I will not be talked down to by Zoomers on this matter

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
Also the 90s had a thing about "bolted on tits" which still also had a bit of 80s heroin chic. I don't think I've ever met anyone that looks remotely like that
- I have. The art and science of boob jobs has progressed just as fast as other technologies.

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.
- n64/ps1 and gamecube/ps2 were easily the best times to be alive for a gamer
- Do you ever sit down to think about how Doom and Half-Life 1 were only 5 years apart? And half-Life 2 was only 11 years after Doom.
  Silent Hill 3 was 4 years after the first one. Super Mario 64 was only 6 years after Super Mario World on SNES. These times were wild and it's hard to describe how the times felt to kids nowadays. It felt like the earth was going to crack open at any second.
  The Xbox 360 came out only 9 years after the N64. By comparison, Red Dead Remeption 2 is already 6 years old. Those sorts of giant leaps just haven't happened for a while.
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.
- Also these games were designed to be played on 640x480i CRT screens (or 720x576i if you lived in Europe). Everything, from the textures to the special effects to the menus. I've been upscaling stuff in PS2 games, and it's hard to get some effects and textures to display correctly, as they're designed to take advantage of CRT scan lines and resolution scaling. PS2 games rendered at 512x448i resolution, if you were lucky there was a 480p mode. PS1 games at half that resolution. Of course they look terrible on a modern gigantic 4K (3840x2160p) flat screen TV or monitor. Anyone that has played these older games on original hardware hooked up to a CRT TV knows that they looked better than how they are represented now.
- , 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.
  lol skill issue
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
Shenmue look liked this
- Man, that game was so cool
- Reminds me of how ever since it came out in 2015 people have been mistaking scenes from Arma III for real battlefield footage.
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.
- Halving the size of the triangles each generation eventually hits a point where the difference is negligible.
Idk I've never been this way. All I've thought was, "wow this looks great!"

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.
FNAF was a thing when I was in 6th-7th grade. I’m 24 now lol
- Stop making me feel old
- didn't FNAF come out in 2014? If you're 24 now then you were 14 in 2014
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.
- here the telco had a deal where if you made a call after 6, the charge would be limited to a small maximum. so essentially nobody with internet was reachable between 18:00 and 07:00.

Yeah, I'm not gonna let some kid who never shoplifted a Penthouse from the seedy gas station talk about what I find attractive

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.
- A person of culture i see.
  I'd like to give Cross a chance sometime. My sister loved it. I watched her play and had so mamy questions about what i was seeing, "wait wtf how many characters are there?", "Poore has an army?", "that guy is definitely Magus dressed as a Vegas magician right?" etc.

We made do with what we had.

The mind makes it real, Neo.

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

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

I mean I played Breath of the Wild in 8th grade and Link was basically my bisexual awakening, the femboy Link fan art is still engrained in my mind after all these years
- Hey not to
  or anything but the legend of twink genre experienced a reneaissance when tears of the kingdom came out and we're on the tail end of it.
That fairy design was so wildly out of place. Zelda was never completely prudish, but heeeeelllo there with the see-through leotard, very pointy boobs, high pitched giggle and very suggestive posing from basically a frog perspective.
I was 11. And then I was slightly older.

Country girls make due

I'm pretty sure it was all the promotional art that people lusted over, not the in-game graphics

There's nude mods for the original tomb raider and some of them are like, old, old.
Idk, for me, the game "sparked my imagination" -- but my imagination and I would go to my room with photos of actual people.

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!

Lara be rockin the cyber truck look, especially with that dump truck ass.

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

This is the real answer. It wasn't like the alternative was a 4k 144fps dommy mommy rendered in unreal engine 5. It was laura croft rendered with like 25 polygons and forest porn. Those were the old days, kids. Don't take what you have for granted.
- It's 1990 whatever. You are horny and like girls. Your options are Captain Janeway, Agent Scully, Fran Drescher in the Nanny, and, idk, when did baywatch run?

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.
- appeal
  british
  statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged
I will only agree if she's in Glamrock form.
Roxanne Wolf beats them both sry
- if she doesn't have a beak I don't want her

Ok, polygonal Lara Croft is debatable. Gadget from Rescue Rangers is not.

Yeah, guilty. Or not guilty, like, I've done much weirder things than have a crush on a cartoon mouse.
Lol I just looker her up and I literally did not remember at all what the character looked like.
- I could never forget what she looked like

What's the evil bird animatronc?

Chica from Five Nights at Freddy's
- Toy Chica specifically (dont ask)
Vocalist in the chuck e cheese band
based millennial
- I have never engaged with any fnaf media. It was years before i even puzzled out that it was a horror game.
  Where did zoomers encounter animatronics to know what they are? I though pizza rat's gambling den was mostly defunct by the 2010s?

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

The correct and objective answer is: 2.
....because It takes 2 triangle welded together to form a polygon which can have a texture/sprite applied to it.
- You don't need a quad to texture map, though admittedly your result would be very limited with just a single triangle...
- But PS1 Lara Croft is a lot more than 2 triangles and also not okay to jerk off over according to OP. So it's more than that, but what?

Cutscene Lara Croft

What is the “evil bird animatronic”? Honestly can’t think of anything.

Chica from Five Nights at Freddies.

it's ahistorical to not consider that bras used to be pyramid shaped

Lara was just dressing something thematic while venturing into pyramids.

It's weird because I do remember finding that shit hot as a kid and then years later I see it and wonder how I ever found myself attracted to it.

It used to be so mindblowing to kids that the whole "nude raider" cheat code urban legend spawned and it got parodied in TR 2 by putting in the code it makes Lara explode.
- I downloaded so many viruses back in the day trying to find that.
The higher-res/poly ads and box art probably helped a lot.
- the ads definitely leaned into it
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHJuFhcRICE&t=185
  Cutscene Lara is cool as hell and has round boobies.
Well, when you're flooded with more hormones than you can shake a stick at...
- Truly gamers are flooded with more hormones than they can shake a joystick at.
- That's a good point
It's a depiction of a woman. Imagination can fill in a lot of details for you.

Final Fantasy 7 did some damage to me growing up, because my reaction is weirdly Victorian.

This harlot is showing too many triangles. Leaves nothing to the imagination.

Smh imagine seeing Tifa Lockhart and not falling immediately madly in love

Not Tomb Raider 1, obviously. We meant Tomb Raider 2.

yeah well at least chica isn't p*sh

If cybernetics happen I need ones that make everything look like it was rendered in GoldenEye's engine on a real N64. Everything needs to be blurry as shit

Jokes on yall my first fictional crush was rosalina (followed by the anime version of Clement from pokemon xy though I didn’t realize it was a crush at the time)

I got a demo for this game in the mail as a kid and had a very very different horny video game experience than most it seems.

Damn, what's her @?