Raiding Tombs for a Living

I've been playing a lot of computer games lately, partly because it's a cheap form of entertainment and partly because it's something I'm really passionate about. I buy most of my newer games on sale from the Steam Store. Recently I picked up the 3 Hitman games, a few Half-Life 2 Mods, both Deus Ex games, and Tomb Raider Anniversary and Legend. I've been enjoying them all, but something about the Tomb Raider Series completely threw me off.

I've always been a fan of the series. Lara Croft is one of the first playable characters I remember and I've always felt close with the character. I played the Hell out of the first three games and am intimately familiar with the storyline up to that point. I rented and quickly played through The Last Revelation and Chronicles, which I feel added nothing to the storyline or the series as a whole. I haven't played the games at all since then until I downloaded Anniversary last week.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary is an expanded remake of the original game. Some of the locations are the same with a few minor tweaks, some are re-imagined with better gameplay, some are entirely new and add continuity to the game. As soon as I saw Lara's tour guide get eaten by wolves at the beginning of the game, I was drawn back into the world. I would flinch every time she got hit by an angry bear and cringe at every jump I wasn't absolutely sure of. I felt her anguish in the last area where we had to kill her first human enemy.

Enamored with the experience, I downloaded Tomb Raider:Legend. Even though Legend was released a year before Anniversary, it takes place almost 10 years after the events of the original game. Although Lara's James Bondish personal style threw me off a bit, the deep storyline and brilliant locations kept me in. I had to Gamefaqs almost every boss and the interactive cutscenes drove me crazy, but I was hooked. That is, until the end.

The opening scene of the game shows Lara and her mother at a archeological site in the jungle. Lara stumbles upon an artifact which reacts to her presence. Her mother tries to save her, and in turn dies. The rest of the game is spent finding parts of this particular artifact and carrying it back to this location. When that is accomplished and the final Boss, let's call her Amanda, is defeated things turn for the worst. Lara activates the artifact and a portal opens in time and allows for communication between Lara and her mother.

Lara begins speaking to her mother, who is concerned for her daughter, standing behind her. Adult Lara tells her mother not to touch the sword, while Amanda yells to remove the sword or the contraption will explode. Lara's mother follows the advice and dies, while Lara ignores the advice and flees the exploding device. Essentially, Amanda killed Lara's mother. And that's that.

Lara doesn't kill Amanda. She simply mutters something and walks away. She contacts her right hand man and lays the beginnings of a plot to possibly find another location where the artifact will work (it had been established that there were a number of them), but that's it. Credits and a black screen. There is no closure and I'm really fucking pissed off about that.