My relationship with Lara Croft.

I have a long and complicated relationship with Crofty, my first memory of Lara was when I was little (probably 3 or 4) and my Dad and Uncle both had Tomb Raider games and I would watch because i was terrible at video games
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 All was good watching my uncle make Lara swim underwater, it was pretty exciting and I was enjoying myself when out of now where a crocodile came along and ate her, I cried. Hysterically. I told my Uncle that it was a horrible game and he should throw it in the bin, to be honest it wasn't the best idea to let me watch Tomb Raider but I don't think games had age ratings back then.

The new Tomb Raider has been out a short while now and i came across a video on YouTube about the horrible death animations in the new game and I can tell you they are painfully brutal.

Aren't they lovely, now if I had seen that game as a child I would've been traumatized, weirdly enough these animations are now what draws me to this game, maybe it's because I can now appreciate the effort that goes into every gory frame, or because graphics are so much better now or maybe i'm old enough to not freak out when fictional people die. (okay so maybe I do freak out sometimes.)

Recently I've been playing the old PS1 Tomb Raider games, there is a long story about how I brought a second hand PS1 and games, my friends dad even gave me some PS1 games he had because i had been with my friend when i brought it , only to take it home and find out that I can't use it but as it turned out you can PS1 games on our PS3 so I didn't completely lose out.

The controls for the PS3 are so much easier than the PS1, I remember getting frustrated when I was little playing the Playstation but I thought I was just bad because I was young and I presumed that i got better over time. I was wrong.

I was stuck in this cave for ages, I can't remeber what the PS1 controller was like but when you play Play Station 1 games on the PS3 you use the arrow buttons to move, If you press the down arrow you hop backwards and to change direction you need to press the left or right arrow to turn on the spot then press forward to walk, this took me about 10 minutes to work that out, I still forget how to move and end up hopping around or running in circles.

Then I found this opening thing on a ledge, I tried to get Lara to jump onto the ledge but she just jumped up and down, It was so frustrating I eventually worked out that after she jumps you need to press another button so she grabs onto the ledge then press the up arrow to make her physically climb and I felt really stupid that i had spent so much time trying to climb a ledge that came up to Lara crofts chin.

 it was really weird to me, the games I play literally tell me what to do and or do it for me which also makes me feel stupid for not knowing what to do myself, like the Amazing Spider-man game for PS3 to move Spidey all you have to do is press a button to look through his goggles point to one of the golden Spider-men  and Spider-man will somersault through the air while you sit back and watch so having to physically haul Lara up onto a ledge seemed kind of alien but kind of cool at the same time.

Any way got out of that cave and got killed by bats, re-spawned worked my way through again, worked  out how to use the gun, shot the bats and carried on.
Like I mentioned before the controls did this annoying thing there you had to turn on the spot before moving and this made it hard to walk across the bridges in the nest room, I fell off the bridge and got stuck in a pit, the only way out of this pit was to find a ledge and climb out which isn't easy when you are hopping backwards trying to run away from wolves, I died.

By this point I spent so much time on this game and have barely even got through the first level but I thought I knew what I was doing so I re-spawned again and got back to the wolf pit room and tried not to fall into the pit and then I fell in the pit again, thankfully I shot the wolves this time, the room was kind of cool there was this 2D mummy thing that made me and my brother laugh, I climbed out of the pit and made my way to the next room.

The next room had a trench thing with vines growing out of the ceiling, I presumed that you have to jump across and/or swing on the vines, I jumped over the trench and I even button mashed hoping to do something cool to get my across but she just fell into the trench and the trench had a bear in it, the bear didn't really do anything to Crofty but i didn't want to let it try so I shot it  any way.

I made my way back to the top of the ledge and tried leaping again but landed next to my dead bear, I did this 2 more times before giving up, I couldn't even get through the first level and I swear i spent over an hour to get that far.
I still feel very embarrassed about the whole thing but I'll probably try it again at some point, now I know that there is someone out there who knows about getting over that trench and will embarrass me further but the point is that Tomb Raider is a fun and hard game (hard for me any way) and I will probably buy the new game at some point and I will be patiently awaiting any new Tomb Raider titles in the future.