Can anyone tell me why companies are so instant on giving us pre-e3 news on their titles and stealing the thunder of the regular e3 show? What happened to the good old surprise reveals? And every company holds their press conferences before the show. By the time we get to the show the surprises are over.
But I digress…
Here is a video of the upcoming “Tomb Raider” reboot that will be coming out fall 2012 (good grief that seems like a long ways off, companies should be banned from talking about stuff at e3 that won’t be out for a year).
(Forgive me, I’m about to get up on my soapbox and use the terms “chest”, “breasts” and “boobs” more then they ever have on this site. Hmm sounds like a ploy to get cheap hits from a search engine but I assure you its not. You’ve been warned.)
I posted this video not because I’m particularly excited about the game, or because the video is amazing although it looks cool enough. But I posted it because I think its interesting that this reboot of Lara Croft is essentially looking to take Lara, shrink her…um is chest a polite term?…and put her in an Uncharted rip off. Or at least that’s the vibe I get. Heaven knows we will start seeing ten thousand rip offs of uncharted after the success of Uncharted 2 and that’s not really a bad thing because its a great game (aside from some of the iffy gunplay and insane waves of hired goons to gun down) but it bears the question…does the video game public of 2012 want a grim, gritty, desexed, deboobed Lara Croft? (Okay she still has a chest in the video but its definitely not in the floatation device realm she was in the 90′s)
Lara Croft is the poster girl for video games and comic books in the early 90′s. You could take a mediocre game or story, throw a large breasted heroine with short shorts on the cover and sell a million copies. I’ve never much gotten into the whole Lara Croft/Tomb Raider thing but I know what a cash cow she used to be and how desperate the industry seems to be to constantly reboot her to get her back but now it seems they have abandoned what was unique about the character in the first place because its exactly what is holding her back in 2011.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for realistic heroines in video games and strong female characters that help the fairer sex embrace the male dominated industry of video games. And I know how difficult it is to get a new property to catch on in video games when its so much easier to save the effort and crank out sequels and spin offs. Maybe this game is a great next step in that process. But if we don’t want this game to remind us of big chested Lara Croft of the 90′s, then why are we so instant on making another Tomb Raider game in the first place? Maybe its time to leave Lara Croft (and any female superhero drawn by Rob Liefeld in the 90′s) behind…
