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[Paperclip Killa]

Back in ancient times when 3D gaming on consoles was finally taking off because computer components that were instrumental to 3D acceleration were finally decreasing enough in price to incorporate these components into a consumer priced gaming console, the first Resident Evil and Tomb Raider took the world by storm.

Shocking everyone with two games that finally could stand up to big polygonal hits on more expensive computer platforms, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider were on everyone's wishlist adults and children, marketing and demo units were spread throughout and retailers who didn't have them were trying to order them because they wanted to receive more foot traffic. Both were co-marketed by Sony, making them even more well known across the mainstream.

Which of these two hallmark early PlayStation titles did you find to be the best experience now and then?

 

[Hawking Radiation]

Resident Evil by a long shot. My first time playing a game of that kind.
Had me nervous going around every corner and the puzzles were pretty cool.

Even avoided playing it at night

 

[Northeastmonk]

I had a hard time controlling Lara Croft back then. I enjoyed the later TR entries, but I picked Crash Bandicoot over Tomb Raider at the time. It felt like making a car perform acrobatics before Twisted Metal. I preferred Resident Evil. I did much better with the controls, especially when they added DualShock support with the Director’s Cut. The gunshot sounds, item management, exploration, and puzzle solving was satisfying to me. You had an inventory to manage, health items to save, and you idled just to make sure you’re safe for the next room. Tomb Raider was fun until I ran into a wall, literally.

 

[TheInfamousKira]

One of these games I played for twenty minutes, repeatedly back vaulting on to my head, getting mauled by bears or some shit and Drowning.

And One of these games I liked.

 

[Barakov]

The first RE, especially at the time, there wasn't much like it. I know people love to shit on tank controls but I found those controls much easier to get into than the ones with the first Tomb Raider.

RE was just a completely new experience for most people. The dogs in the hallway still get me to this day.

 

[Rykan]

Tomb Raider. It was a very ambitious game, and a lot of its issues can be traced back to simply being an early 3D game and developers still trying to figure out how to control a character with somewhat realistic movements in a 3D environment. Its flaws are easy to forgive in that context.

Resident Evil is also a very good game, but it's far less ambitious, and it controls like crap for no good reason. The prerendered backgrounds look very good, and you could argue that the visuals aged better because of it, but it's far less ambitious than creating an entire 3D game like TR did.

I'd say Resident Evil is probably easier to go back to now, but when it first came out: TR was more ambitious and, imo, the better and more iconic game.

 

[aclar00]

RE1 Hands Down! Holds up til this day.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

RE by a mile.

I didn’t complete TR, but I thought it was kinda shit.

Even better, beat RE in under 3 hours and you spam unlimited rocket launchers!

 

[Pegasus Actual]

Resident Evil is probably the more playable game, but it's just an Alone in the Dark clone. Tomb Raider felt a little fresher.

 

[Mindman]

Both. Two of my favorite games from that generation.

 

[SlimeGooGoo]

Both. Two of my favorite games from that generation.

The only right answer

 

[JC 1080P CRT]

Great comparison and contrast! I enjoy both games, but I enjoy RE1 much much more and have replayed it numerous times. It's just more my style of game.

Credit to both games for having badass female protagonists (Jill Valentine and Lara Croft), possibly two of the best in all of gaming.

 

[TexMex]

Both stone cold classics, but Tomb Raider if I had to pick.

 

[Danjin44]

Resident Evil without question, even today you can still go back to PSOne version and have fun, I can’t say the same about TR.

 

[emivita]

Both games were fantastic and both games have one thing in common: their respective sequel were even better and improved a lot.

 

[Mr Hyde]

Resident Evil. I still play it from time to time. But Tomb Raider is awesome too, although when I replay it, it's usually the Anniversary edition of the game.

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

The comparison makes as much sense now as it did back then, when the average gamer could only get one game for months.
They’re two completely different games. They’re both excellent, and both started series that have endured for more than 25 years.

I’m surprised by the number of RE responses so far. RE was considered derivative in its time by the PC crowd who’d seen the “tank-controls puzzle adventure with action” find its niche on PC. Anyone who’d played Alone in the Dark in the four years prior would not see any novelty in RE. Tomb Raider on the other hand, if Mario 64 had not released the same year, would be even more groundbreaking than it was, which is immensely. TR was actually revolutionary, but it’s understandable that it was too much for too many people and it shows in this thread so far.

To be fair, I replayed RE many more times than TR, and I dropped TR after TR2 while I’ve played a lot of the RE sequels. But this has more to do with RE games being much shorter than anything else. Beating TR with the limited saves and the ridiculously long loading times of the console versions was a chore. RE was a blast to breeze through every time, and to be totally honest, RE was the first game I played on my PlayStation console, so it’s very special to me. But this doesn’t make TR any less of a fantastic game.

 

[tommycronin]

Resident Evil scared me but Tomb Raider turned me on so I'm split between the two of them.

 

[MasterDerico]

"Jumping Flash" was the first PS1 game i played...
Sorry if sounds off-topic! (Cose im not sure what i played first, TR or RE...But i think was TR)

 

[JimmyRustler]

Resident Evil, by a long shot. I think people need to take the PSone controller into their hands again just to be reminded how horrible the controls of TR were back then.

 

[Madserb2023]

Resident Evil. I can actually go back and still enjoy it. Can't say the same for the original Tomb Raider.

 

[mxbison]

RE holds up better but Tomb Raider was a far more important and revolutionary game.

RE was an Alone in the Dark clone.

 

[SkylineRKR]

Both were actually really good and came around at the same time. RE was more replayable, but TR would take me a good few weeks to beat also. Excellent atmosphere that game had.

 

[Lupin3]

Resident Evil. Personally, they aren't even on the same planet.

 

[kyussman]

I bought my PS1 with a copy of Tomb Raider so that game will always be a special one for me......Resi was great but I enjoyed exploring the world of Tomb Raider so much back then,it will always be above Resident Evil.

 

[GymWolf]

Re for me and it's not close.

 

[FunkMiller]

TR for me. The atmosphere and exploration of that first game was pretty incredible for the time.

Close run thing though. Both were rightly game changers for the console market.

 

[winjer]

For me it was Tomb Raider. It was a groundbreaking game for the time.
Exploring fully 3D levels, tight and logical controls, the historical references, and Lara Croft.

I also played Resident Evil and it was good. But it wasn't as special as Tomb Raider.

 

[Gojiira]

Tomb Raider, no question. It actually succeeded at what it set out to do, had fantastic level design, was fully 3D and didnt rely on pre rendered backgrounds, great music, VA was better than RE as well. Better controls and combat too. As a first entry its not even close.

 

[Signal Rockets]

I miss the style of these early RE games. I truly do.

Enemies dropping jewels and ammo just feels incredibly unrealistic in the modern era of gaming. But it's just a game. So, duh, I suppose.

Even so, they were just way more scary overall, and you feel like these traits got lost in the fold with the later sequels, quite considerably.

 

[cireza]

Resident Evil without question, even today you can still go back to PSOne version and have fun, I can’t say the same about TR.

This, but exactly the opposite.

I replayed Tomb Raider on Saturn last year and had a blast. I could not get back into RE1 though, way too annoying.

 

[SmokedMeat]

Tomb Raider for me. Resident Evil was good, but Tomb Raider was on another level.

 

[MrStauf]

Tomb Raider by a country mile for me.

 

[Poltz]

Tomb Raider.

 

[SolidQ]

I enjoyed both in 1997. They still in my top 3 games, but every tomb raider i'm finish on 100%, i like in old Tomb Raiders finding secrets

 

[Wildebeest]

Tomb Raider was more new and impressive. Resident Evil was derivative of Alone in the Dark, although it has come to totally eclipse it.

 

[twinspectre]

I refuse to pick one, since both are part of videogames GOAT.

 

[Alan Wake]

I loved Tomb Raider and have fond memories of it. But Resident Evil is certainly the better game of the two.

 

[acm2000]

TR was a true next gen experience, RE was just Alone In The Dark but japanese

 

[Paperclip Killa]

The comparison makes as much sense now as it did back then, when the average gamer could only get one game for months.
They’re two completely different games. They’re both excellent, and both started series that have endured for more than 25 years.

I’m surprised by the number of RE responses so far. RE was considered derivative in its time by the PC crowd who’d seen the “tank-controls puzzle adventure with action” find its niche on PC. Anyone who’d played Alone in the Dark in the four years prior would not see any novelty in RE. Tomb Raider on the other hand, if Mario 64 had not released the same year, would be even more groundbreaking than it was, which is immensely. TR was actually revolutionary, but it’s understandable that it was too much for too many people and it shows in this thread so far.

To be fair, I replayed RE many more times than TR, and I dropped TR after TR2 while I’ve played a lot of the RE sequels. But this has more to do with RE games being much shorter than anything else. Beating TR with the limited saves and the ridiculously long loading times of the console versions was a chore. RE was a blast to breeze through every time, and to be totally honest, RE was the first game I played on my PlayStation console, so it’s very special to me. But this doesn’t make TR any less of a fantastic game.

In terms of ambition and being revolutionary, it had the most impact of any game that generation even on PC because it was released their too. People still go back to play it, but it's also true that what it was trying to do made it harder to go back to for many people who wanted more straight forward games like RE or Crash.

Resident Evil on the other hand, while having fantastic presentation was more of the same if you came from PC with games like Bioforge, Timechase, Murder PD, Alien Odyssey, and others.

But Resident Evil was easier to play, easier to understand, and had Hollywood popcorn flick writing so these days it's easier to go back to just to enjoy. It's also shorter like you said by a long shot even without the loading times.

Both games lost a lot of interest by their 3rd games however, and needed to change to stay relevant. The consequences of yearly back to back releases which were falling out of favor by the end of the decade. Except Crash, that series got away with it somehow.

 

[Shake Your Rump]

Resident Evil is the definite winner. It was a system seller. Although, I personally played Tomb Raider on my PC with 3dfx card instead of PlayStation.

 

[MikeM]

Resident Evil.

But I will say TR had an epic soundtrack. You always knew when shit was about to go down.

 

[Neff]

Tomb Raider was the shit but Resident Evil made you feel like royalty. There's no comparison.

 

[Elysion]

I found TR’s tank controls terrible even back then; they’re just incredibly unintuitive. Moving around in old TR games (and other games at the time with similar control schemes) simply wasn’t fun.

RE had tank controls too of course, and I hated them there too, but the fixed camera angles make it a bit more bearable. So RE wins for feeling slightly less shitty to control.

I genuinely never understood why anyone ever thought that tank controls were a good idea, even back then. There certainly wasn’t any excuse to keep using them after Mario 64 came out and showed how 3d games should be controlled. Spyro, Soul Reaver, Banjo Kazooie, Ape Escape, Medievil, Zelda – the whole industry moved into that direction in the 90s, but for some godforsaken reason Core kept their retarded control scheme in place, long after everyone else had moved on. Originally they even wanted to keep those controls into 6th gen, when they made Angel of Darkness on PS2, until a random journalist asked them during a preview session why they hadn’t adopted modern controls yet (though I believe they only made non-tank controls optional).

 

[simpatico]

I did not think Tomb Raider was a good game.

 

[Shtef]

Tomb raider, it was the reason i picked up playstation over n64 to play it.

 

[Deerock71]

Tomb raider, it was the reason i picked up playstation over n64 to play tits.

FTFY

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

I genuinely never understood why anyone ever thought that tank controls were a good idea, even back then. There certainly wasn’t any excuse to keep using them after Mario 64 came out and showed how 3d games should be controlled.

One reason is that analogue sticks weren‘t even remotely the norm at the time. TR was first released on consoles with D-pads. They could never achieve the finesse of control required for screen-relative movement in a game like TR with that.

Another reason, tied with the first, is that the game was designed like a 3D Prince of Persia. It wasn’t about free movement. It was about taking your time calculating every jump and preparing for it with small steps and backward hops. Incidentally, this really added to the atmosphere, making you feel you were in forgotten places and had to take your time exploring them to ensure you wouldn‘t stumble on a trap or fall to your death. A very important factor that TR2 immediately flushed down the toilet with all those shooting thugs and those random insta-death traps.

 

[Scotty W]

I have played numerous RE games, but I never got into the first, because I always ran out of ammo and got stuck with the knife. I would like to go back someday, because given its popularity, I don’t see how it could possibly be so bad.

I have never liked Tomb Raider, but I played through it at Christmas on the Saturn for the first time, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

Ps, op, both of these are also Saturn games.

 

[Werewolf Jones]

After the Peru levels of Tomb Raider I don't think I'd able to play it. Those later levels are fucking crazy.



More iconic than anything on the RE1 OST though.