RAM helps with textures, not polygons.
Which might be the actual difference between these two. N64 tended to use a lot of gouraud shading instead of textures; that means a solid color with some brightness changes to simulate lighting. It had plenty of graphical horsepower to make things round-ish otherwise.
Laura Croft, on the other hand, has fully textured clothes, but the polygon count is limited.
Yeah, it looks like there’s one more quad or two more tris on the right if my count is right. It might be slightly more than that, but not much. (Though and increase from 6 tris to to 8 tris is fairly significant.) Tomb Raider levels are a lot more complex though I assume, so limiting polygons on a thing always on screen is more important.
Blame the Brits for changing it to Lara in the first place.
If I understand the progression they went through designing Tomb Raider’s protagonist, Core Design started off with “Let’s make a game called Tomb Raider, it’s about exploring ancient ruins and collecting relics and artifacts.” So they designed the player character as a man with a whip and a hat and then said “Blimey that’s Indiana Jones, we can’t do that or Spielberg will sue our bollocks off.” And someone said “Hey there’s an idea, let’s make the character female.”
So they came up with a feisty Latin American woman named Laura Cruz. But depending on whose telling the story, either they couldn’t find a voice actress that could do a reasonable Latina accent in Derby England, or the publisher wanted a “more UK friendly” read whiter name, so they changed it to Laura Croft. But for some crumpet-related reason they thought Americans wouldn’t be able to pronounce “Laura” thinking it an uncommon name over here (it isn’t, we’ve got lots of Lauras), so they changed it to “Lara” which is genuinely unknown over here.
So then a bunch of things happened at once:
- People don’t actually read every single letter in a word, whcih is why yuo cna raed tihs jsut fnie, so the word “Lara” was perceived as the word “Laura” subconsciously.
- People hearing the name “Lara” spoken aloud aren’t familiar with it, found the closest to it in their memory, which is Laura, and went with that.
- “Lara” pronounced somewhere between “LAAH-ruh” and “LAY-rah” is unwieldy to say in many American accents so many people spoke it aloud as “LAHR-uh” or “LORE-uh” which are very close or identical to how we pronounce “Laura,” further compounding the above point.
- Apple and Google don’t know what the fuck they’re on about either and their phone’s autocorrect feature changes it to Laura without them noticing.
