Tuesday 26 January 2016

Geek Syndicate Review: Tomb Raider #1

Wherein I review the umpteenth first issue of Tomb Raider. Short version: it's a reasonably competent stab at Generic Action Heroine #1, but that's all it is, in the main.

6 comments:

darkman said...

You should give the 2013 game a chance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFovzdGjsZA

SpaceSquid said...

I've played that in full, actually, but only because it was free, so it felt like cheating.

SpaceSquid said...

In full, my Lara Croft experience before this comic is:
Tomb Raider 2 (about a quarter)
Tomb Raider 3 (about a third, I think?)
Tomb Raider: Rimmer the Film (in full, alas)
Tomb Raider: The Isometric Whatever, I Guess
Tomb Raider: the Teenaging.

Pause said...

The comment about the sounds appearing in different panels being hard to accomplish well in a game - XIII had those little inset panels showing other activities around you or elsewhere on the map, didn't it? A sound effects system could probably be made to work fairly well in a game using something like that, though perhaps not for every sound, that may quickly get unplayable. And obviously the style itself already owes a huge debt to comic books...

darkman said...

David Cage is also a big fan of using insert panels in his games.
Alot of games already have dynamic music so I don't see how having something like that for sounds is impossible.

SpaceSquid said...

Pause: Yeah, excellent call on XIII, rather annoyed I'd forgotten it. As you say, though, that worked precisely because it adopted the visual language of comics in any case, and even so couldn't do it with the same speed or effectiveness of the page.

darkman - I confess I've not played any Cage games. I don't really see how the dynamic music example really holds, because music is omni-directional and all-encompassing. If multiple musical stings overlapped, that would be closer to what I'm talking about; the process of distinguishing actual sounds requires we can focus on them individually, which - in my experience, anyway - simply can't be done as quickly aurally as visually. So yes, the panel approach lets you do this, but that's no better an argument that games can do this as well as comics as Synder's Watchmen is proof you can film something to convey the same visual information as the printed page does. If you can only generate the same effect by appropriating the same visual language, it's almost by definition inferior.