I’m not a proud man. I don’t stick to my opinions even when I’m wrong and if I make a mistake I apologise.
So, with that in mind I’ll say this: I was wrong about Rise of the Tomb Raider and my low expectations. I was wrong. There, I said it, but don’t get too excited because I wasn’t completely wrong. There are still a lot of shallow elements to the game, stuff that seem at home in the Uncharted series but feel oddly out of place in Tomb Raider. But I’ll leave those for another article and now focus on the good bits. Continue reading Tomb Raider Rises, Beats Expectations
Carry on my wayward son, there’ll be peace when you are gone. Lay your weary head to rest, don’t you cry no more…
Someday I’ll turn these articles into awesome highlight videos with that song playing in the background, similar to Supernatural season finales. But as my editing skills more than suck, I’ll just write it all down.
A couple of months ago I started a series called Classic Play Tomb Raider, later renamed Let’s Play Classic Tomb Raider, because it makes it easier to understand. The plan was simple: play through all the Classic Lara Croft games in reverse order—because I was already playing Underworld when the idea popped in my head! I want to give a special thanks to Kelly M. from The Archaeology of Tomb Raider for pointing out a flaw in my naming: the LAU Trilogy isn’t considered Classic Tomb Raider. It’s why now I say Classic Lara Croft when I explain the series! Continue reading Let’s Play Classic Tomb Raider – Halfway There!
I know, it’s been a while, but since launching my weekly stream, it’s been difficult to also record these videos. But I’m finally back and now let’s start with Tomb Raider Chronicles, the next to last game Core Design ever made and one of the greatest cash-grab titles to grace the world with its presence. It’s set right after The Last Revelation. Lara’s presumed dead and her friends and family (only 3 of them apparently) gather around the fire with a lot of alcohol and reminisce about some of her earlier adventures.
This is an older game, as such it’s complicated to play it on modern PCs, and often it’ll crash. You’ll see in the first episode, just how many problems I have playing it. Some of it is the lack of autosave which I once again forget about.
It’s no secret that I hate this game and Chronicles. They are the worst Core Design ever came up with for the Tomb Raider franchise. I hated every second of this game and its inane mechanics, especially the ‘power-up’ thing where Lara needs to perform certain actions to become stronger and be capable of climbing further and such. I remember web comics mocking this years ago, much like I did.
Recently I completed my Legend–Anniversary–Underworld Trilogy Classic Play run, and some people voted that I should play the ones I hate. So to prove that your votes matter, I will suffer through the indignity that is The Angel of Darkness.
For this run I’m trying a new format, just a commentary at the start and end of the video, but leaving the middle of it free of my lovely voice. Let me know in the comments if you prefer it this way or you’d like me to talk all the way through the videos.
As always, before the videos you’ll find a couple of polls. Vote and let me know how you want me to play future TR games and which games to pick for the next Classic Play series. I’ll be updating this post as I record more episodes so keep an eye out in the coming weeks!
Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
It’s been two weeks and no one even tried to solve my numeric puzzle. For the record, the answer is 22.
Sadly, I don’t have a new puzzle this week. I’ve been without internet for some time and it’s made it difficult for me to do the proper research on certain topics for a puzzle I have in mind, but I will try to have a new one for next week. Also, inventory puzzles are a bit difficult to describe in text without making them too obvious, so those I’m working on slowly and carefully to make them appealing and challenging for readers.
This week I’m actually going to talk about two puzzles, from the same game and both really clever. These are two from Tomb Raider: Anniversary and are simple yet clever.
The first one is at the start of the Greece segment of the game. You come across a panel depicting the Perseus constellation and the different stars are targetable. There is a switch in front to reset them if you shoot the wrong one. The puzzle consists on shooting the right set of stars to open doors and make things happen. The clues are very close and don’t take much exploration to find.
It’s an extremely simple puzzle, but I like it for the sole reason that it involves gunplay in its execution. Many action-adventure games separate the action from the adventure, the guns from the puzzling, but TR Anniversary embraced both and this was just one of the many times where you use Lara’s weaponry as part of a puzzle solution. And because of that it deserves a spot on The Weekly Puzzle.
The second puzzle I’ll mention is in the Temple of Khamoon. You find yourself in a room with four rotating pillars, each with four symbols. If you rotate one, its adjacent pillars do so as well. The point of the puzzle is to align the symbols together, and you have murals depicting the images you should align.
What makes this an interesting puzzle for me is that the clue can also trick you into believing you needed to have the pictures facing the murals, and that is incorrect and made the puzzle twice as long as it should’ve been. Perhaps it was just my lack of attention or maybe the designers intent was for it to serve as both clue and misdirection, but either way, I found it very clever and figuring out the pattern and rotation order to properly align the pillars was a joy.
(Image Credit: Stella’s Walkthroughs) Four pillars, four images, can you match them?
The Tomb Raider series is filled with hundreds of puzzles, and if you have a favourite one, share it!
Last week I finished my Anniversary run, not knowing it was Legend’s birthday! So this week I’m making up for lost time and playing my favourite game and the first in the LAU trilogy, Tomb Raider: Legend!
After the disappointment I felt over The Angel of Darkness and Chronicles before it, this game was the best that could’ve happened to me as a Tomb Raider fan. It revitalised my love for the series and not only gave me back the Lara I had always known and whom I loved but it gave me the first chapter in a wonderful story that would continue in the games I’ve already played through as part of this series. And it’s Tomb Raider’s take on Arthurian legends, what more could you ask?
Much like I did with Anniversary, I will update this article over the next few weeks when a new video is ready! For this run you will have my (not-so) lovely commentary, because my voice has returned! If I haven’t mentioned it before, my voice left me behind after playing the really cool voice-activated title In Verbis Virtus, which I will review soonish!
If you like what you see, consider subscribing to TMA’s YouTube channel. And don’t forget to vote on the polls below. Let me know if I should skip all cutscenes from now on and vote on which series I should go through next in Classic Play!
I even considered ranting a bit more just on the very sore subject of the timed exclusivity, but that topic’s been run to the ground and as a very wise friend said on twitter, enough is enough.
But I still feel there’s a lot to say about this 20 year-old series.
In past articles I’ve been quite negative and resistant to change, but I’ve made it clear that I want to be wrong! I want Rise to make me eat my words. I want the Tomb Raider not only to rise but also to stand tall and keep going.
I know I’ve made it seem as if I wish this Lara never existed, and it might be partially true, but it’s just because I know how strong a character the original was, even in all the silliness of her series. She was confident, strong, capable and brilliant. She faced everything head on, even if she had doubts, remorse or reservations. But she also enjoyed herself. She saw the wonder and beauty in every place she visited and she pulled you in so you could see things from her point of view. Everything was an adventure to her and she took as much joy as she could from whatever she did, something I wish I could do more often.
As a character I admire the original Lara and I found her more inspirational and captivating than most male video game characters. As gaming changed and we entered the dude-bro era, Lara remained herself, with all her charm, wit and copious amounts of sarcasm. And of course backflipping, diving and shooting animals!
At least until they moved on from her to Nu-Lara.
I don’t want this new younger Lara to be exactly the same as the original, as much as it may seem like it. But I do want her to inherit some of her traits. Tomb Raider 2013 was a misery fest, and so far, between all TR media, it seems they want to take her into the “angst-filled hard-ass” archetype and I hope it doesn’t happen. The world doesn’t need any more of those. We need someone who sees the beauty and wonder in everything, someone who reminds us that even the worst circumstances have some good in them. Nu Lara is strong, we know that, but so far the only growth has been on the scabs covering her many wounds. Even the comics—bridging the games—have too much pain and misery and very little happiness.
I’ve said it before. When you’re telling a story, if there aren’t good moments, then the bad ones lose effectiveness. And so far, Lara has had too many bad moments and very few good ones. Her close circle of friends is less there to offer comfort and support but to be victims and hostages.
(Image Credit: Dark Horse Comics) Enough with the blood & mud and doom & gloom. Let’s hit some ruins!
If Tomb Raider were a novel, I wouldn’t worry about the character because she would be in Rhianna Pratchett’s hands and she is an outstanding writer. But the creative vision for the character belongs to the developers and so far, they seem to prefer grit and misery to adventure and excitement and joy. For Rise, they tell us she’s having issues dealing with the events of the first game (or possibly the events of the 2nd, as we don’t know if the therapy is before her trip to Siberia or after), and she’s going to a therapist. I fear this is just to make Lara much more vulnerable, and that the therapy is just a “plot gimmick” for this game instead being instrumental in the character’s development.
But there I go again being negative. Sorry about that.
I want Lara and the new Tomb Raider series to learn the lessons of its predecessor and combined with its own stories evolve into something new and better. I want this Nu Lara to be better than the original. I want her to inspire people as much as the original did—including me. I want her to find the joy of exploration, the awe and wonder and the adventure in life, instead of just wading through pockets of misery.
For the games, yes I want to see more puzzles. I know, I sound like a broken record on this, but it’s part of the adventure genre. It’s part of that sense of wonder I mention, to find ancient ruins with incredibly complex mechanisms you need to piece together or use in some way to progress. Sure, we can get away from box pushing, I’ll be the first behind that idea, but we need that awe, that joy of discovery and that’s what I want the series to bring in the future. I hope Rise’s tombs will be as good as they promise or even better. I want them to be complex, and combine items and physics and platforming.
(Image Creidit: Otakusphere) Go big, go silly, go insane! Be stupid, be brilliant!
In terms of platforming and acrobatics, I want Rise to take it into a bolder direction and future games to go even further. From the classic pits with a rope over them to ditching the climbing gear and just do it by hand. My good friend, Kelly from the Archaeology of Tomb Raider, said that a lot of the challenge of platforming went away with the auto-grab and that is generally true, but there was still a great chance of failure. If you don’t believe me, just check out my Tomb Raider Underworld and Anniversary videos, you’ll see me dying often enough. And that’s where I hope we’ll move, not into the same platforming elements from the past, but the same challenge and risk, to those moments where if you don’t jump at the exact edge, you won’t make it across the gap. I know I’m sounding nostalgic and wishing this series was like the past one, but again, I just want it to learn and use the past series to evolve into something better.
Finally, combat. They’re already going in a very good direction by letting you sneak past enemies instead of just shooting and killing.
However, the one thing I want the most for Tomb Raider—as a game—is for it to be sillier. Gameplay and events grounded on reality are good but sometimes you can squeeze a bit more fun out of a sequence if you allow for some nonsense. Perhaps it’s physics not working exactly as they should, or the character being more agile than she should in a given situation, such as five back-flips in a row while firing two guns at incoming raptors. The Oni were a good first step, but I hope they step further away from ‘reality’ and more into the silly bits!
And all that together is what I want and what I hope from the Tomb Raider series in the future. I don’t want Lara and her games to mimic the classic series, but I do want them to acknowledge their existence and use them to improve upon, to evolve into a series that will have cynical fans like me jumping for joy and enjoying adventures with this Lara as much as we did with the Classic.
But until I play Rise, I can’t do anything but that: hope.
Last week I finished the playthrough for TR Underworld so it’s time for Anniversary! All part of my plan to play all the Classic-Lara games in reverse order.
For those unfamiliar with this game, it’s a remake of the first Tomb Raider, but with story elements adjusted to fit those of Tomb Raider Legend, which I’ll be playing next as part of this series!
For the first video I did some commentary, not only about the game but the series in general as well as some random musings. The rest of the segments have no commentary as I’ve been playing the voice activated Action-adventure In Verbis Virtus, and now my throat hurts quite badly.
Be sure to check out the polls below and tell me what you want for the rest of the Tomb Raider Classic Plays and what game series I should tackle next. If it’s not listed n the poll, you can add one!
Part I – Vilcabamba
Part II – Greece
Part III – Egypt – Temple of Khamoon
Part IV – Finale – Natla Mines & Atlantean Pyramid
If you like the video, give it a like and consider subscribing to the YouTube channel and of course here on the site.
If you’ve read The Archaeology of Tomb Raider and seen the comments before, it won’t be a surprise to you that I don’t have the highest expectations for the upcoming reboot sequel Rise of the Tomb Raider. There is too much I find wrong in it, too much lacking for anyone who’s played the original series. I’m the recurring cynic on those comments.
Last week Game Informer dedicated at least one article a day to the new game, but the articles were lazy, uninspired and not really informative. Most of them just rehashed information we already knew about or recycled past interviews. The interview videos were laden with PR-speak, which to those of you who don’t know what that means, is talking without actually saying anything, answering each question in the most non-committal way possible. You heard them say things like “passion, survival, trauma, exploration, tombs,” without really giving much away. Worse still is they kept talking about these things in almost a monotone. The resulting videos are soul draining.
(Image Credit: IGN) The first image we saw of Lara’s new adventure
It’s quite obvious the point was and is to create as much hype as possible, to make sure that sweet spot of millions of dollars in pre-order revenue. But with examples such as Assassin’s Creed Unity and Watch_Dogs I’m wary of this move. I suspect and fear they might deliver a shoddy product. You may call me a cynic, but it’s happened before. The two Ubisoft games I’ve just mentioned are perfect examples of this. And it’s not just them but also a growing trend in the games industry. A lot of hype to get money before people realise how flawed the experience is. We’ll know for certain hat is the case if Rise of the Tomb Raider gets the infamous release-date embargo.
But my low expectations don’t just come from the hype-machine—it just lowers them more.
I liked the reboot as a game, but I felt it was lacking as a Tomb Raider title. It was too much of a modern-gritty-shooty game. While I do respect the developers’ creative vision and I did enjoy the game, I still feel something was missing, some of the adventuring spirit that has always been the central point of the series. Everything was about survival, and killing people and Lara getting hurt. The archaeology, the exploration of tombs and the puzzles were secondary now, just side-activities that did nothing more than add a completion percentage to your game. The only ones that added something to the experience were the artefacts you found from previous inhabitants of the island, as they helped sell the Dragon Triangle and Yamatai’s background.
(Image Credit: Game Informer) The devs seem to focused on weapons and gear.
The plot was good, but it took ages to get going and ran in circles for a while. It’s what I call the Crysis Conundrum. In that game, you have an alien invasion plot, but you spend 95% of the game fighting humans. It’s the same with Tomb Raider 2013, you spend most of the game dealing with the cultists and the actual mystical side of the plot and the supernatural Oni forces only appear in the last segment, as if they were trying to remain tied to ‘reality’ for as long as possible.
Another problem the game had was the supporting cast. Excluding maybe Roth and Sam, they were all cardboard cutouts, all of them stereotypical. Ask most players of the game and they will tell you they’re just there to be helpless victims for you to save at one point or another, or watch them die…just because. It’s the problem with these neo-gritty stories: they all think you need to have violent deaths for characters to grow and things to have meaning. They don’t understand that for the bad moments to be effective, there also have to be moments of joy. If everything is always hopeless then you become desensitised to the ‘pain’.
(Image Credit: Eurogamer) I do love the bow, I cant deny that!
In fact, the secondary cast is still one of the biggest problems in the new Tomb Raider’s storytelling. Beyond the scope of the game, the comics—bridging the games and expanding on the new lore—also have Lara constantly saving friends. Every story arc involves at least one crewmember of the Endurance or someone related to them. It’s starting to feel as if that’s the only type of story they can tell.
And it’s disappointing for those of us who have been with this series for years, the ones that enjoyed the old TRs, suffered through Chronicles and Angel of Darkness and then saw the light again with the Legend-Anniversary-Underworld trilogy. Those of us who enjoyed the crazy adventures Lara got to in the Top Cow comics, the crossovers with Witchblade and so much more. The stories were sometimes silly, but they managed to capture the sense of adventure of Tomb Raider, they had Lara actually raiding tombs. Same with the games, there was adventure, plunder and ancient secrets to find and they managed to tell compelling stories without sacrificing anything. Just take the LAU trilogy, all had wonderful personal stories for Lara yet they are still outstanding Tomb Raider games.
Another point for me to keep my expectations low is perhaps a minor one: Trinity. First introduced as a small secret in Tomb Raider 2013, and then fully so in the comics, the organisation is now the main antagonist in Rise of the Tomb Raider and they are without a doubt one of the least intimidating and interesting secret groups in the world. From their appearance in the comic, they’re laughable B-list 80s villains. I told Kelly M from the Archaeology of Tomb Raider what I thought about trinity, what made them ridiculous and I still think so: “As a shadowy organization, they are about as subtle as a C4-packed truck honking La Cucaracha.”
Their main agent in the comics is a religious nut. They also made him extremely sexist, perhaps hoping to make him even more unlikeable, but to me he just seemed pitiful. I do know that making secret organisations isn’t easy and making good ones even less so, but Trinity just feels barely fleshed out, just a name thrown out to see if it sticks. And by the way, and for the record, Trinity is a terrible name for a secret organisation.
I’m worried that we’ll once again spend a good chunk of the game ‘fighting humans’ and have the mystical and tomb raiding sides tacked on at the end. With the way Trinity seems to work, this will most likely be the case. You against this insane army (plus bears) until you reach the last segment of Kitezh.
By reading all of this, you’ll probably think I’m hung up on the past games and I’m not giving the new ones a chance. But this isn’t a new IP but a new ‘series’ built on top of one with a massive following, with an already dedicated fanbase and with it come expectations. We know it’s a new Lara (or Nu-Lara as I like to call her) and she has her own stories, but we do want to see her having adventures, not just ordeals and traumatic experiences. We want puzzles and tombs to be part of the main game, not just something tacked on at the end to placate us, to be able to say “oh, we added those” nonchalantly. Sure, we like secrets and additional stuff, but we want Lara to Raid Tombs, not just spend hours on hours stalking and killing enemies. We like the deep storytelling but we want deep gameplay as well, we want brainteasers to go with the high-octane action. We want to feel with the characters but we want a wide range of emotions, not just hopelessness. And to be honest, I don’t think we’ll get it with Rise.
I’d like a bit more of this type of gameplay:
As I said near the beginning, I thought the reboot was a good game. It is, it’s very good, but only if you consider it a standalone product. When you put it as part of the entire Tomb Raider franchise, it’s becomes the least favourite title for most fans.
There is one thing though: I want to be wrong. I want Rise to be everything I think it won’t be. I want them to prove me wrong and make me swallow my words. But you know what, I don’t think that’ll happen. My low expectations will at least help me enjoy the game…if I ever get to play it considering the asinine exclusivity deal.
