Tomb Raider 1 and the following describes exactly how I feel about that game and what has become of the series:
http://www.consoleob.com/trapsp.html
Words by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
Tomb Raider ain't all about the boobs. You know this, I know this, any gamer worth his salt knows this. Ignore the pixellated buttocks and painfully tight shorts- Tomb Raider is about those breathless few seconds as you leap into the dark air, praying that the ledge you stretch out your fingers for isn't just a seam in the rock face, or the rush of wonder as you crawl out of a tunnel to discover a vast, crumbling and long-forgotten city. Tomb Raider is about awe, loneliness, determination, sanctity and giant rolling boulders
Sadly, this is not the Tomb Raider memorialised in the popular imagination. Over the course of her eleven iterations, two movies and nine real-life representatives, boobs (with their action movie adjuncts guns, explosions, fast driving and sleazy banter) have come to the fore, obscuring both Lara's taciturn, hard-as-nails persona and the truly unprecedented experience of which she was the centre.
Now only the most puritanical of apologists would deny that Lara's status as the first mainstream videogame sex symbol has played its part in her success, and you can't help but feel just a teensy bit cynical when Toby Gard, her disenfranchised creator, starts to whinge about her BMI-defying attributes. If you wanted to put personality before looks, Toby, why didn't you give Lara a fifty-inch waistline and a yashmak?
But let’s get our priorities in order. Tomb Raider was a landmark game because it demonstrated, along with Super Mario 64, the cavernous possibilities of three-dimensional gaming, not because of the cavernous nature of Lara's cleavage. It was also fantastic because beneath all the HIGH OCTANE THRILLS and tedious, trivial gunplay, it was a game which expressed, with a poignancy matched only by its greatest descendant Ico, the fragility of a human being lost in an ancient, hostile landscape. Lara's very obvious femininity has a subtler role here, inspiring feelings of protectiveness and empowerment among male and female players respectively.
And thankfully, this is the Tomb Raider Crystal Dynamics remembers. Even given the relative limitations of the PSP hardware, Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a masterpiece which simultaneously advances the Legends formula and recaptures something of the spirit of the magnificent original.
