Tag Archives: Sphinx

The Birth of a Legend: A Look Back at the Original Tomb Raider

by in Ancient Egypt, Dinosaurs, Video Games and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Wow, apparently I haven’t posted anything about video games since I reviewed Chants of Sennaar back in May of 2024 . . . Yikes.

It’s probably because — I’ll admit — I haven’t been finishing many games recently, and the games I have finished are seemingly all installments of giant IPs with tons of previous games and history attached to the point where it seems impossible to talk about the newest one, without referencing the others, and pointless to reference the past games without linking to a review of an old game which at this point . . . (the review) doesn’t exist (yet?).

I’m not sure what type of neurological disorder to blame this incapacity on, but it’s completely killing the games section of this blog before it’s even had a chance to start. Boo this man!

Luckily, game companies have decided they’d rather re-release copies of old games than take risks on anything new, and so there seems to be a rash of “remastered editions” cropping up all over the place. And as much as I feel this is something of an artless grab for cash, it hasn’t stopped me from buying these editions up like hot cakes.

So, perhaps somewhat ironically, the first of these remasters I’ve been able to finish, was one I never played as a kid, Tomb Raider (1), which would have originally appeared on PlayStation (1) (though I’m playing it on PS5). This series is a cultural giant with (apparently) 31 games, 3 films, 2 (soon to be 3) TV shows, 6 novels and a few comics.

Despite the huge cultural significance of this series and Lara Croft as a character, my only real experience with the franchise was a five minute demo of Tomb Raider II which came with my original PlayStation, and the Angelina Jolie films in the early 2000s.

Needless to say, I was quite curious to play through the first game and see what all the fuss was about . . .

I was woefully disappointed. This game was Elden Ring levels of frustrating for me because of its unresponsive and needlessly complicated control schemes, a nearly useless tutorial, and a few seemingly irreversible predicaments — where if you save at the start of the mistake — you can’t get out of. But perhaps my biggest complaint and frustration was probably just the game menu UI. The option to load a saved game is the first thing available, before you toggle over to the save game option, or toggle over again to quit.

I cannot tell you how many times I was trying to save my progress after a difficult fight, or complicated series of traps, and accidently loaded my old game before I’d completed the progress I wanted to save. It was the most infuriating thing I’ve probably ever experienced (wow hyperbole much) and made me want to die nearly every time it sent me back (fun fact I apparently saved the game over 300 times while playing, imagine how many times I messed it up!).

This one difficulty alone made me realize just how far we’ve come with modern games, and I will never be more thankful for the auto-saving features inherent in the modern crop, than I was while playing this game. Now, some of this frustration may be unique to the remastered edition, as I’ve read that the original release had ‘save crystals’ instead. However, I can see how this may also have been a huge source of frustration if you could only save at the crystals, and they were not adequately frequent.

I’ve seen critiques that modern games are too ‘soft’, with too many helpful hints, and focus on story instead of gameplay, but if this original Tomb Raider is any judge, I’m quite happy with how modern games have evolved. There were many puzzles within this game which I had to look up how to solve, only to realize the solution was something I had tried multiple times already and just hadn’t had the luck (adequate control over the character?) to succeed.

Now I clearly must have still enjoyed the game in some capacity, otherwise I would not have struggled all the way to the end (or started the second one), so let’s go over what I did enjoy about my playthrough.

This game is kind of bonkers in just the right way. I can’t really think of another story in which you can shotgun a Tyrannosaurus Rex and some scant few hours later, explore the depths of an Ancient Egyptian tomb (almost could have been one of the influences for my book). It perfectly captures that jet-setting archeologist caricature, and then just continues to poor in fantasy after fantasy, whether it be motorcycles, uzis, zombies, or whatever else you might have dreamed of as a young boy (one enemy even shoots at you while riding a skateboard).

There’s a shoestring for a plot to tie all this together, and mostly it doesn’t make much sense, but somehow it feels right for the game and I mostly didn’t question it. The last stages take place in ‘Atlantis’ which in the Tomb Raider-verse is apparently some kind of bizarre living pyramid in which you run around fat and muscled corridors shooting up skinless horrors. It was the only point at which the “plot” felt like it took a left turn despite many other barely coherent scenes.

Of course we know that real tomb defenses are actually quite lame, but there is just something genuinely fun about putting yourself up against these more fantastical homages. A satisfaction in discovering a lever which opens a hidden door, or pushing a giant block (with hieroglyphs carved on all sides) into just the right place so that you can make an impossible leap to the nearest ledge, barely catch it with the tip of your fingers, and then pull yourself into a waiting treasure chamber. For most of us, this will likely be our only change to run from a giant boulder like Indiana Jones.

And though the City of Khamoon, and the pharaoh Tihocan are not real, it is still fun to try and pick out other little details like the Eye of Horus, or an homage to the Great Sphinx of Giza; the scarabs and ankhs which do reach back into real history.

(Note: there were no flesh eating scarabs to shoot at in this game, The Mummy (1999) is still 3 years away!)

Give Tomb Raider (1) a Play Through?

It’s tough to say. The game’s issues with intuitive, or even manageable controls, nowhere to turn for help, and frustratingly trapping mechanics are severe enough that I nearly gave up playing on several occasions. However, I ultimately pushed through because I enjoyed the sort of chaos present in both the plot and the many settings. Also, any story which takes me to Egypt in some (really any) fashion is going to get some extra effort (and points) from me.

That’s all I have this week. I’m curious about other people’s thoughts. Has anyone played through this one? Either back in the day, or more recently? What was your favorite part? Please leave your thoughts in the comments. I’m looking forward to talking about this one!

With Arm of the Sphinx, the ‘Books of Babel’ Is Quickly Becoming a New Favorite Series

by in Book Reviews, Fantasy and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I think we’re reaching Green Bone or Deavabad levels of excitement with this Books of Babel series.

Back in February, I was pretty much gushing about Bancroft’s character work in Senlin Ascends. For Arm of the Sphinx, its the twists. Of course its hard to write about this without giving the game away (which I won’t do), but let’s just say that this book is easily living up to my favorite mantra in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere novels:

“There’s always another secret.”

It seems like even small things are not what they seem, and Bancroft really leverages dramatic irony — when the audience knows more than the character — to great effect. I’m also quite astounded by the thought and planning it must have taken to weave these threads together. Things in Arm of the Sphinx are often unexpected, but never outright contradictory to what we know from book 1 and so it seems he must have had many of these ideas at least in mind if not fully fleshed out when writing that first book.

It has me wondering, and somewhat nervous (in a good way), what groundwork has been laid (that I missed), which will take me by surprise in book 3.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that we finally meet the enigmatic Sphinx in this book (they’re right there in the title lol). What a bizarre, eccentric and weirdly sinister character. Despite Senlin and friends flying around in an airship for about the first half of the story (I was actually a little worried this book would just be pirating and we wouldn’t explore any more of the tower at all), I felt that it was the time we spent with the Sphinx in which the book fully embraced its potential as a piece of Steampunk fantasy.

What strange and evocative technological marvels we get to experience, many of which should feel like old news in our modern times, but Bancroft really manages to inject a new sense of awe into them.

During the first levels of our ascent through the ringdoms of the tower (meaning while I was reading Senlin Ascends) I felt the only major weakness of the story was the book’s depiction of women. Senlin’s wife Marya is basically a MacGuffin, and Iren and Edith read a bit like male heroes in dresses (although I guess Iren doesn’t actually ever wear a dress). I finished book one hoping for a Marya POV chapter somewhere in the future, which I felt would give the story some complexity if not some much needed diversity.

In Arm of the Sphinx I’m slightly disappointed we still never got to see the tower through Marya’s eyes, but I’m happy to report that our other leading women take on more nuance and complexity through the course of this second book. In fact, Senlin isn’t even around in one chunk of the book, which just gives Edith and Iren more time to shine.

We also have Voleta taking on a more prominent roll. In my humble opinion, results here are mixed. I think she’s supposed to be around eighteen but read much younger to me. On the surface, this may not have been a problem if there was some backstory reason for her stunted maturity, which given the general anything-can-and-does-happen vibe of The Tower could have probably been pretty easy to explain away.

However, the Voleta we see in book one was essentially a prisoner in a brothel. Though her brother Adam tries to shield her as much as possible, I felt a large part of the dynamic there is that he’s mostly absent and ineffectual. As such, I would have expected Voleta to be more mature/jaded, and less childlike. Her devil-may-care disposition towards authority and personal safety (she should really be more freaked out by spiders) would still fit, but perhaps fit just a little better.

Despite the complaints above, I still managed to love and enjoy so many, many parts of this book. I’ll begin winding this love letter down with a passage which stuck out to me towards the end of the book. It reads:

“The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination. Perhaps libraries should bang on about how many volumes are on loan, are presently off crowding nightstands, and circulating through piles on the mantel, and weighing down purses. Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community? The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.“

I think we just need to hire Bancroft for the Library’s marketing team. Which library? All of them. Just in general.

Obviously given my background, this insight was much enjoyed and highly relevant to me personally, but I bring it up in this post to do more than just prattle on and feel seen. I included it as an example of the level of quality and care that Bancroft brings to every scene within Arm of the Sphinx. I’m sure there are a hundred other pieces of wisdom hidden within its pages which I do not have time to hunt down and record, but it feels like enough to know they are there.

Give This One A Read?

Please yes. The Books of Babbel is quickly joining the ranks of stories like the Greenbone Saga, Deavabad books, and Cosmere novels as all-time favorites. And Arm of the Sphinx only strengthens that positioning. With twist after twist (on things large and small), Bancroft continues to ratchet up my excitement about these novels.

Though we still never saw a point of view from Marya, I felt like we made great strides in fixing some of my issues with Senlin Ascends in regards to “writing women”, and while Voleta’s character seemed a bit off to me, it was not enough to detract from the things I enjoyed about the story, which were its sense of awe and (particularly Steampunk) brand of wonder, as well as Bancroft’s unique insight into a plethora of topics like art and libraries.

That’s all I have for this week. Has anyone been climbing this tower along side me? What are your thoughts so far? How stoked are you for The Hod King? And what has been your favorite part of this series to date?

Leave your answers in the comments. I’m excited to talk about this one!