holy crap im replaying TR2 right now for the first time since I was a kid and this is awesome. I was always so fascinated by what was outside the boundries of the levels, my little kid brain always imagined a bunch of cool stuff and secrets in places you could never reach.
I love this game. Me my mom and my dad used to play this game and enjoy the story together when I was little. We played all the tomb raiders but for some reason I remember this game the most. Thanks for the nostalgia
I love these breakdowns. So intriguing to see the internal structures of these levels! This really was the dawn of understanding of 3d level design in some ways. Like watching silent films today, it tells us so much about what the creatives were experimenting with!
Fantastic video. Tomb Raider 2 picks up right where the first game left off. They don't make sequels like this anymore. I can't think of another one that throws the player into a gauntlet on the first level, making sure they mastered the previous game to know what's coming. I love all of the Maria Doria levels, but the Temple of Xian is the real test of this game. Beating that level is a real achievement.
Watching your explanation of The Deck makes it seem so easy to navigate... Also, great video! Already waiting for TR3's version, that I know will take a massive amount of time to make. But we can wait.
thanks! yeah TR3 is my most favorite but also it feels like every level is as dense as the later TR2 levels, so it's a little intimidating, but I'm excited to revisit them!
it's been a blessing finding your maps and these breakdowns you so kindly spent so much time and effort on. I was a child throughout the Core saga, and guess never really had the mental skills to to put the blocks together in my mind and visualise what the locations were supposed to represent. The Opera House, the ship wreck, the temple were all incomprehensible to me. I'm now enlightened 👏🏻
I've just watched both games' summaries and it was quite fascinating to see these levels from isometric and top-down views. The amount of effort you put in these videos from describing each section of a level to writing statistics is insane. This is top-notch classic TR content right here !
Absolutely begging on my hands and knees asking for you to do this with Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness. I can wait forever, especially if you do the other Tomb raiders first. EXCELLENT video, the points you make are so thoughtful as well
I haven't played very much of AoD, but I see there is a tool that claims to allow exporting of level geometry: sites.google.com/site/tombraideraoddecompiling/tools/traod-le I do have the game as part of some bundle, so I can probably do something with it
Welcome back. After that grueling business last year I've decided to build this assault course to hone my skills... and learn some new ones. oh man I had that CD too... god. Oh no i can smell gamepro magazine. 08:06 is where I had come back from the grocery store and had read that there was a level select code or something if you stepped forward twice, back twice.. .yay Konami!
I've been playing TR since '98 and I don't remember the origin story as told in the beginning of this video. I have either forgotten it or never heard it. Thanks for a great video and the memories.
fuck yes!!! it was so fuckin cool and refreshing to see it all from a different perspective and on top of all - you break all the levels down and show how to beat'em! fantastic!!! can't wait for more! subscribed !!!
Loved it! I am playing tomb raider 2 and 3 again and seeing the levels from this perspective just gives a new understanding of how clever and well made they are! The only thing I missed in this video is some of the pick ups / enemy / damage comparisons you did for the first tomb raider video, made this one it feel incomplete! Great review, if you did that it would have been perfect. Can't wait for tomb raider 3
34:14 has some enemys stuff and 34:40 some pickup stuff, but i left out the damage one, yeah, i wondered if anyone ever really looked at those! thank you for letting me know you missed them... i have a spreadsheet for 1-3 with all of that data, so I'll be sure to include the whole trilogy numbers in TR3.
what an amazing video. My first time in level 2, I managed to exit the level almost immediately because I swam under the door, avoided the mines, and just exited the level. Found out that was unintended after like 10 years. Imagine how confused I was that I exited the level without using keys, or exploring a lot. And then .. exactly the same happened at the end of level 3, where I never found the detonator key, and just exited the level without blowing up the house. They just screwed up when designing these 2 levels. (you forgot to mention that you can exit the level without detonating btw). Also on level 5, I always thought you had to make the first enemies to shoot the windows in order to reach the plane, never though about that easier route by jumping to the water, very interesting. The radar tower is my favorite secret of the game, and there's a very precise jump you can make to get out of bounds, loved that. There's a mistake in level 6 though, to get the jade secret you just approach that fake wall and it opens automatically, there's no button for it
i was gonna say, i didn't know you could finish 3 without the detonator key! there were a couple other skips I forgot to mention as well, I watched a TR2 speedrun while making this and they skip about half the puzzles lol. i should've also mentioned that you can finish the mountain level without ever riding the snowmobile. it's funny how easy some of the skips are, i imagine nowadays QA testers would be more sneaky and catch those
@@VGCartography yeah, since they were on a very tight schedule, to release one game per year, they used the budget to create new levels, new outfits, the vehicles, the new FMVs, plot, improving the engine to handle outdoors, the new Lara ponytail, and didn't really tested for skips, or fix the infamous corner bug. In the end, it's still incredible they managed to put this game all together, probably my favorite TR of all time
good feedback, thanks! was thinking maybe I should split a video like this into multiple parts so I have more time/energy for that as I go instead of trying to finish whole thing at once.
I had to comment when you mentioned that fancy jump sequence in the demo mode - myself and my siblings first played part of TR2 level 1 as part of a $5 PC demo disc from the video rental store back in the day, and we didn't know the controls as they weren't included and this was our first experience with Tomb Raider. So we had no idea how to climb up on ledges (and there was no demo sequence to watch like on your PS version). After a while of jumping around we figured out we could get up to the first ledge by doing the double jump off that exact slope. Then to get up to the next ledge, we glitched up there by doing a bunch of backflips up against the wall 😂. Eventually, someone accidentally button mashed their way into figuring out the ctrl key. We had so much fun with that demo. So funny and nostalgic to look back on - these problems we couldn't google our way out of in two seconds. TR3 was the first full game we played and we ended up getting stuck for months in one of the India levels due to an extremely hard to see moving block. Before I discovered walkthroughs. The 90s!!
great memory, thanks for sharing! it's funny how difficult the game seems when you don't know the rules. I know what you mean about hard to see blocks in India too!
The Venice levels are so ridiculously illogical. I like most of TR2 but it's so much weaker than I and III in my opinion. The amount of gun-enemies was frustrating
agree, TR2 is pretty uneven. a few points writing this video it was just like "this switch reveals this switch that reveals this switch..." just random orderings of random keys you use in random places. TR1 had fewer keys that generally had more predictable uses. and the combat was not interesting enough to justify so many gunfights when you can't meaningfully avoid it. retro game design i suppose
@@VGCartography I always thought that the "switch opens door to reveal switch, which opens door to reveal switch" formula was a way more prevalent design choice in TR1, to the point of overuse even. It never felt overdone in TR2 to me. What TR2 overused was the timed challenges in my opinion. Things that shouldn't even be timed, were timed. Like a certain trapdoor in Maria Doria.
@@VGCartography I've been throwing a few ideas around for a TRLE game and being able to look at stuff like this in invaluable to game Designers. Thank you so much. Your whole series looks really fun to study.
I'd love to see this breakdown for the rest of the classic Tomb Raiders and for the response to them from LucasArts - the PC/N64 game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.
they are close. flamethrowers earned their ranking by cooking me to death from afar so many times over the years. the xian guys have the slowly advancing sense of doom at least
no video yet but I just uploaded that map recently! it is an impossible space that intersects the lab room unless I move it elsewhere www.deviantart.com/vgcartography/art/Tomb-Raider-III-Area-51-Map-923457355
@@leatherhidegaming far as i can tell it actually swaps out the rooms under your feet, as you climb up it loads the larger interior and de-loads the exterior seamlessly. they occupy the same space physically, so the opposite happens as you leave. swapping rooms like that is also how TR accomplishes other rooms that fill with sand or whatever in the other games.
your videos are all super interesting... but I have to know how you get these perfect isometric level layouts. is it some sort of free camera mod on the PC version? But woiuldnt that still cause issues with the POV skew causing issues I have to know!
I used this tool as a level viewer for the PC level files, yeah. I modified the source code for the isometric camera instead of regular: github.com/Popov72/TRN2
Who here got the original Playstation in Christmas '97? I remember my mom and I looking for Intelligent Qube in store from that Vol. 5 demo disc, never did find a copy!
intelligent qube was my most-played demo on that disc. the sounds from that game, TR2, "kick punch its all in the mind" and "clock says PARTY TIME" are burned in my brain forever
@@VGCartography We found TR1 first before moving to TR3 second, we eventually got Gex 2, but I really wanted to try Armored Core and IQ, couldn't find either one of those. Were those more closer to the Japanese market, thus not as marketed and displayed?
@@MidnightMechanic armored core was mildly popular i think, it got a couple sequels but was never a huge seller. IQ was probably very niche though, weird + puzzle game + early title. it got a sequel in JP and EU that never made it to the US, IQ Final i think, and some PS2 followups that got weird: ua-cam.com/video/DGQ2ayj_aMw/v-deo.html
holy crap im replaying TR2 right now for the first time since I was a kid and this is awesome. I was always so fascinated by what was outside the boundries of the levels, my little kid brain always imagined a bunch of cool stuff and secrets in places you could never reach.
if you're lucky sometimes there will be a mushy looking picture of some trees or sky lol
I love this game. Me my mom and my dad used to play this game and enjoy the story together when I was little. We played all the tomb raiders but for some reason I remember this game the most. Thanks for the nostalgia
my mom helped me a bit with the original TR as well. it's nice to return
I love these breakdowns. So intriguing to see the internal structures of these levels! This really was the dawn of understanding of 3d level design in some ways. Like watching silent films today, it tells us so much about what the creatives were experimenting with!
Even though I'm very familiar with this game, this video was fantastic! The editing, presentation, in depth-ness... **chef's kiss**
Fantastic video. Tomb Raider 2 picks up right where the first game left off. They don't make sequels like this anymore. I can't think of another one that throws the player into a gauntlet on the first level, making sure they mastered the previous game to know what's coming. I love all of the Maria Doria levels, but the Temple of Xian is the real test of this game. Beating that level is a real achievement.
Watching your explanation of The Deck makes it seem so easy to navigate...
Also, great video! Already waiting for TR3's version, that I know will take a massive amount of time to make.
But we can wait.
thanks! yeah TR3 is my most favorite but also it feels like every level is as dense as the later TR2 levels, so it's a little intimidating, but I'm excited to revisit them!
@@VGCartography my favourite gottta be TR2. It was my 1st PC game ever. But 3 is close
Find the extremely long ladder..
What a thrill...
Nice
it's been a blessing finding your maps and these breakdowns you so kindly spent so much time and effort on. I was a child throughout the Core saga, and guess never really had the mental skills to to put the blocks together in my mind and visualise what the locations were supposed to represent. The Opera House, the ship wreck, the temple were all incomprehensible to me. I'm now enlightened 👏🏻
lovely to hear, thank you :)
I've just watched both games' summaries and it was quite fascinating to see these levels from isometric and top-down views.
The amount of effort you put in these videos from describing each section of a level to writing statistics is insane.
This is top-notch classic TR content right here !
thank you, that's very kind!
these need more views!
Absolutely begging on my hands and knees asking for you to do this with Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness. I can wait forever, especially if you do the other Tomb raiders first.
EXCELLENT video, the points you make are so thoughtful as well
I haven't played very much of AoD, but I see there is a tool that claims to allow exporting of level geometry: sites.google.com/site/tombraideraoddecompiling/tools/traod-le I do have the game as part of some bundle, so I can probably do something with it
Really cool seeing the whole level in one shot.
So excited for your TR3 one! My FAVE TR3 ever! As always! You did great here! :D
Welcome back. After that grueling business last year I've decided to build this assault course to hone my skills... and learn some new ones. oh man I had that CD too... god. Oh no i can smell gamepro magazine.
08:06 is where I had come back from the grocery store and had read that there was a level select code or something if you stepped forward twice, back twice.. .yay Konami!
12:32 I see what you did here, great reference!
Jokes aside really interesting and well crafted video! TR2 it's my favorite of the serie.
thank you :)
I've been playing TR since '98 and I don't remember the origin story as told in the beginning of this video. I have either forgotten it or never heard it. Thanks for a great video and the memories.
iirc the instruction manual introduces a lot of it
fuck yes!!! it was so fuckin cool and refreshing to see it all from a different perspective and on top of all - you break all the levels down and show how to beat'em! fantastic!!! can't wait for more! subscribed !!!
right on. thanks for the comments, always love when someone likes a song lol
3:54 The two walls don't crush Lara because they stop way away from the opposite wall.
Отличное видео! Я не понимаю английского языка, но мне безумно интересно смотреть такие видео. Очень жду TR3 😍
Я хотел бы перевести для вас!
Loved it! I am playing tomb raider 2 and 3 again and seeing the levels from this perspective just gives a new understanding of how clever and well made they are! The only thing I missed in this video is some of the pick ups / enemy / damage comparisons you did for the first tomb raider video, made this one it feel incomplete!
Great review, if you did that it would have been perfect. Can't wait for tomb raider 3
34:14 has some enemys stuff and 34:40 some pickup stuff, but i left out the damage one, yeah, i wondered if anyone ever really looked at those! thank you for letting me know you missed them... i have a spreadsheet for 1-3 with all of that data, so I'll be sure to include the whole trilogy numbers in TR3.
what an amazing video. My first time in level 2, I managed to exit the level almost immediately because I swam under the door, avoided the mines, and just exited the level. Found out that was unintended after like 10 years. Imagine how confused I was that I exited the level without using keys, or exploring a lot. And then .. exactly the same happened at the end of level 3, where I never found the detonator key, and just exited the level without blowing up the house. They just screwed up when designing these 2 levels. (you forgot to mention that you can exit the level without detonating btw).
Also on level 5, I always thought you had to make the first enemies to shoot the windows in order to reach the plane, never though about that easier route by jumping to the water, very interesting. The radar tower is my favorite secret of the game, and there's a very precise jump you can make to get out of bounds, loved that.
There's a mistake in level 6 though, to get the jade secret you just approach that fake wall and it opens automatically, there's no button for it
i was gonna say, i didn't know you could finish 3 without the detonator key! there were a couple other skips I forgot to mention as well, I watched a TR2 speedrun while making this and they skip about half the puzzles lol. i should've also mentioned that you can finish the mountain level without ever riding the snowmobile. it's funny how easy some of the skips are, i imagine nowadays QA testers would be more sneaky and catch those
@@VGCartography yeah, since they were on a very tight schedule, to release one game per year, they used the budget to create new levels, new outfits, the vehicles, the new FMVs, plot, improving the engine to handle outdoors, the new Lara ponytail, and didn't really tested for skips, or fix the infamous corner bug.
In the end, it's still incredible they managed to put this game all together, probably my favorite TR of all time
I made that mistake in level 5 too! I genuinely thought you had to run a horrible gauntlet to progress, this makes a lot more sense.
Can't wait for TR3.
These are really cool don't be afraid to go into more detail though maybe cut to in game footage for some of the more complicated sections
good feedback, thanks! was thinking maybe I should split a video like this into multiple parts so I have more time/energy for that as I go instead of trying to finish whole thing at once.
I had to comment when you mentioned that fancy jump sequence in the demo mode - myself and my siblings first played part of TR2 level 1 as part of a $5 PC demo disc from the video rental store back in the day, and we didn't know the controls as they weren't included and this was our first experience with Tomb Raider. So we had no idea how to climb up on ledges (and there was no demo sequence to watch like on your PS version). After a while of jumping around we figured out we could get up to the first ledge by doing the double jump off that exact slope. Then to get up to the next ledge, we glitched up there by doing a bunch of backflips up against the wall 😂. Eventually, someone accidentally button mashed their way into figuring out the ctrl key. We had so much fun with that demo. So funny and nostalgic to look back on - these problems we couldn't google our way out of in two seconds. TR3 was the first full game we played and we ended up getting stuck for months in one of the India levels due to an extremely hard to see moving block. Before I discovered walkthroughs. The 90s!!
great memory, thanks for sharing! it's funny how difficult the game seems when you don't know the rules. I know what you mean about hard to see blocks in India too!
Amazing video really nicely done
The Venice levels are so ridiculously illogical. I like most of TR2 but it's so much weaker than I and III in my opinion. The amount of gun-enemies was frustrating
agree, TR2 is pretty uneven. a few points writing this video it was just like "this switch reveals this switch that reveals this switch..." just random orderings of random keys you use in random places. TR1 had fewer keys that generally had more predictable uses. and the combat was not interesting enough to justify so many gunfights when you can't meaningfully avoid it. retro game design i suppose
@@VGCartography I always thought that the "switch opens door to reveal switch, which opens door to reveal switch" formula was a way more prevalent design choice in TR1, to the point of overuse even. It never felt overdone in TR2 to me. What TR2 overused was the timed challenges in my opinion. Things that shouldn't even be timed, were timed. Like a certain trapdoor in Maria Doria.
Dude. This is channel is awesome. Thank you so much
cheers!
@@VGCartography I've been throwing a few ideas around for a TRLE game and being able to look at stuff like this in invaluable to game Designers. Thank you so much. Your whole series looks really fun to study.
Amazing. Can't wait for the TR3 summary.
This channel is about to blow up 💪
Loved these levels. Great videos, keep up the good work.
appreciate it!
love this guide!
This content is amazing. I can't wait for Tomb Raider 3 and AoD, my favourites, to get the same treatment.
TR3 definitely... not sure if AoD is doable yet but we'll see!
What a thrill
amazing work!
I'd love to see this breakdown for the rest of the classic Tomb Raiders and for the response to them from LucasArts - the PC/N64 game Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine.
I would love to have large posters of all these levels on my wall dragon 🐉
I beat this game a couple weeks ago, this would have been helpful then!
Liked and subbed. I run these games all the time and this is amazing
nice video
great video man!
This is an amazing video
Hope this continues with the next games
Wouldn't say flamethrower guys are a higher class than terracotta warriors
they are close. flamethrowers earned their ranking by cooking me to death from afar so many times over the years. the xian guys have the slowly advancing sense of doom at least
I'm really curious how Area 51 in TR3 looks in the overview since it contains an alien ship that is bigger on the inside.
no video yet but I just uploaded that map recently! it is an impossible space that intersects the lab room unless I move it elsewhere
www.deviantart.com/vgcartography/art/Tomb-Raider-III-Area-51-Map-923457355
@@VGCartography How does it work in the engine? Like, does it secretly teleport you to a different space if you get into the ship?
@@leatherhidegaming far as i can tell it actually swaps out the rooms under your feet, as you climb up it loads the larger interior and de-loads the exterior seamlessly. they occupy the same space physically, so the opposite happens as you leave. swapping rooms like that is also how TR accomplishes other rooms that fill with sand or whatever in the other games.
your videos are all super interesting... but I have to know how you get these perfect isometric level layouts. is it some sort of free camera mod on the PC version? But woiuldnt that still cause issues with the POV skew causing issues
I have to know!
I used this tool as a level viewer for the PC level files, yeah. I modified the source code for the isometric camera instead of regular: github.com/Popov72/TRN2
@@VGCartography thats super cool! thanks for the reply
I want that TR2 remix!
i never really finished it, but the mp3 is here just for you friend: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JN0b_dEuWINAImZzNyrNXmnj2WDuTs8-
Who here got the original Playstation in Christmas '97? I remember my mom and I looking for Intelligent Qube in store from that Vol. 5 demo disc, never did find a copy!
intelligent qube was my most-played demo on that disc. the sounds from that game, TR2, "kick punch its all in the mind" and "clock says PARTY TIME" are burned in my brain forever
@@VGCartography We found TR1 first before moving to TR3 second, we eventually got Gex 2, but I really wanted to try Armored Core and IQ, couldn't find either one of those. Were those more closer to the Japanese market, thus not as marketed and displayed?
@@MidnightMechanic armored core was mildly popular i think, it got a couple sequels but was never a huge seller. IQ was probably very niche though, weird + puzzle game + early title. it got a sequel in JP and EU that never made it to the US, IQ Final i think, and some PS2 followups that got weird: ua-cam.com/video/DGQ2ayj_aMw/v-deo.html
Подскажите, будет ли видео с TR3?
yes, hopefully in December.
@@VGCartography это прекрасная новость ❤️