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After a bit of a hiatus, I finally got around to finishing the latest installment of Lara Croft’s adventures:  Tomb Raider: Underworld. On balance it’s very good: tremendous good fun, with all the locations wonderfully detailed and packed full of interesting stuff. On my flash new 101cm TV with the xbox outputting at 1080p it just looks gorgeous.

Many of the things I disliked about the previous versions – most notably the unfun boss fights – are gone entirely. (You do get attacked by giant spiders, tigers, zombie Vikings and whatnot, but there’s nothing like the regular boss fights present in the other games).

Lara has some new moves, such as being able to climb walls with suitable handholds, rather than being restricted to ledges as previously. She can also shoot one-handed while hanging from ledges. The best new move is the chimney climb: with two walls sufficiently close together she can work her way upwards by leaping from wall to wall.

The story is pretty lame, and entirely ignorable: basically it boils down to a series of McGuffins that leads you from temple to temple and continent to continent in search of Lara’s long-vanished mother. But the weak-to-nonexistent story-line is not really a criticism. Tomb Raider isn’t about the story, but about the way cool environments she gets to explore. And that’s as it should be.

As much as I enjoyed this game – and it is very fun indeed – there were still many minor annoyances. The Tomb Raider series is now more than a decade old and has eight major and many minor games, and yet there are still basic, basic aspects of control and camera that aren’t right. Tomb Raider is famous for having these problems: is this really an unsolvable problem?

Whenever Lara is in the open she moves smoothly, control is great, and the camera works well. But as soon as she gets close to walls, rocks, trees and so forth, the camera is frequently hard to position correctly, the game often thinks it knows what the camera should be doing better than you, and rendering and positioning errors abound.

One of the big new things in this version of the game is that all Lara’s motions are mocapped. To my surprise I found that Lara’s moves looked awkward and clunky compared to her motion in the previous non-mocapped games! Basing her moves on a real gymnast sounds like a grand idea, but in practice it just doesn’t work for some reason.

But these are minor quibbles. The game is terrific, and I can’t wait to see where they send Lara next.

Way back when I had a PlayStation 2, the first game I played through from start to finish was Tomb Raider: the Angel of Darkness, the sixth in the series of games. Of course I had heard of the games previously, but had never played one. I loved it utterly. Sure it was kind of buggy, Lara was hard to control, and the camera angle changed on you in weird and unhelpful ways. But I figured that that was just par for the course, and it didn’t detract much from my enjoyment. Subsequently I have found that Angel of Darkness was reviled high and low for just these problems, and is widely considered the worst of the games. The developers did such a lousy job that they were fired, and a different crowd hired to write the next games in the series.

The month I got my Xbox360 just happened to be the month that the latest in the series, Underworld, was released, so I rushed out and bought it and the two other titles between Angel of Darkness and Underworld. The games are called Legend and Anniversary.

Legend is a terrific game, full of sly humour. At one stage Lara explores a failed King Arthur theme park. This was built on the site where King Arthur was supposed to have actually been buried, and failed commercially shortly thereafter. As you explore this broken down ruin of someone’s dream of riches, you come across gloriously tacky bits of theme park. Like for example there is a hall where very poorly animated manikins act out various parts of the Arthur legend, complete with appallingly bad faux-medieval dialogue (“And veryily he wenteth forth and smoteth his enemy”). It’s wonderfully funny and a great send up of the tackiness of modern life. And in a final delicious irony, King Arthur turns out to be buried beneath the site after all.

There’s another sequence so funny that I was laughing so much that I was having trouble controlling Lara. After interesting and fun tomb raids in Bolivia and Peru, Lara organizes a meet-up with a member of the Yakuza in Tokyo to negotiate the purchase of an artifact. The meet is at a swanky penthouse party. So you (or rather Lara – the boundary gets a bit blurry) turn up at the party in a little black dress with a handbag and high heels. And it’s just so wrong! No gun, no grenades, no grappling hook. And you’re not even wearing boots, so even the sound of your footfalls is wrong. You can’t run, due to those annoying high heels. You feel naked, exposed, awkward. Gah! You wander round, wondering what the smeg you’re supposed to do without all your gear. Then the Yakuza dude shows up, and (being a bit of a baddie), he has a posse of machine-gun-toting thugs with him. He orders them to kill you, and there’s a hilarious cut-scene in which Lara dives behind the bar. Safe for a while, the high heels get kicked off, the dress gets split up the sides, and the guns come out of the handbag. Hooray! She’s back! After taking out the thugs, you spend the rest of the segment running, jumping, swinging about Tokyo – in the shredded remains of a party dress! Priceless.

Anniversary is, so I gather, a reimplementation of the very first Tomb Raider game, released to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the series. I have never played the original game, so I can’t comment on how closely the reimplementation follows the original. Once again it is a terrific game, with some amazing and mind-blowing sequences, although it doesn’t have the same sense of humour as Legend.

I think the best bit in Anniversary comes towards the end of the Egypt section. You come out onto a ledge overlooking a large square room. The walls are very plain, and water fills the room to just below the ledge. About the only thing of interest are two small protrusions of stone sticking up above the water in the far left corner. So you jump into the water and dive down, and realize that the room actually contains two vast Egyptian-style statues. One is of Horus, the other Anubis. Each figure is sitting in the classic Pharaoh pose, and each statue would be over 100m high ‘in real life’. The two stone protrusions are the tips of Anubis’s ears breaking the surface. It’s amazingly eerie to swim around these vast statues. Eventually you find the mechanism to drain the room, and there’s a cut scene were these two vast figures seem to erupt out of the water. The figures are so utterly cool that they deserve to be real.

Although both games are great fun to play, they both reveal how far this sort of game still has to go: there are many, many times when subtle errors in the graphics reveal how simple the underlying physics engine is: grenades that bounce off empty space, Lara standing on what looks like empty space, bits of Lara vanishing into walls and ledges, being able to see into areas you shouldn’t because two walls don’t exactly meet up or a small polygon was missed by the designers.

It would be hard to say which game I enjoyed more: Legend is more humorous, Anniversary more atmospheric. Both games are very linear, in that there’s never much room for doubt as to where you are supposed to go next. It’s common these days to condemn such linearity, but I’m not convinced it’s a bad thing, as it means you almost never get stuck: you can nearly always see what you’re supposed to do, even if you haven’t figured out how yet.

I do, however, have one major gripe about Anniversary: the difficulty. In both games you can request an Easy, Normal, or Difficult game. I played both in Easy mode, but Anniversary was much, much harder. It’s not obvious how the easiness setting actually effects game play, except, one assumes, for the Boss Fights. Most of both games involve running and jumping and swinging and working out puzzles, but every now and then (especially towards the ends of levels), you enter a large roundish arena-like area and have fight with some hideous creature. I really dislike boss fights. For me they don’t add anything at all to the game, and are just massive inconveniences that have to be endured before you’re allowed to continue on with the fun stuff. This is the reason that I play in Easy mode – to try and make the boss fights easy. In Legend the boss fights were in the main easy. In Anniversary, some were very, very hard. Even with detailed help from the Internet on how to defeat the creatures it took me many long frustrating hours to get through the section. Furthermore, towards the end of the game there is an insanely hard sequence. It involves getting Lara to climb up the inside of a big square hole sunk into a pyramid. There is a pool of lava at the bottom, and so every failure results in hideous death. What makes the sequence hard is that the ledges and poles and grapple rings that you need to make use of to climb all retract into the walls on very short fuses. You have to get every jump pixel-perfect and there’s no room for the slightest error or poor old Lara plummets to yet another agonizing death in the lava pool. The sequence is so hard that I came very close to giving up and swearing off Tomb Raider forever. I made it through eventually, but only by pig-headed determination and lots of help from the Internet. The thing is, the sequence could easily be made easy, or at least easier, but changing the timings on the retracting components slightly, to give you more time to line up jumps and so forth. What do the designers think they gain by providing insanely hard sequences when the player has asked for an easy game? It’s exasperating.

But in the grand scheme of things it’s a minor quibble. Both games are amazingly good, and I’m very happy to have played them.

Now it’s on to the most recent game, Underworld, from which I hear that Boss Fights have been banished. Huzzah!

I bought an XBOX 360 the other day, and a few days later – entirely by coincidence – the latest game in the Tomb Raider series (Underworld) was released. This was very good luck indeed, as the Tomb Raider series is far and away my favourite genre of computer game. Originally I was planning to wait until the game was available second-hand, and in the meantime play through the two preceding titles. But instead I wound up buying the Ultimate Fan Pack, which includes a copy of the game plus:

• a tee-shirt (about seventeen sizes too small for me);
• a cap;
• a satchel (which actually seems sturdy enough to be used as such);
• a very cool Lara miniature;
• a 2009 calendar; and
• “Collectible packaging” (which seems to mean that the box has a picture on it).

The calendar is particularly nifty. About half the pictures are renders from the game, but the other half are photos of Alison Carroll – the gymnast who mocapped all of Lara Croft’s moves for this game – dressed as Lara Croft and in typical Lara Croft action poses.