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from the she-should-be-getting-older-too dept.
A gamer and a graphic artist at the costumers site HalloweenCostumes.com teamed up to create a mashup of the animated character Lara Croft through nineteen years of the Tomb Raider video game series; they realized it also illustrated the unfolding of Moore's Law on console and PC video hardware more convincingly than the usual logarithmic-scale bar and line charts.
When the series started in the mid-90s, the small number of polygons and simple shading models used to render the character were painfully obvious. Contrast that with the nearly lifelike renderings of Lara from the 2013 and 2014 editions, which take advantage of orders of magnitude more capable hardware to employ sophisticated modeling and rendering techniques, not to mention gameplay.
More verbose histories of Tomb Raider can be found here (2008), here (2011) and here (2013).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Sunday February 22 2015, @01:22PM
I never looked at her face before I saw the linked story. Interesting. Nice looking face, now that I've finally looked at it.
The sidebar of the story has an ad thats more on topic for what about 95% of the male audience was already thinking about when they read the headline, "Popular - DIY 3 breasted woman halloween costume". I'd rather see a study of the evolution of what we were actually looking at. Not just the appearance but a finite element analysis of vibrational modes of the structure, etc.
not to mention gameplay.
Isn't that the stereotype of FPS that nothing has changed in gameplay since Quake in the 90s or if you stick to 2.5D then not much has changed since the original wolf3d? Has anything changed in the gameplay other than trivial map and puzzle changes?
(Score: 2) by ticho on Sunday February 22 2015, @01:28PM
Well, there's the auto-regenerating player health, to make it even easier for anyone and their dog to "achieve" something in the game. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 23 2015, @01:21AM
Isn't that the stereotype of FPS that nothing has changed in gameplay since Quake in the 90s or if you stick to 2.5D then not much has changed since the original wolf3d?
Not really. The bland modern shooter tropes such as slow movement, two weapon limit, health regen, chest-high walls, vehicle sections and quick time events owe more to the XBOX and the ascendancy of HALO/COD. These developments sure are stale, but they are a long way from the 90's PC shooter. The gameplay of the Id/3DRealms period apparently being a lost art.