Square Enix is celebrating Tomb Raider's 25th Anniversary this week with a bunch of announcements, including ports of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light and Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris for Nintendo Switch in 2022.

Speaking of portable gaming, three original English-language Lara Croft voice actors will join Keeley Hawes in Tomb Raider Reloaded when the mobile game launches next year. Players will be able to choose classic voices such as Shelley Blond (Tomb Raider), Judith Gibbins (Tomb Raider 2 and 3), Jonell Elliott (The Last Revelation, Chronicles, The Angel of Darkness), or Keeley Hawes (Legend, Anniversary and Tomb Raider: Underworld).

Developer Crystal Dynamics has released a special video celebrating the many women who brought Lara to life over the years.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series about the bits of games we overlook, those poor old things. I'm talking about crowds, potions, mountains, hands - things we barely notice at the time but can recall years later because they're so important to the overall memory of the game.

Now is the time to celebrate them - you and me both! I will share my memories but I'm just as eager to hear yours, so please share them in the comments below. We've had some great discussions in our other Five of the Best pieces.

But now it satchelly time to talk about this week's topic...

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Mike Skupa doesn't ship games often - two in the last 16 years - but when he does, you take notice. He was the design director of undercover cop game Sleeping Dogs, and one of two principal designers on Rockstar's back-to-school classic Bully, both still loved by fans today. Seven years after Sleeping Dogs released and three years on from developer United Front Games' collapse, he's finally ready to talk about what he's been cooking up.

But as eager as I am to hear about his next game (and don't worry, we'll get into that later), I'm keen to find out how he reflects on the ups and downs of his career so far. His successes haven't come easy: the joy of creating Bully was only made possible by 80-hour work weeks that left him burnt out, he tells me. The "fairy-tale" release of Sleeping Dogs was followed by years of uncertainty and aborted projects, culminating in him being told, with no notice, that the studio was out of cash.

Last month, I spent an afternoon with him in Vancouver's Chinatown, where his new company Brass Token is based, to make sense of it all. He told me how paper rounds and bottle rocket wars inspired Bully's design, how he came to dislike Rockstar's "company-first" culture, how being kept in the dark about United Front's finances made its closure hurt even more, and how he's pouring the last 20 years - the lessons, the struggles, and the grief of lost loved ones - into an unannounced story-driven third-person horror game targeting a release in 2020.

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Welcome to another week of Five of the Best, a series celebrating the lovely incidental details in games we tend to overlook. So far we've celebrated hands, potions, dinosaurs, shops, health-pick-ups and maps - a real smorgasbord! I really wanted to use that word.

Best of all, it's Friday again, which means another Five of the Best and another chance for you to share your thoughts as well as sit through mine (well, ours - I sometimes rope in a bit of help). Today, it's...

Hubs! What would a game be without one? A messy pile of level spaghetti, that's what. Where would you go to chill out? Where would you chat up other characters? Yep, games would be rubbish without hubs.

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Five of the Best is a weekly series served every Friday with your lunch (ie. noon UK time). While you're chewing your sandwich, we'll celebrate an overlooked part of video games. So far we've celebrated potions and hands. They're the kind of things you don't notice at the time but you never forget, either. Today...

Dinosaurs! How can you forget a dinosaur? It's the ultimate beast. Back in the playground, when you were arguing about what would kill what in a fight, someone always pulled out a dinosaur. "Yeah? My tiger would rip your lion to pieces!" "Well my T. rex would batter your tiger!" "Fight, fight, fight!"

We're fascinated by dinos (probably because we never had the chance to kill them off, sad-face emoji) and we're obsessed with bringing them back to life. Games are the perfect place to do it, not the real world - I've seen the documentary Jurassic Park so I'm well aware of the dangers! So let's celebrate the best dinosaurs in games. Here are our favourites, which are yours?

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IO Interactive has announced that it's releasing a special Hallowe'en-themed DLC pack for Hitman on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 - and it's completely free.

Hitman's free Hallowe'en DLC offering should already be available to download on all platforms, and brings with it a selection of somewhat seasonal tricks and treats. The game's Colorado location is unlocked for everyone, for a limited time, and there are ten new Featured Contracts that IO calls "spooky, creepy or otherwise frightening."

Some, it says, are focussed on disguises (including the sinister scarecrow seen in the trailer below) while others "tell spooky stories through the briefing" and others "are plain mayhem".

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Everyone knows Sean Bean dies in (almost) every film he's in. But now you'll get to kill him yourself - as the first Elusive Target in Hitman 2.

Better known as Boromir, Sharpe or poor old Ned Stark, Sean Bean will appear in Hitman 2 as a former MI5 agent - in a very knowing nod to his classic role as 006 in GoldenEye. "I even managed to make them think I'd been blown up," Trevelyn - sorry, Bean - says in the trailer below:

Elusive Targets are live missions within Hitman only available for a limited amount of time. You can only take on each mission once, ever. If you fail, that's it. No pressure.

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Hitman 2 will release with a brand new 1v1 competitive online multiplayer mode called Ghost Mode.

This is the first time that stealthy slaphead Agent 47 has indulged in any kind of competitive multiplayer, although the recent Sniper Assassin mini-game did offer a taste to series fans.

Ghost Mode pits two players against each other in a race to be the first to take out five targets undetected. Whilst players are given the same targets and are able to see each other in-game, they actually exist in separate instances. This means their actions will not affect the other player's world.

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Not so long ago, IO Interactive unveiled a new location for Hitman 2 in the form of the lush jungles of Colombia. Now, the developer has showcased the area, and the possibilities it affords for stealthy slaughter, in more detail.

According to previous chatter from IO, Hitman 2 will launch will six distinct locations, and the Colombian jungle level, which features the village of Santa Fortuna as its focal point, is only the second to be revealed so far. As you might imagine, it's in sharp contrast to the tires and tarmac of the Miami racing circuit debuted earlier this year - and its dense foliage and shadowy pathways offer an entirely different range of possibilities compared to Miami's urban sprawl.

Santa Fortuna, according to the trailer, is ruled by an "iron-fisted Delgado cartel", and you'll need to penetrate the area's tight security in order to confront the three cartel leaders convening within the village for presumably nefarious purposes. And you can do it while sporting one of the most fetching plastic ponchos ever to grace a video game.

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Not so long ago, IO Interactive unveiled a new location for Hitman 2 in the form of the of the lush Colombian jungle. Now, the developer has showcased the area, and the possibilities it affords for stealthy slaughter, in more detail.

According to previous chatter from IO, Hitman 2 will launch will six distinct locations, and the South American rainforest, which features the village of Santa Fortuna as its focal point, is only the second to be revealed so far. As you might imagine, it's in sharp contrast to the tires and tarmac of the Miami racing circuit debuted earlier this year - and its dense foliage and shadowy pathways offer an entirely different range of possibilities compared to Miami's urban sprawl.

Santa Fortuna, according to the trailer, is ruled by an "iron-fisted Delgado cartel", and you'll need to penetrate the area's tight security in order to confront the three cartel leaders convening within the village for presumably nefarious purposes. And you can do it while sporting one of the most fetching plastic ponchos ever to grace a video game.

Read more…