OK, more like Lara, Lara. All apologies to the Blue Hearts.

Keeping up to date, today’s weight check : 194.4.

My recruiter seems to have found a couple of decent leads to throw a resume at and hope it sticks, and I’m of course sending off all manner of resumes myself, but while I remain out of work the game consoles continue to get a workout.

After Panzer Dragoon Saga, I went through the Saturn shelf a little more, and came up with Tomb Raider, possibly the most popular series nobody believes launched on the Saturn.

I’ve never finished it. I got quite far – looking at the level list on Wikipedia, I think I was about 3 levels from the end when I ran into a boss fight that I just couldn’t seem to beat. All things considered, it seemed like a pretty good choice.

But, one of the flaws with the console versions was the frequent deaths and very infrequent save points, and I don’t know if I’ve the tolerance for that anymore.

Anyway, I own the PC version, something I got in one of those “Mega Hits” collections, and I knew that had save-anywhere functionality, so I put the Saturn version aside and tried to install that. Not so much the worky. A little digging online revealed that, while it can be made to work under Windows XP, or even Vista, it takes a degree of mucking about that I wasn’t willing to do, and even if you got it running it didn’t have as good of music as the console versions. Shameful.

And… apparently they’re doing a remake of the first game ANYWAY, for the 10th 11th anniversary, and it will be a budget title, so why not wait for that?

Instead, I jumped forward two generations and picked Tomb Raider Legend off the shelf.

I played most of Tomb Raider, as I mentioned, and I played enough of Tomb Raider II on the Playstation to get to the point where running out of flares got annoying (very early), but I’d missed III, Chronicles, Angel of Darkness, whatever else was released thereafter. Comments I have heard over the years have indicated that I didn’t miss much.

Tomb Raider Legend, however, I heard good things about, so when we bought our XBox 360, it was one of the four games we picked up with it – Dead Rising, Ridge Racer 6, and Dead of Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 2 were the others, and one of these days I will actually give them some playtime.

It was rather a different game than 1996’s game. Much more shooty, for one. Far fewer animal enemies, and especially NO UNDERWATER ENEMIES. I confess that I have a serious case of the heebie jeebies that comes from fighting stuff underwater – this was a big problem back when I was playing the first game… all those crocodiles, brrr.

I think I can leave aside the oohing and aahing at graphics, etc. It’s a 360 game and in hi-def and stuff, yes, it looks good. I got a kick out of a bit where, just after I’ve finished going “wow!” at a particularly neat bit of scenery, Lara makes a crack about going into the postcard business.

Most of the time I died due to falling off things, and most of those were due to me being a bit of a klutz when it comes to playing 3rd person games. I did die an awful lot, though, and in the Nepal level it managed to get just a bit frustrating, but never enough to make me toss the controller and give up. This represents a difficulty level that anyone who’s actually good at these sorts of games will probably consider childishly easy, but for me, I was happy to be able to see the whole story.

Another one down. 🙂 With 12 years worth of games to choose from, what comes off the to-play pile next is anyone’s guess.

This needed a PS: The game includes forklift content. Apparently I’m doomed to forklifts. I’m 6 hours into Beyond Good and Evil now without a forklift in sight but I have no faith in that.