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So I usually quit tomb raider games after about 30 minutes. I'm enjoying the reboot a lot.

The graphics are amazing, it has a decent story, its basically Batman: Lara Croft. Only with more scripting/movie bits.

Plus! They are rebooting Thief!!

its pre-loaded, when i get home tonight i'm going to get my almost getting raped on! 

that doesn't read the way its said...

I got bored with the original, but this reboot is pretty interesting. Downloading now.

So how do the allegations of a sexist twist* with a 'fragile Laura you want to Protect' actually play out vs the hype 6 months ago?


*Because super-boobed tank-top-and-short-short-wearing gun-toting teenage fantasy wasn't sexist.

The Clueless Gamer plays Tomb Raider video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCe8-1dbXZc) is what sold me on trying this game.   :awesome_for_real:

all death reels

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sWrSUmhn-Xs

9/10  :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

Yikes.

warning: al gore

What the hell??

Not sure if it's just something funky with my PC, but navigating through the menu-system for the "campfire"-mode where you upgrade your skills and/or equipment is making me nauseous. Stuff is blinking, flashing, scrolling in all directions (looks intended and not like graphical glitches or anything like that.)

I think some of those death reels were inspired by resident evil 4...  is it just me, or were ALOT of those QTE based?

u mean all of them?  :why_so_serious:

Friend of mine complained about CTDs all the time, apparently it's a problem with nvidia's drivers.

How similar is it to the 2D cartoony game from the 80s Dragon's Lair?  Are you always reacting to the story to save Lara or are there more traditional adventure aspects as well?

Conan O'Brien plays Tomb Raider: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCe8-1dbXZc

I'm actually really interested in this.

The videos I've seen seem to have a lot of quick time events. Doesn't look very fun to me.

There are a lot in the beginning. Then one every now and then.  I was not a huge fan of "hit button x at right time"  if you liked Batman, you'll like this.

Trees are apparently very pointy in that game.

Did I see an achievement for beating the game, Furi?

Because wow. Short.

Yea. No backtracking or repeating areas, or multi-tiered puzzles and me staying awake until 4 playing it the first night makes for short game. I'm hoping they add some dlc.

So far its fun.  QTE's are better than most because they are either the furious mashing two keys variety or hitting a key at the right time (so you aren't waiting for the QTE to come up, you see it come up and wait for the circle to align) Furi, I'm at the:

Spoiler

I figure i'm probably about 1/3 through??  So far it feels like a cross between resident evil, uncharted and farcry3 but if i was to compare farcry3 and this game I'd say tomb raider does the whole survival + storyline thing much better.  lack of sandbox and scripted plot has its pros and cons, the pro is you aren't whorfing it across the island looking for a radio tower or cassowary's before you can move to the next mission, the con is that you're options in enlisting local help, wildlife, multiple different stealth options are limited. 


tl;dr - rail based semi-exploration of uncharted,  farcry 3 ish island theme, some tense moments and QTE's like resident evil makes for a nice game.  Lara's juggs are a nicely rendered (probably) C-cup!

No shower scene, but we can expect Gary's Mod to fix that.  :grin:

"The uploader has not made this video available to your country"

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Eventually found it, is this a worth getting eventually, or can I just watch the all death scenes video to get the general gist of what will be happening to me 90% of the time?

I'm only reading this because someone said "reboot Thief", which will suck but I'll keep an eye on it anyway.

If this is like Batman, I'll like it.

I thought we were going to be getting THI4F -- I mean, Thief 4. Is that a reboot now or something?

I think it's a reboot, so I'm sure Garret is gonna get ruined pretty hard.

Next gen consoles, so don't hold your breath.

So apparently Nvidia owners are getting a taste of AMD owner's usual grief and not appreciating it in the slightest.

No problems here so far. Game is fun so far though kinda rails-y (though I'm only a couple hours in and I understand the opening sequence is like that). Only issue I had was that campfire UI. Not the nausea Xuri is feeling, just that it's not very intuitive. I feel like they didn't get a chance to explain as much of the UI as they would have liked. Some are very straightforward while other areas are guesswork.

That first sequence escaping the place there's a rock and something you need to kick. Took me six QTE events tries before I finally saw the line of text explaining "hit F to kick". It was so obvious I almost don't think it appeared the first five times.

Only story issue I've had so far is the contrast between kickass/bow-arrow/eating-deer-guts Lara and the "come save me Mario I'm just a helpless princess" dialog with one of her crew.

I liked the bit where she is very upset after killing her first bad-guy and then five seconds later goes "Ah, good to get that out of my system" and starts headshotting (depending on your aim) and stealth-killing people in huge numbers without comment.  :awesome_for_real:

Heh yea she got over that right quick.

With a few of ya saying how short the game was, I'm taking it real slow. Question though: I haven't at all been hard up for food. Does this come into play at all?

I'm pretty sure it's just a "tutorial gimmick" for using the bow/"salvaging". At least, the topic of food hasn't come up again after that for me.

(http://i.imgur.com/EoV0TKy.png)

There are just way too many things in this picture that fucking piss me off.

Is that real? I saw arrow to the knee and just assumed it was a bad Skyrim joke.

It's real.

(http://i.imgur.com/QnmlDfY.jpg)

I'm taking my time and it's very enjoyable.  Yes some stuff is silly(seriously were there cargo planes filled with skulls that crashed?)  but tomb raider is pulp adventure fantasy at its core and nowhere is it going wrong in that respect. 

The locals are beautiful, the gameplay is smooth and I love a good indiana jones mystical journey.

If I had one criticism it would be the side tombs being so small. Beautiful as they can be, they are essentially one room puzzles.

Yeah that bothered me a bit as well. You arrive in those tombs, then you spend maybe a couple of minutes figuring out how the one puzzle that is there works - then you open one chest and you're done. :/ On the other hand, the shortness of them do tend to reduce them from "a chore" to "might as well do it while I'm here" - as you get nothing else from doing them other than more achievement points or % of the game completed, or whatnot.

PC patch is out.

the whole one-room puzzle thing has its pro's and con's.  I'm with Xuri, they don't feel like a chore, but sometimes I want more of them.  Either slightly longer or more of them would be fine.

I agree. For being called Tomb Raider, there's very few tombs and very little raiding. Doesn't bother me too much though.

I'm not sure I see the parallels to Arkham Asylum that some have said though. Feels a bit more like Dishonored with some ME-style cover/target shooting mixed in.

I feel like a fucking retard when doing QTEs and this game abounds with them. If the intention is for it to be more immersive, it's just wholly misguided. I cringe at the stupidity of them. SUDDENLY: MINI-GAME! BET YOU DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING!

No, I didn't, you smug asshole, I expected to be able to use my fucking gun, not have a directed epileptic seizure. You keep changing the goddamn rules of the game as it suits you like you were a five year old. If you set up a scene of suspense, I want to feel rewarded for preparing properly (i.e. taking out my gun), not have random instructions rammed into my face. If I can't read what's going to happen, there's no payoff to investing in the scene. I'm just going to fail a QTE, reload, pass the QTE, and move on. It's no better than what Doom 3 did with its goddamn monster-in-the-closet kind of gameplay.

/vent

You must really fucking hate wario ware.

I don't have a problem with the QTEs except for those (thankfully few) occasions when the inputs didn't show up at all. They were really annoying in the first few zones, but either I've gotten used to them now near the end, or they taper off.

So let me get this straight, teenage Lara Croft almost gets felt up by some sleazy crook, she kills him resisting, and suddenly turns into a major badass and kills her way through the rest of the game?

Am I getting the gist of it?

Not really, that one scene is maybe two seconds long and not rapey as people are want to think.  More like she gets beat the fuck up, shoots a guy in the face and gets over it really quick.

Defiantly not as rapey as the death scene where she fails to kick off a bad guy and he sticks his Pick into her.

Pick. Its a mining tool, not a typo. You see.

With the power of feminism, anything is possible.

What's funny is the game writer is the daughter of Terry Pratchett.

The revelation of which seemed to chill everyone the fuck out.

Proving once again that people are hypocritical fucking over reacting douchebags of the highest order.

Which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, ever.

Well you can't really blame people like Gail Simone for going "Wow, that's kind of rapey-looking and uncomfortable" when essentially all the early PR for the game was a lot of talking heads doing their damnedest to make it look rapey and uncomfortable.

And what makes that require any more press coverage or attention than the times men have been put in a vaguely similar position in videogames?

You know the part that bothered my girlfriend the most? It wasn't creepy dude, it was vertigo she got from all the high up scenes.

I didn't follow the PR for the game beyond establishing "this looks fun" so I don't know all the material that was published, but there's ONE, ONE as mentioned very short sequence early in the game which could be construed as sexually abusive. Even then it seems to me that he caresses her to make her uncomfortable rather than because he gets off on it. You're back to brutal, visceral, hand-to-hand murder in like five seconds. I don't think anyone gets that close to her again for the rest of the game, other than when smashing her head to pieces in gruesome close-ups.

Yeah, I'm emphasizing something.

It's all in your head.

Yeah. How could anyone accuse a Lara Croft game of being in any way sexist or objectifying women. What was everyone thinking.

That wasn't what I was trying to say. That's really a different discussion, aswell. I was arguing against the notion that it's somehow presented as a rape fantasy or glorifies being a rapist asshole. Was there any PR material that gave off the vibe that she actually really enjoys it? Now that would bother me.

Yeah, it's strong imagery. That's why it ended up in a trailer and everything.

When has a male lead character been promoted as almost getting raped (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-06-13-lara-croft-attempted-rape-will-make-tomb-raider-players-want-to-protect-her) in his game? And that in order to make him strong and relateable as a character, the game narrative focuses on building him up just to break him down again?

Strawman. Tomb raider was not promoted as her 'almost getting raped' in fact nothing even close to that happens. She gets broken down physically and emotionally as do many heroes in novels and people confused that with somehow her being a victim.  We never consider people like Frodo a victim even though by the end he's gotten pretty fucked up and it's sort of similar to that.

In short, one half second of lecherous grab does not a rape scene make.

True. But the fact that the guy did that is indicative of his intentions. And the shock/realization of that is enough to make someone lash out/resist. And the guy ended up dead.

What's your point? Are you saying that having any hint of abuse towards a female hero is bad?

The premise of the game is that you're in the "not" bermuda triangle and ships have been wrecked there for centuries, so thousands of people have found their way to the island.  The game doesn't gives only a passing mention of what happened to the women and children, neither of which is sexual.  The game actively shies away from such uncomfortable things which would almost certainly happen in real life.

So you really get with tomb raider completely sanitized game where graphic gore and violence is acceptable in the extreme and any uncomfortable topic is brushed over so fast it makes your head spin.

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS AGAIN ?!

It came out of an interview with the game's executive producer. He was the one who used the "attempted rape" terminology as part of how much they were going to pile on top of Croft, which indicated the lecherous grab was the potential start of something else. And then the early preview was all about Lara Croft getting beaten up.

Also, it's nearly only the female characters that get strength raped / sexually assaulted into them. Male heroes who suffer their way to strength usually do so through surviving physical tests (which may include beatings and torture). (They generally don't get 'raped' appended to their character history because (at least in part) a male who's raped is perceived to be weakened - he couldn't even fight off his attackers.)

So while it may not have made up much of the released game, it was part of the E3 2012 promotion. The reaction may have led to other things being downplayed before release; it certainly led to the involvement of Rhianna Pratchett being played up a lot more.

Actually, apparently there was a male on male rape in far cry 3, and one of the endings in far cry 3 involves Citra drugging the player, tying the player up and fucking the player. And then killing the player. vOv

But Far Cry 3 didn't count because it was a male character being put in that position and therefore it didn't merit a blogstorm.  Therefore there are no examples of male characters being put in that position, since only examples which are notable by virtue of having generated blogstorms are worth discussing.   Therefore video games are sexist.  QED.

So, to change the subject to the subject of the thread:

It's not much of a game, but it's a really spectacular interactive movie. Like, really. Even on hard it's really rather easy and the platforming doesn't require much dexterity. The cover-based shooting is meh and formulaic, almost entirely comprised of arena-type encounters. The QTEs are aggravating (as you noticed :-P) in the early game but disappear almost entirely to be replaced by either combat or actual platforming sequences.

I have to say Luddington did a really good job as Lara. I didn't groan and try to skip past every time she opened her mouth, as is par for game voice-over. But boy, recording must have been harsh on her throat with all that screaming.

I'd give it a C+ for gameplay, an A for presentation.

Spoilering this ENTIRE THING so people just go "oh, that Sjofn, what a feminazi!" and either read it or completely ignore it and talk about the actual game! I wrote it, god dammit, so I'm posting it!

I agree with Ironwood.

Is it time for a blazing saddles quote yet?

(http://i.imgur.com/vkutpju.png)

That is interestingly sad.

Hell no. Don't get me wrong. Shit happens IRL, and realism is good in fiction.

I think having a protagonist overcome a trauma or adversity that people actually go through in real life makes them inspirational.

One particular example I learned when watching one of the Full Metal Alchemist movies, I was watching the commentary and Vic Mignogna(Edward Elric) was on, he talked about how he met a girl who said she was like Edward and watching FMA helped her. Vic said he thought she wasn't making any sense until she started crying and showed him that she had a prosthetic leg. She had lost her leg in an accident and watching a show with a main character who overcame the same handicap as her helped her.

The way Tomb Raider spun it is more like Hollywood drama. She's taken captive by a group of criminals, one guy kills her friend, acts a little skeevy, she kills him in self defense, and suddenly she's dropping bodies like the frickin' Terminator.

Not really - as Sjofn pointed out, the Far Cry male rape bit is quite a while into the game and it wasn't used as a promotional tool to show how adult FC3 was. It also didn't happen to the player character, but the threat was made.

A number of people did post articles about it, but it was part of the game that fell into spoilers territory, not trailers territory like it did for Tomb Raider. If FC3 had more widely promoted that part of the game, I'm sure there would have been a bigger reaction.

I'd postulate that would happen just because it's sex, with actual uncovered, uncensored and moving boobs, and not because the player got drugged beforehand or killed right afterwards.

I covered that a bit in my spoiler.  :oh_i_see:

I can expand on it, though!  :why_so_serious:


Basically, if you're going to get annoyed at anyone for the kerfuffle, get annoyed at their marketing department. Oh, and that douche who was like "sexual assault is awesome because it will make you want to protect the female lead you could not possibly otherwise identify with." He definitely did not help at all.

(I'm done, I promise.)

 :facepalm:

Yes.  Please.

I'm a fan of this game play. The combat is of course unrealistic, from going schoolgirl-to-Rambo is very short order, to the amount of damage you release being way more than them, to none of them getting anywhere near the headshots you can. But it's not really about just the combat either. It mixes halfway decent combat with the halfway decent puzzle-y stuff with gorgeous scenery. It pulls off "reboot" so well I hope we see more of it. I'm as surprised by it as I was Dishonored. Kinda thought both would be meh.

And I agree she's very well acted. I actually find all the performances pretty good, though they coulda used an hour or more extra thug dialog :-)

Also (and yes, worth an edit): explosive tipped arrows. That is all.

Man, all this talk about rape and it's not even breakfast yet.

I agree with all of this.  It's hard to overstate how easy this is, but it's still fun, mostly because the storytelling is so good, not so much because of the plot, but because of the combination of the voice-acting, animations, and pacing.  This version of Lara is also a really likeable character.  This game has a clear vision and executes it.

I agree the mix works fairly well in theory, it's just that it feels a bit much like I'm round-robin'ing two or three seperate games. Since you brought up Dishonored, that game melded better and felt more like a single, cohesive game eventhough its constituent parts were largely the same. Dishonored used platforming as a tactical element and made positioning and initiative important to the outcome of combat. In TR, you reach a mark C, then X number of bad guys turn up (literally spawn in) over a period of T minutes and you alternate between the cover on the left and the cover on the right. All combat isn't like that, but a significant portion is. I think that, along with the overly arcadey boss sequences, is what makes the combat more out-of-character than it needs to be. Stealth, traps and other covert tactics seem like a much more fitting (and more fun) way of doing the combat in a game like Tomb Raider because obviously she wouldn't actually last even ten seconds against these people.

I'm not really looking for the exclusion of direct combat (like Thief more or less did), just that the combat could have been better integrated with the environments and the puzzle-oriented aspects of the game. I don't mind the murder, I mind how it's achieved, both from a storytelling perspective and a mechanics perspective.

I agree with that. There are a couple of assassin-y moments here. But by and large it's a target shooter. To me it feels closer to ME in that regard.

Very curious how the DLC will go. I feel like Lara's character is rambo-like during the puzzle and combat sequences, whereas her likability as a fallible person coming of age is delivered through cut scenes and dialog. Will a DLC continue this balance, or will it do the more economical all-combat or all-puzzle thing?

I wouldn't cling on to hopes of story DLC, those things never seem to materialize (again, Dishonored). More tombs, hopefully more extensive than the ones found in the game, I would expect on the other hand. I have no interest in those, though.

Honestly though I'd rather see they skipped half-hearted DLC and just got on with making the inevitable(horray!) sequel proper. Tomb Raider without a strong story arc now seems heartless and pointless.

Can't believe how I'm gushing over this game. I'm a little embarrassed of myself.

No plans for anything other than multiplayer dlc is what I have read.

As an aside, I finished my second play-through tonight with my son.  He would come home from school and or wake up and ask if we could play.

I recall some bad words, but reluctantly agree.

The first third of the game has a couple shits and a few other bad words. The second third is pretty tame maybe one F-bomb. Suddenly in the 3rd part of the game there is an F-bomb every 20 seconds. I might not be getting dad of the year for letting him watch/play with me. (Climbing the tower made him REALLY happy hitting the W-key.)

His remarks echo mine. "Can we play the next one now?"

Well, he's gonna end up being exposed to this (not to mention impaling and beheadings), anyway, so maybe its best he sees it with his dad, to take its power away.

Bleh. I'll hope you're wrong and leave it at that :-)

If it sells well, I'm sure they'll revise their plans.

Looks like there's some plan revising going on, alright. SE's CEO apparently just resigned, citing record deficits.

Yea... (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/189285/Square_Enix_president_steps_down_following_terrible_year_for_the_company.php)

3.4mm units sold reportedly. And that doesn't include digital copies. I don't see how they thought they'd sell much more than that.

Thankfully, Square Enix isn't the first TR publishers nor their only option for future content/sequels.

Edit: Just saw this thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23112.0)

The DLC is ... interesting. 13 euro for 19 different DLC items, 1 of which extends the gametime, 1 is a multiplayer map and the rest is just skins, weapons or skills.

Sigh.

Where are the dlc shorts?

Bought this game almost two weeks ago. Pretty good.

Also noticed that when I got all the GPS caches, some secret documents popped up talking about an organization called Trinity, who seemingly know about Himiko, Mathias, and something called the Star Phenomenon.

So it sounds like this is a hint to some over-arching plot that will span this new TR series.

Probably some Illuminati type group. Secret society that's existed over the course of history and shaped it to their liking.

Edit:

Also I just noticed something. Lara has the perfect opportunity to rescue Sam. Matias is standing still waiting for Whitman to get killed by the stormguard and Lara is hidden not ten feet away from him. She could easily blow his brains out with her pistol(something she can draw without a lot of movement and that fires with a silencer.) and let Sam run back to Reyes and Jonah.

On sale for $13.60* at GMG. Decided to bite. Seemed well received around here.

http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/us/en/pc/games/action/tomb-raider/

*Use this coupon. GMG20-LLASD-D8WBQ

I was umming and ahhing on this one since yesterday. Looks like I left it too long, as it's now gone...

So Gamersgate have it on midweek sale now. Not quite as cheap as GoG had it last time, but still reasonable.


Is this worth playing with KB+M, or is it one you need to plug a 360 controller into your PC to play it properly?

KB+M worked fine to me. IIRC the binds were a little awkward but nothing game breaking.

KB+M are totally fine. I suppose it plays well with a controller. The only challenge I had with controller was the QTEs at first, but that was some jank thing where occasionally the key to press wouldn't appear on screen. Eventually they must have patched it or it was just an early-game edge case.

Almost finished with this. It's like Uncharted with higher production values. I feel bizarre saying that given that it's a Tomb Raider game, but it's shockingly high quality.