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  • Aluminum Christmas Trees: People exploding when they come into contact with lava might sound absurd, but it's actually a fairly realistic depiction of what would happen to organic matter in that situation.
  • Anti-Climax Boss: Simon Turner. Given his importance in the plot, you'd think he'd put up a better fight, but he can't attack you until he comes out of his invisibility, at which point a volley of submachine gun fire is more than enough to put him out to pasture.
  • Demonic Spiders: Sharks. The waters of Palawan Lagoon are infested with these bastards, they take six hits from the machete to kill, they take serious chunks out of Indy's health, they bite fast when they get close, and they swim faster than Indy. Your only practical recourse is to try and avoid them, which isn't always possible when you're underwater and your air is running low, or whipping out your Colt and simply shooting them when they are within range if you can find a patch of land nearby.
  • Genius Programming: The game was way too big to fit on the N64's hardware, so what did Factor 5 do? They used the cartridge itself as ram, essentially streaming the data it needed! Also, instead of using standard microcode (what controlled the graphics hardware), they wrote their own to focus on real-time lighting and high polygon count. However, despite everything else that was achieved, the game still skips Level 13 (King Solomon's Mines) if you are playing on a console with no Expansion Pak, possibly due to the massive size of the area and the higher-than-usual speed of traversal, which would have made data streaming less feasible.
  • Goddamned Bats: Wolves and jaguars. Because they're endangered, Indy isn't allowed to kill those (every other animal is fair game) and can only temporarily scare them off with firing in the air. The predators aren't some instant-kill monstrosities, but if you aren't constantly careful and keep fending them off, they will keep jumping at you. The most egregious case is that one particular jaguar preying inside a small courtyard of a ruined temple in Olmec Valley level, since it has no place to truly run away and will try to attack Indy five seconds after being fended off.
  • Good Bad Bugs: On the N64 version, when restarting a level the player retains all ammo and health kits in their inventory, making it easy to farm vast amounts for free by repeatedly restarting levels.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • When Core Design was working on the first Tomb Raider, one of the biggest concerns was to distance itself from Indiana Jones, to avoid a lawsuit from LucasArts, leading in the end to the creation of Lara Croft. When LucasArts decided to make a 3D Indiana Jones video game (the eventual Infernal Machine), they shamelessly ripped off the Tomb Raider formula, and the game was green-lit solely due to how massively successful the Tomb Raider franchise turned out to be.
    • This game features aliens from another dimension and Dirty Commies years before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull did.
  • Obvious Beta: The N64 version. One of the most memorable glitches had to be the fact that in one level, when you tried to drop into a cave since access seemed impossible, when Indy fell in the water and you tried to resurface, he just swam through the air. Effective for getting in the cave, but he just drowned.
  • Polished Port: The Nintendo 64 version had to downgrade the game in many ways to run on the weaker hardware but offers some advantages like aim strafing, making a nice alternative to Tomb Raider for N64 and even to people who already played the PC version. However, it's prone to freezing.
  • That One Boss: Marduk. The whip is incredibly difficult to use in combat as it is, because Indy has to stop moving to remove it from his belt and uncoil it. This makes you incredibly vulnerable during this time, as you're unable to avoid Marduk's attacks. It's only compounded by already problematic controls, which makes it difficult to keep Indy pointed in the right direction during a fight. All of this combines to make him an even bigger challenge than he already is.

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