 | so, for my week off from work, i wanted to theme each day on a particular television show that i love. some candidates are "what not to wear" (a work in progress!), the designer guys (also a work in progress), some metropolitan kind of cooking show (meh), and well, a couple of others - maybe something to do with working out and feeling good. on my first day in though, i think i may have wasted the day. except that there's something neat about how i wasted it. i remember the first time i met lara croft. i was managing this print centre and i loaded a demo of the original "tomb raider" on one of the NT4 workstations (a clear violation of network protocols, but what the heck), and i was simply amazed. you have to realize that this was before the day of halo and quake and all those games that make TR1 look like a piece of crap... lara croft was a sexy, go-getter adventuress who had the world's most exotic locations as her playground, a license to kill, and challenging puzzles and problems to solve, mostly having to do with pushing large blocks around and pulling levers. but she could run, jump, shoot, climb, roll, swim and shoot like nothing i'd ever seen before. now, she's been reinterpreted over and over and over again. she's been portrayed twice in feature film by the sexiest woman on earth, angelina jolie, and she's got a new game coming out this winter, tomb raider: underworld, that looks to kick some serious serious globetrotting ass. this rather lengthy preamble is my way of saying that i spent most of the weekend and today working through the 10-year anniversary remake of the original tomb raider, tomb raider anniversary. the story, locations and puzzles are mostly the same, but the technology and the presentation are incomparably improved. lara leaps and twists with the grace and agility of an olympic gymnast. the puzzles and challenges are far more difficult and challenging - accommodating the decade's worth of increased sophistication of video gamers. replaying a familiar storyline is less like going over something tired and boring and more like meeting an old friend who you haven't seen for a long time and finding out that they've undergone miraculous improvements and reveling in their success! i can't say enough about how much i love this game! i think that finishing it in a few days of almost solid playing should tell you something about how engrossing the game is. i prefer watching lara leap and roll and dodge infinitely more than i enjoy even my superman video game... which causes me some concern. do i love the feeling of helping lara to succeed in her journey, or in a more frightening possible interpretation, do i feel the need to control and manipulate women like a puppet? i'm going to leave that kind of concern to another day. i'm at the final level of TR:A now and i want to finish it before i go to bed. - g song of the day for rocking lara's world: elevation, u2 |