a rant about Samantha<\/a>, the damsel in distress of the new Tomb Raider game.<\/p>\nIt was really temping to contrast Samantha with Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite, but I was afraid of doing cross-game comparisons that would likely get sidetracked into a frustrating “game X is superior to game Y” debate and confuse rather than illuminate the issue. <\/p>\n
My other major issue with the new Tomb Raider is it fondness for cutscene incompetence. Just about every cutscene involves Lara doing something really stupid or reckless. The writers also LOVE the use of off-screen space to poof in bad guys. There’s more than one situation where Lara seems be be alone, then a cutscene happens and someone punches her unconscious from just offscreen. <\/p>\n
Having all of your cutscenes deliver setbacks by having the player character perpetrate awful blunders is a great way to make the player hate either the writer or their avatar. I realize these problems are nothing new to videogames, but they are problems that really grate on me because they seem to be the offspring of laziness and bad habits. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My column this week is a rant about Samantha, the damsel in distress of the new Tomb Raider game. It was really temping to contrast Samantha with Elizabeth from BioShock Infinite, but I was afraid of doing cross-game comparisons that would likely get sidetracked into a frustrating “game X is superior to game Y” debate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[155,138],"class_list":["post-19242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column","tag-experienced-points","tag-tomb-raider"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n