Ninchilla

Tomb Raider Remastered doesn't have the best options of any photo mode I've ever seen, but it does let you both pose and reposition Lara in the scene…

Inevitable - maybe my favourite RPG that I've never managed to run - is DriveThruRPG's deal of the day - only £8!

007 First Light looked so generic and boring in the previews, I was amazed they even bothered to show it. So… many… exploding barrels.

In IOI we trust.

Play
I picked up Tomb Raider Remastered in a recent sale because I had some PSN credit burning a hole in my virtual wallet. The original Tomb Raider - on PC - was one of (maybe the?) first proper 3D games I ever played, so it's something of a formative gaming experience; the caves of Peru are seared into my memory in a way that few games since have ever managed.

It's a strange experience, in a few ways. It's relentlessly unforgiving in terms of platforming, and I regularly smack Lara's face into a wall and fall to her death because I did the wrong kind of jump. I'm starting to get the hang of it now, I think, but it's a much more ponderous experience than anything you get today. Any time I start to get impatient or try to hurry, the game immediately punishes me for it.

I still don't think many games - even in this series - have ever managed to get the same sense of loneliness that the original Tomb Raider has. It stands in stark contrast to modern Tomb Raider (or Uncharted, etc.) where the objective is usually clearly visible, and it's only a matter of working out how to get there; in 1996, there were big, echoing caverns stretching out into the dark, the limited draw distance enforcing a kind of ignorance about the right way to go. There's hardly any music, and even less dialogue - you're on your own, only the whistling Andean wind for company - until the wildlife turns up, anyway.

I can't play it for long in one go - in part, that's down to the controls, which are honestly quite frustrating. It defaults to Tank Control, but the "modern" scheme is even worse, and I found it almost impossible to properly judge a jump with that switched on. The other part is the tension - it's a game where you can die very suddenly, as a result of anything from your own incompetence, to a collapsing floor, to a lion suddenly leaping around a corner that you couldn't see. I'm in the Colosseum at the moment, and that litterbug Pierre keeps popping out from behind a pillar to gun me down. Bastard. I intend to see it through to the end, if I can, but I very much doubt I'll be getting anywhere near the Platinum.

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Because it's on the PS+ Game Catalogue - and because the score (by Garry Schyman of BioShock, with a main theme by Bear McCreary!) is very good - I've been playing a bit of Forspoken, which got roundly dunked on at release, for being quite cringily written. I actually don't think it's that bad - there's too much dialogue, but I don't know that it's much worse than a lot of other games. The controls are a bigger issue (the "parkour" is all but useless when presented with an obstacle much bigger than Frey is), the environments are dull and difficult to navigate, the camera is far too close to follow the action in combat, and basically everyone except Frey looks like a mannequin with a half-frozen face, but I'm kind of enjoying it, in a "this absolutely doesn't matter" kind of way. Wouldn't recommend it.

Want
007: First Light. I mean, obviously.

I keep um-ing and ah-ing over Clair Obscur; obviously it's gotten a (mostly) great reception, but I'm not a big JRPG guy. Maybe in a big sale down the line.

All my Kickstarters to arrive. Most aren't due to ship until next year, though.

Bin
Fascism.

Two shoutouts for Wilbert Roget, II: