Well, that’s strange. Lara Croft pinups seem to have disappeared Tomb Raider I-III Remastered following a patch earlier this month to fix a number of bugs. Whether intentional or not, some fans are now calling it a gross censorship of retro classics.
The publisher Aspyr published it The game’s second update on April 11th and mentioned a whole bunch of changes, but nothing about enlarged posters of Lara Croft being removed from the dressing room in the “Sleeping with the Fishes” level Tomb Raider III: The Lost Artifact. Although they still appear and look like pixelated postcards when playing with the original graphics settings, the walls they are on are now blank when players switch to the revised graphics settings.
Their distance was noticed first on the Grave robbers subreddit before the discovery began spreading to other parts of the internet last week. “I thought it was bullshit, but no, Crystal Dynamics played the OG fans. They censored the images in the update.” tweeted a person. “Updates should never be used to retroactively censor games, it is a form of theft. “Any company that engages in this bait-and-switch behavior should go bankrupt.” tweeted another. To be clear, the original versions of the posters are still available in the games when played in 1990s mode.
A warning at the start of the remastered collection informs players that Crystal Dynamics, the studio behind the original games, has chosen to retain offensive stereotypes and imagery in order to “acknowledge their harmful effects” rather than erase these parts of the series’ legacy . Neither Crystal Dynamics nor Aspyr seemed to have a problem with the pinups before. In fact, they were considered one of “Ten remastered details you may have missed” a week after the collection’s release.
Shortly after the latest patch removed the posters, NexusMods user Dario108 came forward I uploaded a mod to restore them in the PC version of the game. Timur Gagiev, the maker of the popular open source port OpenLara, who eventually worked on the remasters for Aspyr, Dario retweeted a link to the mod without saying anything else. Some took this as a sign that the change was intentional, despite possible disagreements behind the scenes.
Aspyr and Gagiev did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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