Readers, consider this is a public service announcement for (deep breath) Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Trilogy Starring Lara Croft. Do not, for the love of all that's ancient and holy, play this game with its newly-added modern control scheme. The original tank controls are by far and away the best (and only real) option for going back and experiencing Lara's OG adventures from the late 90s, and I'm not just saying that out of nostalgia. The modern controls are bad, plain and simple, and are as much an enemy to Tomb Raider's incredibly precise mode of 3D platforming as the tigers and wolves that stalk its trap-filled catacombs. They are utterly maddening, and the antithesis of everything Tomb Raider stands for. I implore you, do not go anywhere near them, for your own sake as well as Lara's.
]]>As the release of the (deep breath) Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft approaches (yes, that is its full and official Steam title) on February 14th, developers Aspyr have detailed some of the game's new features over on the PlayStation Blog, and how they've approached bringing the art, controls and effects up to date for 2023. Personally, I'm extremely pleased to see they've added a photo mode, for example, as I spent inordinate amounts of time making Lara do creepy side-eye smiles during inappropriate Shadow Of The Tomb Raider scenes. But I'm also heartened to see they've kept in the original tank controls as an optional extra, alongside a more modern control scheme to make them more approachable.
]]>Lara Croft has seen her fair share of live-action adaptations, but this time she’s raiding the small screen with a Tomb Raider TV series and a film in development at Amazon. THR reported that the Emmy-winning Fleabag writer Pheobe Waller-Bridge is set to pen (and executive produce) the upcoming show, though there's no word on who's attached with the film. THR states that Amazon is looking to "build out a connected world of Tomb Raider, with the video game, TV series and film." This sounds a little ambitious, considering that Crytal Dynamics' game is already in production, so we'll have to wait and see how the adaptations interact with the games.
]]>Sudsy business sim PowerWash Simulator is heading to the familiar, and apparently very mucky, surroundings of Tomb Raider’s Croft Manor in a free expansion releasing on January 31st. The Tomb Raider Special Pack will go live at 5pm GMT/6pm CET/9am ET, and you’ll be able to take on the Croft Manor job from the new Specials area in the main menu. You can watch Lara’s gaff being cleaned down in the trailer below.
]]>The next Tomb Raider will again be developed by Crystal Dynamics, but this time with "full support and publishing" provided by Amazon Games. It's the second game which Amazon have announced they're publishing in quick succession, after last week revealing that they would bring Bandai Namco MMO Blue Protocol to the west.
]]>Eidos Montreal, the studio behind recent Thief and Deus Ex games, say they are "now the owner of the games [we] developed, like the Deus Ex and Thief games." Likewise, Crystal Dynamics say they have taken "control" of its Tomb Raider and Legacy Of Kain games from their previous owner, Square Enix.
Which sounds like a big deal, but really both studios are just reporting a change to their terms of service and privacy notices since they were bought by Embracer Group last month.
]]>Swedish media buyer-uppers Embracer Group have completed their $300 million (£253 million) acquisition of former Square Enix studios, begun in May this year. The deal sees Crystal Dynamics, Eidol Montréal and Square Enix Montréal become part of a 12th operating group within Embracer. Square Enix Montréal will now change their name.
]]>Earlier this month, Embracer Group announced their intent to buy Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal from Square Enix in a $300 million (around £240m) deal. The acquisition includes the original IP associated with those studios, including Deus Ex, Thief, Legacy Of Kain and Tomb Raider.
In their quarterly earnings report, Embracer now say they see "great potential" in leveraging the heck out of that IP with sequels, remakes and more.
]]>Square Enix are to sell most of their Western studios and intellectual property such as Tomb Raider, Deux Ex, Thief and Legacy Of Kain to Sweden’s Embracer Group for $300 million (£240 million) in cash, it has been announced. The studios being sold to Embracer include Crystal Dynamics, Eidos-Montréal and Square Enix Montréal, but not the UK-based Square Enix Collective. This means Square will retain publishing rights to IP including Life Is Strange, Just Cause and Outriders.
]]>It would seem to safe to assume that there's always a Tomb Raider game at some stage of development, but Crystal Dynamics just confirmed it. At the tail end of today's 'State of Unreal Engine' stream, they said that they've "just" started work - and in Unreal Engine 5, obviously.
]]>There’s an old chestnut from gaming mythology - you surely know the one - about the movement in Mario’s 3D ventures being perfected by Shigeru Miyamoto at their very start with Super Mario 64. Core Design managed the same thing with the original Tomb Raider back in 1996, too. Nobody really talks about it now, while the Mario story endures. Possibly because Nintendo didn’t make umpteen identikit sequels over the following decade or splash Mario’s stretchy mug on the cover of The Face.
Really though, the Italian plumber and English graverobber were equally confident that if all their moves were available right from the start with no unlocking needed then that was enough. Both games were – are still, after a quarter of a century – the Platonic ideal of their characters. And they had bloody good swimming sections.
]]>Resting place defiler Lara Croft will be breaking into your TV screens to star in a new animated series—an announcement that is giving me déjà vu, so full as my brain is of television adaptations of gaming series. This is indeed new information though, as announced by your friends at Netflix who cannot stop tossing cash at video game adaptations.
]]>Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition was a remake of the original Tomb Raider under development for the PSP by series creators Core Design. The project was cancelled in 2006 and re-skinned as an Indiana Jones game, which was also cancelled. Now, thanks to the Internet Archive and some Tomb Raider super fans, you can play this cancelled game - sort of, a bit.
]]>Welcome to the free games website where we tell you about all the games that are free. Here's another game that is (temporarily) free: Tomb Raider. Unlike the many demos and temporarily free to try games flying about right now, Tomb Raider is actually free to keep if you add it to your Steam account this weekend. Square Enix have put a 100% discount on Lara Croft's origin story adventure from 2013 through Monday, March 24th.
]]>Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you'll be playing in the "scary" cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.
To help keep track of them all, here's a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you'll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.
]]>Tomb Raider’s reboot hit us the same year I started university, so emotions were already riding high, but as soon as I dove into Lara’s world once more I felt a little more at ease. I don’t think she felt more at ease, due to all the horrific deaths I accidentally put her through, but I really needed to hang out with an old friend during a massive change in my life, so her re-appearance was a welcome one.
]]>With Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Lara has now completed another trilogy, probably by falling through its roof and shooting it in the face. This would be the second set of three games from Crystal Dynamics (with help from other parts of Eidos), following on from the six titles created by Core (if you don't count the Game Boy ones). She's twelve main games old, twenty-ish if you count the mobile and off-brand ones, and 22 years old if you count in linear time. I'm here to argue it's time for Lara to go.
]]>I didn't much like the first in the most recent trilogy of Tomb Raider games, named with such originality and aplomb, Tomb Raider. (Square Enix's arrogance in reappropriating the original name of a series has never been a helpful move - see also Thief and Hitman, and I'd be willing to bet a fair wad of cash we'll be seeing "Final Fantasy" in the next few years.) It was a nasty, badly written torture sim which very occasionally let you do some running, jumping and shooting. Infamous for its repulsive early scene invoking sexual assault, it also made a mockery of Lara's former independence by making her subservient to a father figure, Conrad Roth, and then had a dumb-ass story packed with insulting stereotypes. But more than anything else, it absolutely resented ever letting you actually play.
]]>Lara Croft will be sticking her toffee nose into the Mayans' business to prevent their apocalypse in Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, Square Enix confirmed today as they started showing more of the game. Typical colonial invaders: thinking they know best, that they can and should solve everything. Hey, pal, that's not your apocalypse. Butt out. And don't think I didn't notice you slip that crypt jewellery into your little backpack.
Ahhh to heck with it. Here, watch Lara fighting dirty in the fancy new cinematic trailer:
]]>The next Lara Croft adventure will be Shadow Of The Tomb Raider and it's coming on September 14th, with no period of console exclusivity this time round. Square Enix have been bunging corks into their leaky reveal barge over the last couple of days, but now the teaser trailer is officially here. It contains all of your expected Lara action: she climbs a vertical cliff-face, falls down and slams into a wall, and looks at a sunset above some ancient buildings. But wait! That's no sunset at all. It's an eclipse. Everyone knows eclipses are prime ingredients in Top Archaeology. You can raid a tomb in the morning, you can raid a tomb at night. But raid one during an eclipse and you'll find some proper mysteries.
]]>Update: Big surprise! It's finally now official.
Now, keep this between us - quiet, alright? Just between you and me, I think there might be a new Tomb Raider game in the works. I also think that it might be called Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and that it might be released this September, and that it'll feature scenes a lot like the completely-unrelated-we-assure-you image you see above.
I have all these wild hunches because Square Enix's PR seems to have sprung all of the leaks, spilling juicy game info all over the place up to and including shakey-cam footage of the teaser trailer, along with the release date. So much for a dramatic reveal, eh?
]]>With a new Tomb Raider film about to hit theaters, the world is ripe for some Lara Croft nostalgia. Here to fill that void we have some delightful remaster news: the first three Tomb Raider games are getting made-up really pretty, and they'll be free for gamers who own the originals. The reason why, however, might surprise you.
]]>I know! Another sequel to a ludicrously long-running and successful game franchise! What surprises this life holds.
Unfortunately, "a new Tomb Raider" is quite literally all publisher Square Enix are saying right now, outside of promising we'll hear more soon. Still, it's nice to have forgone conclusions confirmed, innit?
]]>The best moment in cinematic history is, of course, any time a character says the title of the movie they're in. This is the main reason I am excited for a Tomb Raider movie. At some point, surely someone will say in reverent tones "You're... the Tomb Raider".
Myself, I'm hoping Lara will rebuff accusations of grave robbery with "Please, my father was the Grave Robber. Call me the Tomb Raider."
Oh, right, yes, the 'news': Warner Bros. have shared the first snaps of their movie based loosely on the gritty 2013 reboot, along with a blurb hinting at a "tomb raider" shoutout.
]]>A splurdge of DLC for Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site] has just come out, which means you can now pop back to a decrepit Croft Manor, team up for co-op wilderness endurance, or battle the tough ‘Extreme Survivor’ difficulty mode. But most importantly, you can now control famous archaeologist and murderer Lara Croft the way she was meant to be played – as a conglomeration of poorly-rendered triangles. Yes, Pointy Lara is back. She is as terrifying as always.
]]>Crystal Dynamics recently welcomed Ian Milham to their team. While no new Tomb Raider game is announced yet, he'll be assuming the role of game director for the series. Don't worry, he's got the experience to back it up. Milham has been in the business for twenty years, including time as an environment artist, the art director for the Dead Space games, and the creative director of Battlefields 4 and Hardline.
]]>If you donate $1 or more to GameChanger between now and April 5th, you'll receive a digital copy of 2013's Tomb Raider reboot. That's while supplies last, at any rate, and there's no indication of how many supplies are available.
The donations will contribute toward a very good cause. GameChanger will use funds to fulfill its "mission of improving the lives of children facing life-threatening illnesses through gaming". That includes financial support for families and carers as well as gaming events and gifts.
]]>I wanted to play Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site] more than I realised I did. It's nice to not have yet another BrawnMan in the middle of my screen, sure, but for me it's the idea of vaguely puzzley, vaguely sandboxy adventures in a not-too-fantastical wilderness which appeals.
Enthused by Adam's review, I picked up the PC version, but it wasn't long before I was hissing through my teeth at the bad balance of impossible escapes from death, relentlessly dour and earnest tone, mechanically-delivered dialogue and preposterous animal-massacre-based-crafting (because, once again, Lara had gone on an incredibly dangerous adventure without packing anything more than a glowstick and the first option you get if you type 'bow and arrow' into Amazon then sort by Price: Low To High). Fortunately, the Endurance Mode DLC turned out to be game I wanted.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
It's probably the case that most people's favourite Tomb Raider is the first one they played. Unless it was Angel Of Darkness. Mine was Tomb Raider II, so it's always the one I think of the most fondly.
]]>Crystal Dynamics have released an alternate playthrough of Rise of the Tomb Raider's [official site] 'Advancing Storm' demo to showcase Lara's stealth possibilities. This is probably because even though they said stealth was entirely possible that bit got lost when the main message of the original video turned into "GUNS and then THROAT SLITTING and then EXPLODING BARRELS and then SHOTGUN YOU IN THE FACE".
Or perhaps the stealth message went astray during the bit where they explained [at 3.13 in this video] that you could set up a poison bomb in someone's corpse and the beeping would lure an AI over and then the poisonbombcorpse would explode. Who knows.
]]>Once a week most weeks, team RPS gathers, eyes itself warily across the table then debates. Sometimes it's about SCANDAL, like slow-motion Batman or No Man's Sky hype, other times it's about perennials, like best levels ever or if Early Access means the end times.
This week, we're discussing the pitfalls and merits of platform exclusives, in the wake of Everybody's Gone To The Rapture being PS4-only, despite its devs making their name with the PC-only Dear Esther. In recent months similar has happened with Tomb Raider, and of course there's a long history of this sort of thing, from your Marios to your Halos. Is this right? Is it sensible? And what about the other side of the coin, with XCOM 2 being PC-only? Not so grumbly then, are we? Let's see if we can figure this one out, eh?
]]>Just as Dark Knight Rises was mostly a tale of falling down in order to get back up again, Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site] will require Lara Croft to hit the ground hard before she even considers doing any sort of upward movement. A new 13 minute video from Gamescom sees her Jonesing around, talking about her dad's research, stumbling, crashing, dodging bullets and - SHOCK OF SHOCKS - raiding a tomb.
]]>Fail Forward is a series of videos all about the bits of games which don’t quite work and why. In this episode, Marsh Davies discusses Tomb Raider [official site], evil wizards, falling off things and the forthcoming demise of the cinematic shooter.
]]>Remember how Square Enix were fannying about with Rise of the Tomb Raider [official site], playing tedious word games and falling silent to pretend that their neck-impaling sequel would be an Xbox exclusive when clearly it wouldn't? You'll never guess what: it is coming to PC after all!
Well, the word games aren't quite over - it may or may not be exclusive to Windows 10 (more below). But yes, "early 2016" is when it'll come our way. As I've been dutifully ignoring the game until Squeenix stopped playing around, I suppose now's the time for me to flood you with details and gameplay trailers.
]]>Everything is so bloody stupid. In a world where major publishers like THQ can fold, and even something of the scale of Activision-Blizzard couldn't find a buyer other than itself, you'd imagine Square Enix wouldn't be doing absolutely everything in their power to reach as few customers as possible. But the company that recently suffered financial woes, and complained the first Tomb Raider didn't sell enough copies, are doing exactly that. Rise Of The Tomb Raider is the sequel to the morbidly overrated Tomb Raider reboot and was previously revealed as an Xbox "exclusive" release, ensuring the vast majority of its potential sales are instantly removed. And now they're tying up their marketing with in-store promotional brochure, Game Informer.
]]>It's hard to believe that Lara Croft's been cavorting around stealing priceless artefacts and killing endangered animals for nearly 20 years. But rather more amazing is that she's been doing it in fan-made levels since November 2000's Tomb Raider Chronicles PC release, which gave anyone with the inclination the tools – in the form of an official level editor – required to send her on new adventures.
The dedicated ladies and gents of the Tomb Raider fan community have been squeezing life out of that decrepit old blocky Tomb Raider engine for 14 years, and while they've slowed down a bit in recent times, they're showing no signs of stopping.
Dutch schoolteacher Titia "Titak" Drenth has been there from the beginning. "I thought it would be fabulous to be able to make my own worlds for Lara to run around in," she says of her initial motivations. Fabulous indeed. Titak's levels take Lara to the Himalayas, American Wild West, the world of Stargate, and the jungles of Cambodia, among other places, with rave reception from the community at the Tomb Raider Forums and trle.net on nearly all of them.
]]>Four years after the surprise twist in the Tomb Raider franchise that was Lara Croft And The Guardian Of The Light, Crystal Dynamics have punctuated the releases of their reinvented Lara with its sequel, Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris. The review code we received did not yet have multiplayer switched on, so here's wot I thought of playing it through on my own.
]]>Alec wrote about some of his favourite gaming moments last week and I was inspired to put together something similar. Ever the structuralist, I decided that I'd string my favourite moments across a fictional interpretation of an actual day. Here is one of many days in my life, from a breakfast of champions to the blurred bottles at the heart of Saturday night.
]]>Valve's Team Fortress 2 team are running a competition whereby the entire Tomb Raider franchise is fair game for TF2 Workshop content creation. Their official blog post on the matter goes straight for "the heavy in short shorts" at their first example of the contest's potential*. But why on earth would you want to help Valve and Square promote a game for free? Let's take a look at the rules.
]]>A rather strange addition to Steam's Early Access list popped up over the weekend - the Eidos Anthology. Eidos, which sort of exists inside the maw of Square Enix, is no slouch when it comes to noteworthy games, and Eidos Montreal recently picked up a Golden Joystick for Best Hair or similar. An anthology of their games is quite the thing.
In a collection of quite enormous proportions, Square are selling 34 games (including all the Tomb Raiders, all the Thiefs, all the Deus Exes) and about forty-nine billion DLC packs at just over half the price of buying them individually. That price, however, is £160. Cor.
]]>When Square Enix announced Rise of the Tomb Raider at E3, they were careful not to mention platforms. The natural assumption was that they were wooing Microsoft and Sony over rights to call it "exclusive" to their console for a few months, but a PC release was a given, right? So I shrugged today at talk during Microsoft's big Gamescom press event that Tomb Raider 11 is coming "exclusively on Xbox", thinking that simply meant MS had given Squeenix an invitation to its birthday party, £2, and a Sherbet Dip Dab to ignore Sony at school for a term.
No, they really do mean Rise of the Tomb Raider won't be released on PC. Or so they say. Hmm!
]]>Well lah-di-dah, look at Lady Croft, hob-nobbing with ancient Egyptian gods. Don't Horus and Isis know what she gets up to at weekends? She stole that dinner set too, you know. You can still see the bloodstains. I can't imagine why they're keeping company with her. For all I know gods are fond of that blood and murder, though. Dreadful heathens. I tell you Alice dear, I wanted them to turn down my invitation to afternoon tea.
Deary me, sorry readers. I popped out the room to make a cuppa before tackling the announcement of Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris and my grandmother Alice (it's a family name) starts trying to send me an e-mail about a video game as if the characters and events contained within were real ha ha grandmother what a hackneyed literary device.
]]>The sequel to Tomb Raider: The Reboot has a title and a trailer. The title really is Rise Of The Tomb Raider, which I suppose is better than Raid Of The Tomb Riser, or High Rise Raider, in which Croft and some other posh sorts wage violent class warfare in a south London estate. In the actual sequel, Lara has been left so emotionally damaged by her experiences on the gusty island of the first game that she has to wear a hoodie. And see a therapist who reminds me of a non-specific Fox News anchor.
]]>While a sequel to this year's Tomb Raider hasn't officially been announced, it's obviously inevitable despite rumours of "mediocre" sales (ie. Square's expectations were ludicrously high). And it seems the gap between the two games will be bridged by a comickybook.
]]>Recently, we had the wonderful fortune to post GDC's magnificent #1ReasonToBe panel in full. It's a powerfully eye-opening thing - regardless of which "side" of the equality "debate" you fall on - and you should absolutely, definitely give it a watch if you haven't already. One person, however, was missing from its lineup: industry writing vet Rhianna Pratchett, who - in addition to whipping up words for the likes of Tomb Raider, Overlord, Mirror's Edge, and heaps more - sorta, you know, created the #1ReasonToBe hashtag in the first place. She wasn't able to make it out due to scheduling conflicts, but this is why they invented the Internet: so we could do anything from anywhere at any time. Thus, we bring you Pratchett's #1Reason - not to mention her viewpoints on why equality's very different from 'pinking' games, why the industry's failing to attract female talent, what controversies surrounding Tomb Raider taught her, and how we can ultimately make games better for everyone.
]]>The only other Tomb Raider game I've ever played was the first one, which I found alternately brilliant and annoying. Oh, and I reviewed The Angel of Darkness for a magazine, but that doesn't count. This year's reboot, Tomb Raider, was my first experience of Crystal Dynamics' work with Lara Croft, so I was a relative blank slate in terms of expectations. Perhaps that's why I had a better time with it than John did - there wasn't anything I knew to miss or call for, any pre-existing associations to be endorsed or threatened. That didn't stop me from howling in misery at all the quicktime events and the often bobbins plot, of course, but there's an awful lot in there I really dug.
]]>It's a bad day for Square Enix, latter-day publisher of Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deus Ex and Thief, as well as those dreary Final Fantasy things. Citing "slow sales of major console games" as well as uninspiring business from its arcade machine arm, it's admitted that its recent monies "substantially fall below its plan" and its president Yoichi Wada has fallen on his sword as a result.
]]>It’s about five to seven on a Wednesday night and I meant to call my mum about an hour ago to tell her that I am a failure of a woman because I am twenty seven and sleeping on a beanbag in a loft, but instead what I did was look in the back of the fridge for dinner, which turns out to be a giant pot of Tesco’s Finest pea soup with ham in. I dump the pot of soup on a table and then have a slight heart in mouth moment - I can’t call my mum or eat soup I am interviewing Rhianna Pratchett and she is the Lara Croft of writing Tomb Raiders.
]]>Although I was disappointed with the new Tomb Raider, there's no question that the game really shone when it was offering you a tomb to explore, packed with puzzles to enjoy. In those moments it remembered the freedom the previous Crystal Dynamics games had offered, let you loose to solve for yourself, rather than get dragged down through its barely-linked cutscenes. That there were only seven of them (this number varying, horrendously, based upon from which shop you bought the game) was a massive shame. But DLC can fix that, right? Wrong. Very sadly, CD have said they've no intention of expanding the single-player game with DLC packs, instead focusing on the multiplayer.
]]>I have pulled on boots and a hat, grabbed my pistols from the drawing room, and I've attempted to plait my hair but my fingers got all tangled up and oh how do you do these things anyway you need like six hands ugh.
]]>Tomb Raider is out, and I've played the single player to the very end. How does Lara fare in this reboot of one of gaming's most famous series? Here's wot I think:
]]>I'm not sure how amazeballs this really is in practice, as PC Tomb Raider code is being witheld until the end of the week because reasons, but I dig the concept. Game hair's not great, by and large - some engines certainly do OK by it, but the hair-helmet approach very much remains the norm. AMD's come up with some tech to try and make locks more lustrous. Instead of taking two anti-aliasing systems into the shower, they've devised TressFX (oof), intended to make hair flow and change more convincingly. This will apparently first be seen in the impending Tomb Raider re-reboot, which has "the world’s first real-time hair rendering technology in a playable game", it says here.
]]>That game of verbal Twister gone horribly, horribly wrong up there? I'm pretty sure it's some kind of an attempt at combining the words "Rambo" and "bow [and arrow]" - not, say, "Rambo" and "rainbow," which I immediately suspected upon reading it. But then, I also wrote it, so I'm pretty sure I understand the author's intent more than most. At any rate, that brain-and-bone-spattering word pileup occurred because of Tomb Raider's combat, which is basically Rambo, but even bow-er. Which is kind of wild, because Rambo already had a bow to begin with. But yes, Lara sneaks and turns baddies into pincushions and slays infinity men on her "first step to becoming a seasoned adventurer." They really make you earn that title, huh?
]]>Hey, do you want to see over eleven (count 'em!) minutes of the new and handsome Tomb Raider game? C'mon now, it's got drama, hiding, arrowing, shouting, and nearly some drowning. It's all-action in Miss Croft's part of the world. And what part of the world is that? Well, it's not the dismal sub-rural periphery of Bristol, I can tell you that.
The game arrives on the 5th of March. Our reviewing temple's candles are being lit, and the altar furnished.
]]>Lara Croft is Batman! Maybe. At the very least, she seems to have been watching the caped crusader carefully, although her study of his Arkham adventures doesn't extend to mimicking Wayne's restraint. When she's firing ziplines across chasms or attaching rope arrows to destructible scenery to create new routes, she'd look right at home in Rocksteady's Gotham, but then she shoots a deer in the face at point blank range, or sneaks up on a villain and perforates him unto dying. Batman would just break every limb in sight and then move on. The latest Tomb Raider 'Survival Guide' builds up to the reveal of an 'exploration system' that you may recognise from elsewhere. It's called 'fast travel'.
]]>Somewhat surprisingly (by which I mean completely unsurprisingly, given the era in which we live), Tomb Raider has multiplayer. Naturally, this has been a source of great outrage among even the least fly-harming-est of gamers, as it's a distinct disruption of The Natural Order. Granted, it does have two things working in its favor: 1) Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light added co-op multi to pretty great effect and 2) the mode's an entirely separate, presumably cybernetic leg of the game being attached by none other than Deus Ex: Human Revolution developer Eidos Montreal. Here, now, brown cow, is a video of some finely mustachioed men introducing it to the star of spy dramadey Chuck for some reason.
]]>June 2003: a remote jungle clearing outside Moshi, Tanzania. I am seventeen. It is sometime after midnight.
My skin is sticky with pesticide and sweat. In the treacle dark, my friend Rachael’s face presses hot against my shoulder. The hiss of the jungle soars into the sky in a cacophonous, unbearable symphony.
I need to pee.
]]>I got lost in a forest once. Admittedly, there weren't any horrific plane wrecks or crazy gibberish-screaming cultists, but I learned a lot. For instance, never go anywhere that's not your own bedroom without some form of map, and also poison ivy is the absolute worst. But presumably, I gained some kind of applicable skill from that experience. According to Tomb Raider, however, the reason I haven't figured it out yet is that I need to go sit at a camp fire and absorb its wisdom-imparting fumes. That's the base camp system in a nutshell, and - in addition to making perfect sense - it provides Lara with quite a nice range of options in her bid to make it off the island in one piece. Raid the tombs beneath the break - coated in cobwebs and haunted by the ghostly echoes of pun threads long since passed - to see a video of it in action.
]]>Survival can take on many shapes and forms. Thus far, for instance, Tomb Raider's demonstrated it through climbing, hunting, resting, and fleeing from deranged cultists - so, you know, the usual stuff. But this is an ultra-budget prequel to a series that once featured DINO-BATTLES. In other words, it's not a slow-paced sink-or-swim sim. Lara has to acquire skills and character traits that will eventually allow her to - again, let me emphasize this - bring down a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Those abilities, it turns out, aren't often found in the realm of possibility. So then, here's Lara running, gunning, hacking, slashing, and just generally trying to cope with a world in which the walls, ground, and most aircraft are made entirely of light-breeze-sensitive explosives.
]]>Over the last few years we've seen the pre-order become a central aspect of gaming. Heavily relied upon by both major publishers and the smallest indies, more people than ever are paying for their games long before they're even finished. And with Kickstarter and its crowd-funding sisters, the matter's become even more complex and nuanced. Shops tend to so massively over-stock on major console releases that there's no real need to bagsy a copy, while PC games are of course infinitely available via digital channels. And yet pre-ordering games is a bigger thing than ever before. Why's that, eh?
Time was you could loudly declare yourself for or against the concept - now it's a subject that requires a little more thought. I've given it some below.
]]>Tomb Raider's demo made me realize something: it'd be a stretch to call what we do in games killing. I mean, yeah, we're probably the only medium that can (and frequently does) tout multiple physics systems specifically capable of calculating the way bullet-perforated brain bits dance majestically through the air. But really, all we're doing is knocking down hyper-detailed action figures. We pull the trigger or aim the bow or bury the shank in a fertile bed of neckflesh, and they go down. Then we move on to the next faceless thug, rinse our knives, and repeat.
The Tomb Raider scene I sat in on during E3 really struck me because it didn't let Lara cut people (or animals) down and then continue gleefully on her way. Death is messy and scary and awful. While the Nathan Drakes and Persian Princes of the world slay 300 people and then sweep corpses under a rug with a dumb joke, Lara – intentionally or not – sticks around for her victims' final moments. I guess what I'm saying is, I sympathized with an irredeemable, cold-blooded murderer and, er, some random deer. They died scared and spittle-soaked and alone, and I really didn't feel good about that.
]]>One of the most striking scenes of yesterday's E3 press conference gauntlet didn't take place on a stage or a screen. It wasn't rehearsed or pre-planned, and it most certainly wasn't expected. I sat in a jam-packed arena-sized auditorium and watched a game demo unfold on a screen bigger than my hometown. OK, that wasn't the surprising part. I'd been doing that all day. This one, though, came to a rather abrupt halt when - mere inches away from the camera - a man's head erupted into a volcano of hyper-detailed gore after a point-blank shotgun blast. And then: deafening applause from hundreds of people.
This was the blaring exclamation point on the end of a day of gleefully grotesque neck-shanking, leg-severing, and - of course - man-shooting. I can honestly think of maybe five games - in four multiple-hour press conferences - that didn't feature some sort of lovingly rendered death-dealing mechanic. And oh how show-goers cheered. So then, have we all become brainless barbarians with a lust for blood bordering on fetishistic? Hardly. That'd be a simple black-or-white (or, I suppose, red) answer, and this issue's a whole lot messier than that.
]]>Tomb Raider's latest resurrection is scheduled for March 5, 2013. So there's a while to wait, but it could be worth that extra six months wait, if the latest trailer is anything to go by. There's some spectacular scenery and ugly violence. Oof, yes, it's all looking a bit Uncharted to me. Go take a look.
]]>Obviously by now, everyone is applying what I assume is known as the Walker Principle, which states whatever first release date is given for a major game is to be ignored. So no one will be in the least surprised, let alone disappointed, to learn that Tomb Raider now won't be with us until 2013.
]]>Very much interested to find out more about the forthcoming Tomb Raider reboot, we sent intrepid, debonair reporter Dan Griliopoulos to interview the game's global brand manager, Karl Stewart. He tells us about the motivation for reinventing Lara, the reasons for quicktime events, and Lara's bookish ways.
]]>Sorry good readers, I have no news about that new Tomb Raider game. I was hoping to share some useful information about the game, but all I have is a 12 minute making of behind the scenes of the CGI trailer. Wait, what?
]]>The game I was most interested to see this year was Tomb Raider. Of everything on show, this was the one I was most intrigued by, based on Crystal Dynamics' stellar record with the license so far, and the dark, gloomy tone that's promised. Potential levels high. Which means I feel strange coming away from the demo a lot more concerned. Mostly by quick time events.
]]>In case you missed it - as part of my oh-so-insightful and not at all chaotic liveblog of the heavily staged, saccharine pantomime that was yesterday's Microsoft pre-E3 conference - here's a fair-sized chunk of proper in-game footage of the latest Tomb Raider reboot. We've only seen screenshots and pre-rendered stuff so far, right? Well, here's how nu-Lara plays.
Warning: shirt.
]]>Alright. Okay. I'm not sure there's any conceivable way that Crystal Dynamics' forthcoming reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise could be half as arresting and gorgeous as this trailer. Tell you what, though. I'm looking forward to seeing them try.
]]>Yes! You heard right. These are the only images from the forthcoming Tomb Raider reboot to be posted here on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, today. Never before seen in full on our website, you won't see us posting these images anywhere else. If we do, we'll sue us.
]]>Update: The cropped Tomb Raider images illustrating this article - which was essentially a long-winded link to Game Informer's site - have been removed. This is because Game Informer - after threatening our readers on Twitter - sent us a legal threat of our very own. A slightly ironic reaction bearing in mind the content of the original post, which is below.
]]>The first few scraps of information about the new Tomb Raider, officially revealed yesterday, are beginning to appear. NeoGAF have been plundering the unreleased Game Informer article by their own nefarious methods, and we learn a few interesting morsels. Like, for instance, Lara is to be 21 in the new game. Keys to the tomb. And deaths are to be brutal. Erk. It's sounding like this is going to be part Tomb Raider, part Survivor, and I'm very intrigued. More bits and pieces below.
]]>One of my favourite things of recent years has been the standard of Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider games. While there's no doubt there's Lara fatigue, it's inappropriate when they're some of the finest action platform/shooters around. So it's with a happy face that I greet the news that the next game from the team is a complete reboot of the series, simply called Tomb Raider. The announcement comes via the cover of the next Game Informer, along with a press release. Details below.
]]>The next Tomb Raider game won't be a Tomb Raider game. Rather, it's called simply Lara Croft and The Guardian Of Light, it's to be download only, and it looks to be an arcadesome, isometric action-platformer. Albeit one with lots of tomb-raiding. Wuh?
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