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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As part of its 25th anniversary celebrations for Tomb Raider, Square Enix has revealed footage and details of Tomb Raider: Ascension, an early survival-horror-like prototype created by Crystal Dynamics as it explored ways to reimagine the series - with various aspects of the project ultimately making their way into the developer's 2013 reboot.

"After narrowing in on the concept of a survival story on a remote island," explains Square Enix over on YouTube, "[Crystal Dynamics] began developing what was internally called Tomb Raider: Ascension." The project is said to have "felt closer to a horror game than a Tomb Raider title" at one point, although this aspect would eventually fade into the background as the studio opted to focus in on survival elements.

Square's Ascension showcase takes the form of three videos, the first consisting of concept art, and the second showing a surprisingly substantial chunk of in-game footage, in which Lara scrambles through a claustrophobic flooded cave, prowls (and eventually rides horseback) around a vast, foggy forest wilderness, and more.

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Hayley Atwell, best known as Marvel's Peggy Carter, is the voice of Lara Croft in Netflix's new Tomb Raider anime.

The award-winning actress will lend her voice to Lara Croft in the new Netflix show, which is set to follow the events of the rebooted Tomb Raider game trilogy.

In other words, Hayley Atwell's Croft will be the same, if slightly older, version of Lara played by Camilla Luddington in the Tomb Raider reboot and its sequels Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

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Netflix has snaffled up another iconic video game property to add to its increasingly teetering pile of animated TV adaptations, with the streaming service this time having set its sights on globe-trotting archaeologist Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider franchise.

This latest Tomb Raider adaptation is being produced in collaboration with Legendary Entertainment and will pick up after the events of Lara's recent video game trilogy, developed by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal. Exactly how far after after those events is currently unclear, meaning we could end up with anything from the prequel trilogy's perpetually anguished Lara to the considerably more charismatic protagonist of earlier games.

As reported by Variety, Tasha Huo will write and executive produce the animated Tomb Raider adaptation (his previous credits include The Witcher: Blood Origin and Red Sonja), alongside Dmitri M. Johnson (Sonic the Hedgehog), Stephen Bugaj, and Howard Bliss.

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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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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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Whether you enjoyed the first film or not, a Tomb Raider 2 appears to be on the cards.

Free Fire, Kill List and A Field in England writer Amy Jump has been hired to pen the script for Alicia Vikander's return as Lara Croft, Deadline reports.

Last year's Tomb Raider film reboot loosely retold the story of Crystal Dynamics' 2013 game reboot - it's unclear if the film sequel will go on to retell the story of its 2015 follow-up, Rise of the Tomb Raider.

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Whenever I hear someone talking about the great old days of games, back when the designers would just chuck you right into the middle of it all ("Getting stuck on a puzzle?" I once heard Tim Schafer say, "We used to call that content"), I think of one game that did just this, and very literally. About a third of the way into Tomb Raider 2, Lara Croft goes for a short ride on a submarine. The ride is short because the submarine crashes or explodes or something wretched and annoying like that. Anyway, the cutscene ends ambiguously and then the next level begins and...well, total darkness. Or just about. You're floating at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by shadows and water and not much else. There is, initially at least, very little suggestion of where to go. My sense, upon first encountering this level, was that the game had broken itself in a very unusual way: it had broken itself in that the setting had survived but the game had somehow run out of narrative to fill it with. It was like the designers had downed tools and backed away.

I died and died and died at the bottom of the ocean. But then I started to experiment. Eventually I found a series of oil drums or whatnot on the seafloor - a guide of sorts. I followed the trail and - after dying and repeating a few more times - I was inside a sunken ship, enjoying a handy pocket of air. This sequence sounds awful, probably, but it was brilliant. Weirdly, it is probably my favourite moment of all Tomb Raider moments.

The idea that games used to be better when they were harder and more obscure is one of the more annoying conversational gambits out there. The terms are vague - there are so many ways for a game to be hard, not all of them intentional or laudable - and I don't think I agree with the premise in the first place. But there is one series where I think it's absolutely true, for me at least. I really miss getting incredibly stuck in Tomb Raider.

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In the late 90s, when Tomb Raider was at the height of its power on PSone, Lucozade snapped up Lara Croft for one of the most famous video game-related TV ads of all time.

Now, Lucozade has once again snapped up Lara Croft, this time to coincide with the release of the upcoming Tomb Raider movie.

The 1999 Tomb Raider Lucozade advert saw Lara Croft get the better of a pack of wolves. Ol' Lara blows the wolves a kiss before leaping off a ledge. The wolves jump after her - to their doom - while Lara grabs a conveniently placed and hand-sized rock handle. Take that, wolves!

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