As a remake, the 2013 release of Tomb Raider has truly remade an iconic image.  But by beating her down, has Crystal Dynamics successfully created a reasonable image of a survivor?

In this week’s episode, we look at the re-imagining of Lara Croft in this year’s Tomb Raider reboot.

A couple of weeks ago at the 2013 Game Developers Conference, EA showed off a 17-minute demo of the upcoming Battlefield 4. It’s unusual (but awesome) for such a substantial gameplay video to be released at the same time as a game’s official announcement, but this is also a unique situation. The demo wasn’t just showing off Battlefield 4, it was also showing off the Frostbite 3 game engine that runs Battlefield 4 and that will run most of EA’s major next-gen games. This demo was meant to show off the graphical future of all EA games.

With all that weight on its shoulders, I’m left wondering, though: “Why feature a first-person shooter?”

It wouldn’t be right to call BioShock Infinite‘s themes subtle.  Its commentary on pretty much every “-ism” under the sun is on plain display.  Even so, the absence of “soapbox moments” instills the game with a sense of quiet confidence and healthy respect for the player.  BioShock Infinite contains imagery and themes concerning race, class, and gender that very few other games touch on, but it doesn’t present a series of heavy handed speeches that spell out how you should feel about them.  The game exhibits a unique combination of restraint in letting the evocative images exist on their own terms. 

In that spirit, I wanted to highlight some of the images that made an impact on me, as well as some of their real-world analogues.  I’ll provide some commentary, but hopefully the pictures from my digital photo safari are worth a few thousand words.

Recently while playing League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena, one of my team’s opponents burst out after making a kill, “GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL!”  A short moment afterward a second message issued by him appeared in my chat window, “Man, I miss playing Pokemon.”  To which I responded, “You are playing Pokemon.  You are grinding to catch ‘em all.”

Now, I’m not a member of the Pokemon generation.  While I have dabbled a little bit in collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, I’m a little too old for Pokemon.  My only real familiarity with the Pokemon brand is half watching it with my daughter when she was little.  I know that there is a video game in which, as a Pokemon trainer, you collect Pokemon.  I know there is a card game in which you buy lots of packs of random cards in the hopes of collecting a variety of Pokemon.  I know there is a show about a Pokemon trainer named Ash who, along with his friends, collect Pokemon.

That being said, I get the allure.  There are hundreds of these little creatures to catch in digital form and in physical form (as cards or toys), all of which have their own unique look and unique powers.  If I had been a little boy during the 1990s, I’m pretty sure I would have wanted to catch ‘em all.  Or at least as many of them as I thought were cool and even then I wouldn’t have turned my nose up at those I thought were less exciting.

On reflection, I feel like I know why I would want to catch ‘em all.  I feel as if I have been programmed from birth to collect, and even more specifically, to associate play and entertainment with collection.

Somewhere during the first third of Final Fantasy VII, as the party grows and events begin coalescing, the protagonist, Cloud, complains that he’s turning into a “three-ring circus.” This is a cute bit of meta-humor as the game followed the then common convention of having party members travel around inside the body of the main character. Whenever secondary characters were needed in a scene, they would emerge from Cloud’s body, and when the scene concluded, they’d approach him again and disappear, as though waiting in his pocket until they were next needed. Cloud’s joke is cute because it acknowledges an absurd and—at that point unnecessary—RPG staple.

Compacting the party into one body was a residual custom from the tabletop or low-bit count RPGs that reduced the number of moving parts at play when only one active character was needed. Outside of combat and scripted scenes, the player moves the leader and the leader moves the party; they are all one. Extending the logic of the party fitting into one body, it actually resonates well with the kind of themes JRPGs tend to cover. One of the core mechanics of JRPGs is party management, which has interesting implications for how the game conveys the journey of a cohesive group over that of an individual.