Spoiler alert: it was horrible.

And not in the nearly-charming horrible way like the first run was, where I was dying left and right on simple things. No, I can sum up why it wasn’t charming in a couple of bullet points:

  • I’ve learned a ton more tricks since my last run yet I managed to add 30 minutes to my time.
  • I spent an achingly long time on some of tricks.

Other odd things:

  • a fly showed up at some point (I haven’t seen a fly in these parts in ages), and kept landing on my head and distracting me. Not long after my run ended it finally stopped pestering me (it must’ve known that I was now free to find something with which to kill it).
  • I kept having Tomb Raider mini-crash throughout the run. Or at least that’s what it looked like. It would just completely freeze for a few seconds. At some point, I noticed that I could see my mouse cursor and realized I could try clicking on the window. So somehow focus was being stolen from the game window.

my mini crashes

[ed. note: I ended up confirming it was LiveSplit and wrote a separate post about it.]

From watching the footage just now (55:26, 1:48:51, 2:52:00), it appears that LiveSplit may well have been the problem because I noticed on the footage that my mouse cursor appears in the general area of the LiveSplit overlay at the time of all of the “crashes” I remember. I’ve got the LiveSplit window on top of my windowed game. So in retrospect, it appears that, even though my mouse was supposedly locked to the game window, I was somehow accidentally clicking on the LiveSplit window. I’m not sure how other speedrunners have their times visible, but damn, I say, I’d rather have LiveSplit completely invisible than suffer those “crashes” again.

house skip

Here, Lara refused to reach out in cases where I know I was far enough forward to get her to reach out and grab the ledge.

And after my run, I loaded one of my checkpoints with the house skip and I was able to get away with the jump just fine, with basically the same exact setups. It makes me wonder if there’s something I did elsewhere in the run that somehow “upset” my ability to get house skip there.

Regardless, it was the first WTF of many.

“shantyville” roof skip

I’ll just come right out and say that I keep calling Shantytown Shantyville because it’s an accidental portmanteau of Shantytown (English TR) and Bidonville (French TR), so hell, I’m just going to own it and call everything Shantyville from here on out.

37 seconds to get on the roof

Not terrible, it could be better.

shantyville fire arrow gate clip

Oh my god. 6 minutes to clip through the gate

Truth be told, I really suck at clipping through this gate. And because it’s in the middle of a enemy battle, I tend not to practice it much, because I frankly prefer the tricks where I can just take my time and really line stuff up. I like to look for repeatable setups, and getting shot out randomly tends to make that task quite difficult.

shantyville massive skywalking skip

Oh my f*cking god: 27 minutes and 45 seconds to successfully do the shanty skip

  • times I failed to get out of bounds: countless
  • times I fell off the mountain and didn’t make it up the waterfall (the first major part of the trick and supposedly the easiest) : 16
  • times I failed the hardest part of the trick: 2

As of this writing, I still don’t really know if a higher framerate actually makes things easier, but I ended up basically upping my framerate to try to get the trick and it worked on the first higher-framerate attempt.

For a quick tech aside, basically I play with my CPU throttled (in the power settings in windows, I believe it’s called “maximum processor state”). So in order to up my framerate, I simply throttle my CPU less. In my experience, going to 100% maximum processor state makes the game worse because suddenly it stutters randomly. I still haven’t figured that one out, so instead, I just increase my state to 90% whenever I need the higher framerate.

airboat fight skip

4 minutes and 10 seconds

Tragically, the first time I was able to actually attempt the jump (meaning I wasn’t murdered on the way out of bounds), I successfully “landed” on the lower level. I, however, was not able to successfully get back in bounds and fell to my death.

  • times murdered before even getting to attempt to get out of bounds: 4
  • jumps failed: 2
  • successful jumps but not successful at getting back in bounds: 1

I’m still really iffy on this trick with mouse and keyboard whereas my success rate is probably like 80-90% using a controller. I can “fly” Lara out of bounds much more intuitively with the controller. “Flying” with keyboard and mouse just doesn’t make any sense to me and I feel I basically just mash random keys and hope for the best.

skywalking on the way to get le palan

I’ve done this successfully a good number of times, but I hadn’t recently practiced it, so I tried it twice, and then just went for the normal route.

Lara Skywalker

22 minutes and 45 seconds to become Lara Skywalker

Basically, the most amazing thing was that I proved that my new method of starting the trick really does work and is repeatable.

  • times I died in semi-random locations: 2
  • times I fell to the left (and into the water) trying to get up the “ramp”: 5
  • times I fell trying to get the tricky part where too far left is bad and so is too far right: 4
  • times I fell basically 5 meters from where I needed to be to land safely: 1

the unskippable battle

9 minutes and 29 seconds

  • deaths: 3

I continue to get trolled by low ammo everytime I reach this battle.

It’s kind of funny in a way. In a PC speedrun (and assuming you know all of the tricks), this is basically the only fight you actually play because everything else either gets skipped entirely, or (for the mini-fights) you run past the guys. This battle is your one chance to show off your actual combat skills.

Or for me, my lack of combat skills.

jumping on dead bodies (cage puzzle skip)

11 minutes and 3 seconds

Confession: as I write this, it’s been awhile since I actually did this run, but I believe this was the second ever time that I got this trick. So given that, the time wasn’t terrible.

final boss skip

40 seconds

  • deaths: 1

So basically, I got it on the second try. Rephrased: in the entire speedrun, here was the sole place that I showed some skill.

speedrun totals

  • total time: 2:55:46
  • deaths: 53