What is it about girls from Public Schools? The education and the accent for one thing. The thought that spending most of their time surrounded by other females deprived of male attention, feeds a fantasy that under the properness they're testosterone-hungry sirens is another.
Oh yeah, and then there's the 34D cupsize boobs that stay perfectly in place while she spits bullets from two 9mm automatics that are kept strapped to her thighs in a crude imitation of a garter belt.
Over the years, since the first release of Tomb Raider in 1996, it's been hard not to see Lara Croft as a bit of a joke. She is a 14 year old wank fantasy, even her original designer Toby Gard protests that he wishes "they hadn't made her breasts so big".
I honestly believed the series to be dead. On Sunday I sat through Lara Croft Tomb Raider The Cradle of Life ("We need a snappy title... how about something eight words long?") in which Angelina Jolie's Lara is hired by MI6, along with Gerard Butler (who probably has the words 'something for the ladies' under his Spotlight listing nowadays) to take on some sort of Bond villain who wants to hold the world to ransom with chemical weapons. It was severely lacking in two respects: tombs and raiding. It was like the director Jan De Bont had been handed a James Bond script, reversed some of the genders, added in a monster and asked for his pay cheque. In short it was dreadful.
Lara arrived in the film by somersaulting a jet ski over a wave and then hoisting her dripping, bikini-clad self up on to a boat. For this reason I assume a lot of teenage lads have slow-mo functions on their blu-ray players. Lara was a cartoon.
So it was with some understandable trepidation that I started to play Eidos and Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider Underworld. Having been told that it had some 'visually stunning moments' by one of the less-rabid games magazines I decided it might be nice to look at on my telly.
The opening of TRU is stunning. A slow-motion, reversed pull-back through the burning Croft Manor while suitably epic choral chanting is heard in the background sets the scene for something new, taking Lara in a new direction perhaps, wiping the slate clean. You're then invited to watch a series of cut scenes from other games to explain what's going on. I skipped these, if you can't tell a story without relying on the 'Previously' recap then you should go back to the drawing board. Luckily the smart plotters had included what I needed to know - a week before the destruction of Croft Manor Lara goes looking for something that may hold the key to finding her supposedly dead mother who might still be alive in a parallel universe called Avalon.
Armed with this sweet notion about reuniting the family I dove in. Literally. And spent the next four hours exploring a lost Norse underwater city.
Lara's probably never been so able to interact with her environment. Walls can be scaled, columns shinned up, cliffs rappelled down. Amazingly, her cleavage never gets in the way. The same goes for the acrobatics, Lara doesn't just climb up to something, she does a handstand and spiders up to it. It might be amazing in the bedroom for her, but you'd need a harness and six months training with the Moscow State Circus to keep up.
And then I got the 'Wow' moment, as I ran into a chamber filled with one giant pissed-off looking Octopus.
That was the moment when I realised how much I had missed Lara and was taken back to the first game when the T-Rex first appeared. It wasn't about Angelina Jolie's accent* or the ridiculous outfits - it was about exploration, puzzle-solving and giant Harryhausen monstrosities. Second Life had spoiled me in terms of 3D exploration, all leisure time, no one shooting at me and more often than not completely deserted, but TRU showed me once again how exciting a game like this could be.
Surely the time for team exploration and not something as frenetic as World of Warcraft is here? I'm not talking about an XBox Live version of Time Team, but you must be able to create vast cave systems or castles that groups explore together online, pitting their wits and reflexes against other teams. Perhaps such a game does exist, but for now the XBox Live experience seems to be one about the team killing of underground insects, zombies, Nazis or underground-insect-Nazi-zombies. There must be a way of bringing TRU's puzzle-solving to a team environment... so for now I'll stick with Lara, the perfect partner... but only when it comes to scaling cliffs and killing giant creatures.
*In TRU Lara is voiced by Ashes to Ashes star Keeley Hawes who does a great job of putting on that voice you want to say "You've been a very naughty boy, now go to my room."
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