just using the d-pad for movement (analog stick feels too imprecise) and face buttons.

As someone who played TR1 on release, I'm not hugely impressed with the look that I'm seeing in screenshots and videos of this remaster. The graphics look too bright and colorful, almost 'cartoony'. It doesn't seem very faithful to the dark, gloomy, foreboding atmosphere of the original games, imo.

So, I find it a bit strange that so many seem to be praising 'the graphics'. In what way are they an improvement (besides just higher resolutions, which can be achieved with several open-source engines)?

As an example, the screenshot on the GOG store page of her with the lion - it looks way too bright and colorful. I know which level that is (one of my favorites) and I don't recall it looking that 'gaudy'. I mean, the lion looks like it came straight out of The Lion King ...

Funny, because most, if not all of the time the remastered visuals are actually significantly darker than the original ones, here on my end at least. The contrast is quite staggering, especially when switching from one version to the other and back again.

In other Tomb Raider Remastered-related news:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1atpq7d/nexus_mods_removed_the_mod_that_deletes_that/

"Nexus mods removed the mod that deletes that warning message from the Tomb Raider remaster
Here is an archive link for the mod page, seems like the comments were extremly angry at the person who uploaded the mod. https://web.archive.org/web/20240215093750/https://www.nexusmods.com/tombraidertrilogyremastered/mods/13"

I'm not sure I agree, though this seems to be like the blind man leading the blind man when it comes to either of us talking about drivers, OSes and graphics APIs :)

At which point can you say it's the difference between the OS, or just "drivers and settings"? If the drivers are inherent and specific to the OS, can't you say that OS A runs a game better than OS B? Linux works better than Windows? What do you mean it's not the OS? For all practical purposes, it basically is, even if it's just the graphics drivers (which it probably isn't).

Also, Steam Deck is not a console. There are significant differences to Playstations and Xboxes and so on. And no, none of those run a freely available Linux distro, unlike the Deck (that you are free to install any desktop distro you like). So no, you can't just say that it works on Linux desktop because the Windows PC port was bad, but the console ones are good due to Linux, when they don't even do that.

This could have to do with native Windows HDR settings [10/11] or Auto HDR [11] If its either of the two, you have to set the brightness there, in your graphics card control panel, monitor and eventually also in-game. It can also help to calibrate your monitor if you have never done it, and using an ICC profile for it.

Come on mate. I shouldn't have to mess around with OS/graphics card settings, just to make a game not looks it's come straight off of Nick Jr. I don't have to do that with any other games (and not everyone has the knowledge/expertise to do that, in any case).

I'd rather they weren't remaking/remastering everything over and over and over again and instead make new stuff that people want. Yes having A remaster of a degree is fine from something as old as PS1 game(s). But we've seen them 'remaking' and 'remastering' games that are only a few years old, the TombRaider 2013 being notable so they could add more hair physics and upgraded textures which did... what? Remember SquareEnix considered it a failure of a game after selling only 8 million copies...

These companies much like Hollywood want to stay in the 'safe' zone of titles that performed well in the past, but we've seen one too many times and have been tired of for a while. Add on censorship, woke politics and other BS and it degrades things more and more over time.

I'm sorry, it can't be helped. Sometimes there simply is no way around tinkering with settings. I trust that members like Swedrami are able to understand the instructions and implement the solutions, which I hope will fix the problem. :)

Just for the record - I actually prefer the darker visuals of the remasters (it's all about raiding dark and dank tombs after all), and I never tinker with my monitor's carefully calibrated colour management and settings just for those rare cases where I don't agree with the default "vision".

What I usually do here is applying a ReShade profile, tweak/fine-tune it to my liking and... voila - fertig ist die Laube.

Hmm, ok. That doesn't come across at all from any of the videos/screenshots that I've seen. In fact, they give me the exact opposite impression.