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.

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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.>

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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.>

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.      > (more…)