Of course it's not clear why she's hot, it's a still screenshot with a res bump. To truly appreciate Lara you need to see her on a small 480i tv and with the PS1 texture jitter.
You spent more time looking at her butt than her boobs anyway. Which is why they put more polygons into her butt. Resource management!
Laura tank walked so 2B could run
Pyramids? 
2 beveled cubes? 
Backing Lara into a corner so the camera zooms in on those luscious triangle titties.
and you have to be 14 years old
I remember the first time I saw Doom on the SNES. It was the most realistic thing I'd seen a computer render, the equivalent of playing the latest FPS game. Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I've seen. Each successive generation of game has been both the most realistic thing I've seen and the theoretical limit of realism for computer graphics. Something makes me unable to imagine a higher level of fidelity than 2024 releases without it just becoming haptic sensors, and if I see a female character in that 2024 game it's as realistic as a body can get. While I didn't play Tomb Raider because CDs were obnoxious, I remember the characters in Golden Eye and Perfect Dark being vaguely attractive to a child who had never seen a naked woman.
Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I've seen.
It's really hard to communicate the incredible size of the graphical leaps in the early days of mainstream consoles. Every generation was just amazingly better than the last for quite a while there. I remember booting up Mario 64 for the first time and just sitting there with my whole family, jaws hanging open. You could see Mario breathing. The world was enormous, three-dimensional, and open. Coming off the SNES, it was just mind-blowing. The move from PS3 to PS5 looks like hardly a tune-up by comparison. It was wild.
Yeah, very much this. I think it's tied in to how vision works - We don't perceive the world directly. What we see is a bunch of cludges and hacks that our brain uses to assemble a coherent picture from a bunch of very bad sensors. Like I think your eyes can only really see what's directly in front of you and most of your peripheral vision is just cludged together from things you've seen recently, which is probably why, like, people can sometimes sneak up on you and claerly be in your peripheral vision and you don't notice htem bc you were focused somewhere else.
It didn't really matter that Lara was a bunch of polygons or the dinosaurs in Turok were like 50 tris or whatever. Your brain will fill in the details. When I think about the actual experience of playing games decades ago I don't remember the actual graphics. My brain has assembled sort of a representation of that where Lara Croft is "high poly" and shadows and lighting work and the movement system wasn't a nightmare.
The brain filling in the details is exactly how to word it. I play Dwarf Fortress and it's as vivid as the latest Ubisoft game because that's the best simulation available. Whatever is missing from it, I add the fidelity.
yea like you have to imagine the cart full of magma entirely because they still haven't fucking fixed that bug years later
It's the same dog sprite for every dog, but each of them looks like an actual individual dog once I read the descriptions. If the 2044 equivalent of Dwarf Fortress has dummy-ass graphics, my experience of perceiving it will be exactly the same.
I remember seeing footage of Shenmue when it was new and laughing. I thought it was some kind of joke, because there was no way a game could look that realistic or smooth. I thought it was some kind of footage of real people that had a special effect put over it. When I learned it was a real game I felt a weird sense of dread, because it felt like arriving at the end of human history, like I slipped into the future by accident
a higher level of fidelity than 2024 releases
We've reached a point where the major bottleneck on realism isn't the hardware you run on, it's the size of your dev team and the amount of time you spend working on your graphics. That's part of why triple ayyyyyyyyyy games are so much more expensive to make than they need to be, because they're throwing money at diminishing returns and they always have to outdo the last game that came out.
Also big fan of when you see someone reference the literal worst content imaginable from the 2010s and the comments are full of zoomers saying "bro this was my CHILDHOOD"
No, bro. This was 5 years ago. If this was your childhood, you're still a child.
No, bro. This was 5 years ago. If this was your childhood, you're still a child.
No, most of Gen Z already feels like old people. Capitalist enshittification literally aged us at lightning speed.
If you were the target audience for Paw Patrol or Poppy Playtime or Youtube Kids shit you're like at most 15. Literally a child. Capitalist enshittification and trauma don't make you an adult, this is the difference between maturing and aging. Your telomeres are shorter, you're not more mentally and emotionally mature because of it.
Paw Patrol or Poppy Playtime or whatever, sure, but early 2010’s stuff could have someone who was 11 watch them and now be 20. We are in 2024 now.
Yeah oldest gen z are in their mid 20s now
FNAF was a thing when I was in 6th-7th grade. I’m 24 now lol
Stop making me feel old 
I mean "content from the 2010s" could mean a lot of things. Like someone who says "FNAF was my childhood" could be a 22 year old who played it as a 12 year old in 2014
Hell even something from 5 years ago could be a lot of people's childhood, an 18 year old remembers 2019 as a 13 year old
These zoomers don't know what it was like. Imagine a time before pornography at your fingertips. Before it invaded every empty digital space and defied Volcel fatwas openly wherever it tread. A time when if you wanted to connect to the Internet you had to plug it into the phone line (a hole in the wall that required a physical connection) and speak the language of electronic Satan to summon the 640x480 super-compressed jpegs of boobs that took 72 minutes to download apiece. It was a wasteland out there. Simulated booba, no matter how crude, would activate anyone's neurons in such privation. Shame, shame on any would castigate their ancestors for their will to survive. Shame.
There was a time when computers would scream at each other in binary anguish to establish a connection to the net.
I remember the time when someone gets on the dial-up internet, nobody at home could use the landline phone. And this was before the time when every single person gets their own personal cell phone.
Imagine not being able to use the internet for much of the day because your parents or someone else in the family might have to call home.
Imagine not being able to call home in an emergency because someone was jackin' off
I remember not being on the internet as it was metered and it would cost too much. So if I wanted to do something on the internet I went to the library. But harder to jack off in a library so I had to make do with women’s clothing catalogs, sheer underwear so you could see a nipple or some bush was hitting the jackpot.
Yeah, I'm not gonna let some kid who never shoplifted a Penthouse from the seedy gas station talk about what I find attractive
I never understood the hype when I was a kid either.
Honestly, I think it was mostly by dudes to justify why they're playing a game with a woman lead. We forget how sexist everyone was back then. The only way a female protag could be justified was as eye candy.
Also I'M NOT OLD 
Lara wasnt my thing but I did have a polygonal video game crush as as a PS1 kid, and it was Kid from Chrono Cross.
We made do with what we had.
The mind makes it real, Neo.
When the big triangle boobed fairy came out of the fairy pool in ocarina of time that was it for me. Also the girl from the lonlon ranch malon i think.
I still remember debating my friend over which girl in oot was hottest
games are all smoke and mirrors designed to evoke emotions and imagery, the actual pixels on the screen only tell half the story
basically you had to be there and also be 14 and horny
Country girls make due 
I'm pretty sure it was all the promotional art that people lusted over, not the in-game graphics
Lara be rockin the cyber truck look, especially with that dump truck ass.
There are certain genres of porn that should be permanently blocked for everyone. Any Japanese word that ends in "-con", of course, but also simpsons, minecraft, and roblox hentai. Talk about unrealistic body standards!
Well technically ps5 lara is still made out of triangles
🤓
I imagine a lot of the horny people simply used their imagination to fill in the blanks
Ok, polygonal Lara Croft is debatable. Gadget from Rescue Rangers is not.
chica is a billion times hotter than lara croft
Kids these days don't understand the appeal of british women with infinite ammo and a fifteen foot standing high jump murdering endangered species for reasons that aren't really justified by the plot.
Considering one of the criticism seems to be "woman made of triangles" which still holds true to this day as per video game characters this begs the question of how many triangles the OP assumes are necessary before you get to jerk off to a video game character
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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