Well, this is unfortunate: a glitch discovered by a Canadian player makes it look like Lara Croft's tank top has gone all see-through.

The glitch was sent in by a person who goes by Recostar from S3DGamerZone. Here's his account of how the bug came to light while he was playing the game in 3D on his PC:

It was right after we died from an explosion; we kept getting strange glitches. We had been to close to a gas exhaust and shot a flame arrow beside it causing Lara to die. When we came back into the game, water, shadows and lighting looked very odd. So we kept selecting re-load last check point hoping to solve this issue. For the most part everything looked ok after several re-loads, until we went to break a valve and I noticed her tank top looked funny in the light.

When I looked closer, I could see what appeared to be 2 nipples. We zoomed in to make sure that's what they are (purely scientific lol). My only possible conclusion is that when they made Lara's damaged explosion mesh, behind her tank top they jokingly put these 2 t marks were her nipples would be on purpose. They probably never thought that a glitch would remove the tank top overlay exposing this. Also, I noticed in the video right where Lara's nipples are you can clearly see 2 huge and out of placed square pixels.

It should be noted that Kotaku hasn't been able to reproduce this glitch.

Older players amongst you will remember the nigh-indestructible rumor of a "nude code" for the original Tomb Raider. This isn't quite that. It's a long-odds software hiccup that makes the newly-redesigned look a lot less modest than her predecessor. After years of more attention being paid to Lara's breasts than to gameplay or character development, the new Tomb Raider succeeds because the game isn't all about Ms. Croft's endowment. This instance of unplanned exposures isn't quite as bad as the fully naked Heavy Rain glitch from three years ago. But still: Shame on you, explosion glitch, for trying to mess up Lara's evolution away from being a sex symbol.

If you've been playing big-budget action video games over the last couple of years, you've probably noticed a few trends. The graphics have gotten better. The animations have become more lifelike. The explosions have gotten more explosive.

And more recently, amid all those improvements, has come a trend that's even more earth-shattering and important: Video games have discovered the bow and arrow.

Call it the "bowification" of video games. Far Cry 3. Crysis 3. Assassin's Creed III. Tomb Raider. In just the past six months, we've had four high profile games include a bow and arrow as a primary weapon. In an impressive bit of reverse evolution, it seems video games have finally discovered the bow and arrow, decades after they discovered the assault rifle.

All this goes along with pop culture's more general bow-obsession, with Katniss Everdeen using her archery chops to survive The Hunger Games and Brave's Merida besting each of her suitors in an archery contest, Robin Hood-style. Way to be current, video games!

A few notes: First of all, cossbows don't count. Sorry, Dishonored! I'm going to focus on four games that are pretty recent, as they represent the current height of video game bow-and-arrow design. So, I've left off games like Turok, Wii Sports Resort, and any of the Zelda games. I've also left off a few games where the bows don't really have a mechanical component to them—my bow and arrow in Guild Wars 2 operates pretty much like a gun; same thing with Diablo III or Torchlight II. I am including Skyrim, because that game is interesting and its iteration on the Elder Scrolls' bow and arrow design is cool. If there are other video game bows you think are worthy of recognition, I hope you'll mention them in the comments.

Here we go, ranked from last to first:

How it works: Aim and fire with the Y/Triangle button.

How you cancel a shot: Press B/O.

How you aim: You select a target using the aiming feature, then Connor does the rest for you.

One hit? One kill with most humans, but not with animals.

Better than a gun? No, not in this case. The Assassin's Creed III bow is silent, which is good for taking out guards quietly, but in general it's inferior to the game's pistols, particularly the moment you've been spotted. Aiming and firing simply takes too long to be effective.

Upgrades: None to speak of.

Fakest thing you can do: The more I think about it, the more I think that Assassin's Creed III's bow might be the most realistic of all the video game bows on this list. Which unfortunately seems to have contributed to it being in last place.

Greatest moment: There's something to be said for hunting from the treetops in Assassin's Creed III, and the bow always felt at home in the woods.

John Rambo says: "Your worst nightmare."

Overall Opinion: The bow in Assassin's Creed III just doesn't feel very good to fire. The auto-aiming is strange and doesn't allow you to track a moving target, and as I've noted before, pressing "Y" (or triangle) to aim a weapon feels a bit like standing on your tiptoes to reach something in a high cupboard. There's a lack of satisfying impact, as well.

How it works: Zoom with the left trigger, pull the string back with the right. Release to fire.

How you cancel a shot: Click the right thumbstick.

How you aim: You don't actually aim along the arrow, but rather using crosshairs on your HUD combined with a green line indicating the arrow's trajectory.

One hit? One kill, provided you've got your draw-strength up for the bigger baddies.

Better than a gun? Without question. It's so much better than a gun, in fact, that it makes the guns totally pointless and throws off the balance of the game.

Upgrades: Your bow comes outfitted with all manner of special arrows, so they don't really qualify as "upgrades." But Prophet's bow can fire regular arrows, explosive arrows, thermite-tipped arrows that explode on a delay, and arrows that deliver a deadly electric shock.

Greatest moment: The sound design on the Crysis 3 bow makes up for its odd feel—the tension of the arrow combined with the thunk of impact makes it clear that this thing is really a deadly future-weapon in the guise of a bow and arrow.

Fakest thing you can do: At first I was going to say that having your arrows designed so that they'd show up on your heads-up display for gathering was unrealistic, but actually, that's exactly the sort of thing that some military weapons-designer would probably do.

John Rambo Says: "I could have killed 'em all, I could've killed you. In town you're the law, out here it's me. "

Overall Opinion: Prophet's bow in Crysis 3 is sort of a "bow in name only." Sure, it looks like a tricked-out compound bow. Yes, it fires arrows. But it's so powerful and futuristic that it's almost entirely removed from the more primal appeal of the weapon itself. Furthermore, because the bow can be fired while cloaked, it throws off the precarious balance struck by the first two Crysis games and makes Prophet overpowered.

How it works: Aim with the right trigger, release to fire. Hit the left trigger to toggle slow-mo, if you have the ability. As a demonstration, check out this TOTALLY SICK VIDEO I just shot today. I was going to grab a screenshot to show how the bow works, but I happened to fire this arrow and... yesssss.

My first thought was "I can't believe no one saw that." Then I checked the corner and saw that I'd accidentally hit the record button and captured the whole thing using Fraps. Victory! So, I thought I'd share it here. (And okay, maybe it's not actually that hard to do—it does kind of look like the bird relocated so that my arrow would hit it. But I felt pretty proud, so. Anyway.)

How you cancel a shot: Press X, a welcome addition to the Elder Scrolls series, as in the past you'd have to fire into the ground and then pick up your arrow.

How you aim: Right along the arrow, with a zoom-in if you've purchased the required perk.

One hit? Rarely one kill, unless you're up against a weak enemy or you're firing from stealth.

Better than a gun? There are no guns in Skyrim, though video game marketers seem fond of suggesting that there are several other games that satisfy that particular fan desire…

Upgrades: The most important upgrade is the ability to slow down time while aiming, which is a boon for those who play this game with a controller, in particular. However, thanks to the game's crafting system, you can upgrade your bow in all manner of other deadly ways. My Daedric bow shoots lightning arrows, for example.

Greatest moment: Picking off an entire roomful of bandits without alerting a single one. The "bang!" sound of a successful sneak attack is never less that satisfying, and it's only heightened by the goofy way the ragdoll physics can take over once they go flying. It's also fun to peg a dragon in midair with an arrow, partly because it's such a difficult trick to pull off. Unless you're me, as evidenced by that amazing video I've already talked about too much.

Fakest thing you can do: You can upgrade your bow so that it fires lightning and traps souls! God, how unrealistic.

John Rambo says: "It's in the blood! It's natural! Peace? That's an accident!"

Overall Opinion: While Skyrim's combat is generally not on par with the other games on this list, I actually like the bow and arrow a lot. It never quite has the stopping power I'd like it to when I've got a troll charging at me head-on, but when sneaking, there are few weapons in the Skyrim universe as deadly and satisfying.

How it works: You aim with the left trigger and pull the string back with the right trigger.

How you cancel a shot: There isn't a consistent way, unfortunately. You can switch arrow-types if you've got an additional arrow assigned to the D-pad, but that's an unsteady workaround at best. I have memories of being able to inconsistently cancel pulled arrows, but haven't been able to recreate that in my game. If there's a way, I'm not sure what it is. Meaning that I wind up shooting my arrows into the ground and grabbing them. You got so much right, Far Cry 3!

Update: Since enough of you guys pointed out that in theory it's totally easy to cancel a shot, I thought I'd give it an even more thorough test. Looks like this issue is only on PC, or even just my PC, and it's inconsistent. I'm able to get "R" on the keyboard to cancel the shot every time, but "X" on the controller is inconsistent at best. Often it won't work at all. So, good on you for the most part, Far Cry 3—the issue isn't with your design but appears to be with your PC controller setup. Your bow is still pretty cool, though.

How you aim: You can get either a red-dot sight or a more advanced hunter's sight, which accounts for drop-off. I never quite mastered the way aiming works, but I did always use the hunter's sight, even though it was more difficult to see what was going on.

One hit? One kill.

Better than a gun? Not really. The bow is arguably better for silent takedowns, but it's hard to top a powerful silenced assault rifle or sniper rifle, particularly if you've unlocked the later weapons in the game. That said, it's certainly cooler than a gun, and holds its own.

Upgrades: You could eventually either make fire-arrows or explosive arrows. The explosive arrows were oddly underpowered, and often it took more than one to blow up a vehicle or kill a guy.

Greatest moment: Hunting actual animals, actually. Some of the most enjoyable side-missions in Far Cry 3 were the advanced bow hunts, where you'd be tasked with taking down a deadly jungle beast using only the bow and regular arrows. Usually it involved finding a good vantage point and hitting shots from far enough away that the tiger/leopard in question wouldn't be able to find you. But these sequences effectively captured the thrill of creeping through the underbrush, bow in hand.

Fakest thing you can do: Make an explosive-tipped arrow out of a hand grenade while under duress in the wild. Look, I get that Jason Brody has become something of a badass while on this adventure, but.

John Rambo says: "You know what you are... what you're made of. War is in your blood. Don't fight it. You didn't kill for your country. You killed for yourself."

Overall opinion: The bow in Far Cry 3 is a cool, empowering weapon, and easily the game's defining mode of dealing destruction. While silenced sniper rifles can generally get the same job done from a longer range, the bow itself was my weapon of choice for the majority of the game, particularly when hunting.

How it works: Aim with the left trigger, pull back the string with the right trigger.

How you cancel a shot: Let go of the left trigger. Okay, hold on. This is the only game on this list to adopt this method of canceling a shot, and it deserves mention, because it's great. Initially, I was uncomfortable canceling shots this way, but only because it felt so unfamiliar. As it turns out, this is a very natural, subtly brilliant way of doing things. It's a much more accurate amalgamation of what you'd actually do if you decided you didn't want to shoot an arrow. You'd release the string.

How you aim: Down the arrow using a crosshair.

One hit? One kill, as long as you're sneaking or can score a headshot. In combat, it depends.

Better than a gun? Absolutely. The bow is a silent killer, has a ton of non-combat uses, and is wicked powerful and accurate over long distances.

Upgrades: By the end of Tomb Raider, Lara's bow has become something of a swiss army knife. It can fire regular, flaming, and explosive arrows, sure. It can also fire a rope that can manipulate objects in the environment and even attach to cliff-sides and set up ziplines. Coupled with her automated rope-retractor, she can demolish large chunks of wood and access new areas. She also uses her arrows as a makeshift melee weapon, and to skin animals after hunting. After a couple of days on the island, Lara's bow is no longer the sad little wooden thing she pulled off the corpse at the start; it's a wicked-looking high-tech compound bow with a counterweight and nasty arrows.

Greatest moment: There's a sequence near the middle of the game where Lara enters a large wooded area at night. It's full of guards. The first time I played this bit, I was able to creep through the woods, silently picking off guard after guard until none were left standing. It was probably my favorite sequence in the entire game—Lara Croft as deadly predator, dealing death with a bow and arrow.

Fakest thing you can do: While I value the utility, I'm not at all convinced that a bow could fire a rope-arrow into a cliff face firmly enough to let me peg that rope and climb across a chasm.

John Rambo says: "When you're pushed, killing's as easy as breathing."

Overall Opinion: Turns out there's a reason that Lara's bow has been featured so prominently in Tomb Raider's promotional materials—the weapon feels inextricably tied to Lara in the new game, and between the two of them, they can overcome almost any obstacle. The bow has a marvelous feeling of physicality to it, including how Lara can only pull the string back for so long before her aim starts to shake. The decision to give players the ability to hit "up" and flick Lara's lighter, igniting the arrow, was inspired. I found it telling that in the game, I used Lara's bow whenever possible, even when it wasn't the most powerful option, unless I was getting rushed by enemies on either side. Even then, whipping out a machine gun or shotgun just felt wrong somehow.

So, Tomb Raider wins it by a neck. Far Cry 3 put up a good fight, but while that game does have some very fun bow-hunting, the bow itself doesn't match Lara Croft's weapon in all its upgraded glory. My Skyrim bow is all well and good, but falls short in heated combat. Crysis 3's bow is barely a bow at all, really—more of an overpowered killing device—that may be to some players' taste, but it isn't to mine. And Assassin's Creed III's bow, like so many other things about that game, is better in concept than in execution.

Congrats, Lara. Take a bow. You are currently the video game archer to beat. At least until it turns out there's an awesome bow and arrow in BioShock Infinite or The Last of Us. Which, given the industry's current bow-happy state, wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Tomb Raider's PC version is generally strong, offering a better-looking, higher resolution, smoother tomb-raiding experience than its console counterpart. That said, if you're using an Nvidia graphics card, the game could be pretty unstable, though that instability is usually fixed by turning tessellation off.

Good news: A beta driver released by Nvidia on Friday clears the issue right up, and ostensibly offers some performance improvements across the board, too. I installed the driver for my 660Ti and have been running with tessellation with nary a problem.

It's been cool to explore the island a bit in the aftermath of the story, just like Evan said it would be. That said, I think I might actually start a replay of the game on a higher difficulty. My bow and arrow misses having moving targets.

Monday mornings are for morbid death compilation videos, right?

Director of the video above, BenBuja, says that it's every possible death scenario in the game. But if you catch a missing one, feel free to share it below. Otherwise, enjoy your morbid morning. And you're welcome.

This botched-up bus advert was spied by Crystal Dynamics' Karl Stewart, the global brand director for the Tomb Raider franchise. Oops.

Although this year's Tomb Raider reboot made our latest list of most anticipated PC games, I must admit that it was one of the games I was least looking forward to from a performance perspective. Previous titles in the franchise have received mixed to positive reviews, but gameplay aside, their visuals weren't exactly mind-blowing so we've never bothered doing a performance review on one — until now, anyway.

As with the last few entries, Crystal Dynamics developed the new Tomb Raider using the Crystal Engine — albeit a heavily modified version. Being a multiplatform release, we were naturally worried about the game being geared toward consoles with PC being an afterthought, which has become increasingly common (Dead Space 3 comes to mind as a recent example) and generally results in lackluster graphics.

Those concerns were at least partially alleviated when we learned that the PC port was being worked on by Nixxes Software BV, the same folks who handled the PC versions of Hitman: Absolution and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, both of which were great examples of what we expect from decent ports in terms of graphical quality and customization. Hitman in particular really stressed our higher-end hardware.

We were also relieved to learn that Tomb Raider supports DirectX 11, which brings access to rendering technologies such as depth of field, high definition ambient occlusion, hardware tessellation, super-sample anti-aliasing and contact-hardening shadows. Additionally, compared to the diluted console versions, the PC build offers better textures as well as AMD's TressFX real-time hair physics system.

The result should be a spectacular looking game that pushes the limits of today's enthusiast hardware — key word being "should," of course — so let's move on and see what the Tomb Raider reboot is made of.

Testing Methodology

We'll be testing 27 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia covering a wide range of prices from the affordable to the ultra-expensive. The latest drivers will be used, and every card will be paired with an Intel Core i7-3960X to remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end GPU scores.

We're using Fraps to measure frame rates during 90 seconds of gameplay footage from Tomb Raider's first level, the checkpoint is called "Stun." The test begins with Lara running to escape from a cave system.

Our Fraps test ends just before Lara exits the cave, which is ironically where the built-in benchmark begins. We decided to test a custom section of the game rather than the stock benchmark because this is how we will test Tomb Raider in the future when reviewing new graphics cards. Using Fraps also allows us to record frame latency performance, though for this particular article we didn't include those.

Frame timings weren't included for two reasons: it's not easy to display all that data when testing 27 different GPUs, and we feel Nvidia needs more time to improve their drivers. We'll include frame time performance for Tomb Raider in our next GPU review.

We'll test Tomb Raider at three common desktop display resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 using DX11. We are also testing using the three top quality presets that includes Ultimate, Ultra and High. No changes will be made to the presets.

Moving from high to ultra has a huge impact on performance so we dropped several cards from testing as they couldn't handle this quality.

For an average of 60fps, you'll want the HD 7870 or GTX 680. We're not sure if we've ever seen those two cards sitting next to each other, so it seems like there's something that is really hurting Nvidia's cards (note that TressFX is off).

In another first, the HD 7970 GHz Edition tangoed with the GTX Titan, slipping behind a few frames in the average results but doing much better on the minimum fps.

The minimum frame rates of the Nvidia cards were quite low and we see this most notably with the GeForce GTX 670 which averaged 61fps but had a minimum of just 28fps.

This time the GTX Titan is just barely able to outclass the HD 7970 GHz Edition, while the HD 7950 Boost was the first card to break 60fps, though you could probably get by just as comfortably with the standard model.

You won't be playing on ultra quality at 2560x1600 without a respectable graphics configuration, as the GTX 680 was reduced to a mere 33fps while the HD 7970 fared better with 45fps.

Ultimate quality unsurprisingly calls for an ultimate GPU — probably more than one. Even at 1680x1050, it took an HD 7970 or GTX Titan to render an average of more than 60fps, while the minimum frame rate of the 7970 was around 30fps. Nvidia's cards continue to struggle and the minimum frame rates are far too low as the GTX Titan dropped to just 19fps in spots.

For now, those wanting to play Tomb Raider are far better off with an AMD solution as the HD 7970 GHz Edition was able to deliver more consistent performance than the GTX Titan and it offered substantially better results than the GTX 680, which ranked lower than the HD 7870.

Playing at extreme resolutions such as 2560x1600 or beyond will likely require more than one GPU with the fastest GPU tested (the HD 7970 GHz Edition) averaging only 34fps with a minimum frame rate of 21fps.

Even if you like the new Tomb Raider reboot like me, you still might be pining away for the more assured version of the series' iconic heroine. So, it's a great thing that this fan film give you a bit of both.

The vulnerability of the new version of Lara Croft gets folded in with the snarkiness of her predecessor in Reboot, a two-part creation directed by David Wayman. Some beautiful locations are on display here and the quiet, mysterious tone with its hints of the supernatural pulls you in deeper. And the meta twist at the end is a nice nod to how things have changed for Lara.