tfishell: I'd do as Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw would do (as he said in his TR Anniversary video, iirc) and maneuver Lara into a corner so the camera would swing around to face her and look at her "juicy ... thighs". :P I'm not sure if he did that in TR1 or a later game, but I did that in TRIII which I believe had a bit more detail on Lara's character compared to the previous two games. In general I don't think there was a major engine change - at least visually - until Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness.
Yeah, first three games were pretty much the same thing, just with more polish and bells and whistles.
In regards to early TR general graphics quality, the terrain was impressive, for all that it had to be made of cube blocks and slopes, and while Lara model had that absolutely ugly shovel face and triangle tits, her body (particularity from the back as we look at it most of the time) and its animation was very well done otherwise, and that's what mattered most. Some other devs needed half a decade to catch up, and still didn't do half as well.
tfishell: Yeah I know some people on the forum despise early 3D (and of course simple pixel art that some might think is "lazy"). I like vintage 3D (late 90s-early 2000s) probably mostly because of nostalgia. And I don't like being too hard on devs for low-quality artwork because I know gamedev is tough and time-consuming (so imo it's good to see a game like Undertale succeed despite the poor artwork)
Acknowledging the fact that certain period pieces could be pretty damn ugly, it's more the matter of indie devs using pixel art and primitive design to slack off, made so much worse by insanely bloated hardware requirements. FFS, when your crap looks worse than the first Doom or Duke Nukem, or Disney platformers, hell do you need 8 gigs of ram, two gigs of video, SSD and seventh generation Core for? Games used to look stunning with less than eighth of that.
So much of the modern game pixel art is just lazy garbage, an excuse to not to put in any effort. There are exceptions, of course, pixel art can be gorgeous, heck, some of the early click'n'beep game soundtracks were better than orchestral arrangements from many a modern game, so when another dumbass puts out a pixelated, Unity or equivalent-made pile of crap and appeals to people's nostalgia it's an insult to all those great games of old, that did their best in spite of technical limitations, not used them as an excuse.
tfishell: Nice! I haven't been worried about getting Shadow and Rise personally, since GOG hinted at them showing up in the newspost for TRLAU release thread.
I don't expect Square Enix
Japanese stuff to show up unfortunately, or things where the multiplayer is a big component, but maybe Project: Snowblind and Mini Ninjas (and the few other missing titles from EIDOS ANTHOLOGY bundle on Steam)
NieR:Automata would be a big release for GOG (4.5k+ votes on the wishlist), but I assume that falls under "Japanese games we're unlikely to see here". Ideally GOG would be able to get more aged stuff from other "AAA" publishers (like EA, been like 6 years since they released here), if they can't bring many other Square Enix titles for now, but GOG's ability to do that is rather inconsistent unfortunately.
Square Enix been good to us. Great games, great prices, so I figure the best we could do is to buy all their games here to show that we care and GOG is a viable market, and they'll eventually make the rest of their stuff available.
