The recently released and evocatively named Tomb Raider 1-3 Remastered starring Lara Croft allowed an entirely new generation of gamers to experience the formative action platformers for the first time. But it seems that in the last update, released a couple of weeks ago, sexy pinup posters of Croft herself have quietly gone missing, a change not mentioned in the patch notes. Fans, as you might imagine, quickly noticed and were unimpressed, already pointing fingers at Crystal Dynamics.
Reports began to trickle in via Reddit (thanks, Kotaku) that certain suggestive images of Croft, which could be observed in a locker room in the Tomb Raider 3 level, Sleeping with the Fishes, are now entirely blank when playing in the remastered graphics mode. The pinups can still be seen in the original graphics setting, where they resemble pixelated postcards. SmashJT demonstrates the removal below:
Interestingly, Crystal Dynamics decided to keep the racial and ethnic stereotypes present in Tomb Raider 3 for the remaster, which makes the removal of the pinups seem even stranger. We suppose it is probably easier to remove a picture than it is to redesign enemies, but it remains a strange decision nonetheless.