A Survivor is Born (Tomb Raider Review)

I grew up around Lara Croft, but I didn't grow up with Lara Croft, if that makes sense. While everyone was oogling over one of video game's first female protagonists during her debut on the Playstation, I was busy being loyal to Nintendo and a certain well-known plumber.

That being said, over the past few years, I've made it a point to see what all the hoopla is about. My first Tomb Raider game was Legend on my PS2, and then Anniversary on the same system. Legend's level layout, gameplay, and story was decent, and I especially loved the character costumes you could unlock for Lara in her mansion. Anniversary was good, but because it was a remake of one of the original Tomb Raider games, it didn't seem to bring anything new to the table that I hadn't already seen in Legend.

A few months ago, my brother began prodding me to grab a copy of the latest Tomb Raider incarnation. During the holidays, I managed to spot it at Target for only $15 brand new, but I still wasn't convinced it was a game that I wanted to add to my ever-expanding list of 2014 titles for my Xbox 360. Then, just before Christmas, I stumbled across a $10 price tag for a brand new copy of the game at GoHastings.com. I grabbed it, and I have to put this decision in the top ten best decisions I've made in my life.

Tomb Raider is Crystal Dynamic's reboot of the Lara Croft character. The story places Lara at the very

beginning of her tomb-raiding adventures, when she's a mere adventurer on the ship Endurance. The passengers aboard Endurance venture into the Dragon's Triangle to search for the lost kingdom of Yamatai. And as most video game stories go, this is where everything hits the fan. A storm wipes out the boat, and Lara and her team are tossed on an island full of cult members, mercenaries, and strange supernatural happenings. A man named Mathias is attempting to resurrect the Sun Queen, and Lara is pulled by fate to put a stop to it before he tosses the island into utter annihilation.

But unlike most video games (at least the ones I've played) the story that takes Lara from innocent, timid, inexperienced young girl to brutal, assertive, seasoned woman is one of the best and most believable that I've ever played through. What makes the story more believable is the decision by the game designers to tone down Lara's sexuality and focus more on her character. While Lara was a video game sex icon in earlier years because of her well-endowed pixels, this incarnation of Tomb Raider forms a much more serious character.

Throughout the game, Lara's friends are being abducted and killed, she's being kidnapped and nearly-molested, and through the whole experience, you cringe at the various damage Lara takes - gunshot, fractures, scrapes, falls, etc. Her character is fragile, and you feel that fragility when you play as her during most of the first half of the game. She is a victim, she is afraid, and she is scrambling to find anything she can get her hands on to survive her next encounter with any and all who would try to harm her. The game itself is gritty, with dark themes surrounding a cult and its bloodthirsty followers, lending to the game's realism and edgy tone.

What I love most about this game is that Lara's story isn't one about revenge. The people close to her get killed off or abducted, and Lara herself is beaten, shot, cut, and other things. But this isn't a story about her going on a vendetta. It's a story about her trying to do the right thing and surviving to that point. Her origin story is about turning her from victim to survivor, and a survivor who goes on to become one of video gaming's most endearing and well-known adventurers. And you truly feel that survivor theme shaping her character as you progress through the game. The writers did such a wonderful job with her story, and the game designers did an equally impressive job building a game to show off that story.

As far as gameplay elements go, Tomb Raider does exceedingly well. Throughout the game, you collect salvage from enemies and crates and can use that salvage to upgrade your weapons, and a simplistic skill-tree turns Lara from a trembling flower into a brutal opponent. For completionists, which I am, there is much in this game to appease your obsession to find every little trinket that a game has to offer. Treasure maps, GPS caches, journals telling the backstory of the island, and of course artifacts litter each section of the game. There are also ancient tombs you will stumble across, each of which offers up a satisfying puzzle to solve for even more treasure. Along with all the goodies you can grab, there are also unique challenges such as find five of this item or destroy three of that item. And you'll eventually grab a skill that allows you to see treasures and then have them marked on your map. Fast travel between camps allows you to go back to previous locations and scramble to grab everything. The system is set up to make it convenient but not overly easy to reach 100% game completion.

This game easily fits into my top five favorite games of all time. The game didn't take me too long to complete, but the experience itself more than makes up for the lack of a fifty-hour runthrough I'm used to with games like Skyrim. I will be making it a point to go back and play the game all the way through again sometime in the near future, just because I loved the experience so much.

Tomb Raider also has multiplayer, but I haven't dived into that too much yet, and I probably never will. The only negative thing I have to say about this game is that 15 of the possible 50 achievements are multiplayer based, making them an agonizing task for those of us who don't like multiplayer but want to gain all achievements in our Xbox 360 game. 

Photos - Square Enix

Free Time

When I'm not spending time with family, working on my writing projects, or sleeping (which is overrated by the way), these are a couple of the 'free-time' things I've been up to lately...

Currently, I'm reading House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski. I'm a little more than halfway through the book, and I have to say this is probably the creepiest book I have ever read. I'll admit that aside from the Han Solo trilogy - which is my all-time favorite book series, I consider Stephen King's Dark Tower series to be my second favorite.

Until I started reading House of Leaves.

This book's premise is a bit too confusing to sum up outside of a full-blown book review (which I will definitely be doing once I'm done reading it), so I'll just leave you with this Goodreads link, and you can check out a description and reviews of the book yourself - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337907.House_of_Leaves. To say the least, I absolutely love this book. It does lean heavily at times into some heavy sexual content, but other than that, the book does a tremendous job of pulling you into its multiple layers.


When I'm not reading, I am usually gaming. I grew up with video games (my dad introduced me to the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64 when I was growing up), and it is by far my favorite past time now. The only problem is that I can be very ADD with video games, playing them halfway through and then moving on to others, sometimes playing three or four at a time, but never really fully appreciating any particular one because the plots, controls, characters and other aspects get lost in the confusion.

I've been consciously making an effort as of late to focus on one or two games and stick with them until they are beat or mastered. The only exception is Half Life 2: Deathmatch, which I play everyday on my lunch break. The two games I'm currently playing right now are Guild Wars 2 (which I'm always constantly jumping into anyway, even though my computer has to push itself to the max just to run it at all in lowest graphic settings), and....

Dead Island. Dead Island is a game I picked up about a year ago and promptly returned a few days later. I just couldn't get into the game for some reason, but I found it at a bargain price a couple of weeks ago and decided to give it another try. I sure am glad I did. Once you have the mechanics of the game down, it's a fun and satisfying zombie slashing adventure. It also has a lot of collection elements to it, and a decent loot system, which makes it an all-around favorite for me.

Giving Thanks

With Thanksgiving coming tomorrow, I wanted to take a moment and post some of the things that I'm thankful for. These are things I am thankful for all year long, but I figured since it's Thanksgiving, maybe I'd actually go public with them.

My relationship with God.
These last few years have brought me closer to God and further from myself - the parts of myself that need to die and make room for newness and better fruit. It's been a challenging journey through self-publishing, writing, and family matters since I left my '9-5' job back in 2009, but God has seen my family through and shown us miracles and countless proofs of His love for us. I'm thankful that He is a God who is continuously active in our lives.

My family -
I am blessed beyond measure with my wife and my son. My wife and I have grown so very close to each other during this journey, and I cannot imagine my life now without my dear son. Working from home while also taking care of my son has been a challenge, and I've had to learn to grown into certain spots, but overall, I wouldn't trade my family or the experiences we share together for anything in this world.

My Career -
I've been writing stories since I was eleven, and now that I'm thirty-three, I find my passion to write becoming an ever-growing obsession. I have had the ability and privilege to write from home full time and grow into this self-publishing business. At times, this writer's life is frustrating and hectic, but those golden moments when I get chills reading something I toiled over or hearing how my writing changed someone's outlook on life are priceless and make all the struggle worth it.

My hobbies -
This should probably be changed to hobby (singular) - video gaming. I grew up with video games. My dad introduced me to computers at a young age, and I still remember playing Choplifter on my Commodore 64. Video games run in my blood, and I still enjoy them to this day, sneaking in moments of gaming goodness whenever I get the chance. In fact, if I wasn't called to writing, I definitely would have entered into the area of video game design for my career.

I hope all of you have a great Thanksgiving, regardless if the retail industry attempts to overshadow it with nonsense. I'll be back on this blog next week, ramping up for the release of Black Earth: Exodus!

My Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Experience

I picked up the original Guild Wars on a whim about four years ago - I'm almost certain I purchased it from Target. And when I first dived into the MMO - my first - I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. As much as the game is catered toward community involvement, I have always been a solo kind of guy, so when Guild Wars allowed me to take NPCs with me on my adventures through the world of Tyria, I did so in lieu of calling on the support of real people.

And that made my gaming experience pleasurable in some areas, and not so much in others. The not so much was mainly in dungeons, where it required a lot of thinking, strategy and skill to pass through the hours of gameplay to get through a particular dungeon or even just to pass one of the game's many missions. I've never really had the patience to customize NPCs so that I have a specific group built with specific skills and specific armor in order to get through a specific dungeon...so I failed in certain areas of the game.

But other areas were more solo friendly, like most exploration areas, certain missions, and game festivals and events, which let me do my thing without having to call on other people - a portion of which are immature teeny boppers who don't really know what teamwork is. So overall, I was able to enjoy Guild Wars to a certain point. And when I heard about Guild Wars 2 being in production, I was ecstatic. I wondered if they would simply improve upon the areas of the game that I didn't care for, or if they would make the game even more difficult and community reliant to the point where I wouldn't want to play it at all.

Well, after playing the Guild Wars 2 beta this last weekend, I am more than happy to say they have, quite possibly, built one of the best games I have ever dived into. Not just the best MMO, but one of the best games in general.

My computer falls under the minimum system requirements for the game - so certain areas were extremely laggy, although some of that can be attributed to the fact that it was a beta and that there were sooooo many people online at one time, testing ArenaNet's servers - which is one of the points of a beta. Because of that, I didn't bother taking any game capture video. But I did take a slew of screenshots which will hopefully detail some of my experience in the world of Guild Wars 2.

When you first start the game, you are brought to the character creation screen. And for purposes of the beta, we were only allowed to pick between human, Charr, or Norn. And as much as I love the Norn and wanted to check out their storyline, I always start my games as human to see where the storyline is going to go.

So, I picked human and then I was brought to the screen where you choose your profession. I almost always - at least in Guild Wars - enjoy being the elementalist, so that's the one I picked. Then you go through the screens where you choose what your character is going to look like, questions are asked regarding what kind of background you want your character to have - which will in turn help form the storyline you will follow in the game.

After all that, here is my character. (This is after I found some armor dropped from enemies, dyed it with the color Autumn, and obtained an awesome looking magical staff through mission objectives.)

Velvet Rio

In the beginning of the game, I was thrown into the city of Queensdale where Centaurs were attacking the town. This is where I learned to use my magic skills which are connected to the weapon that I have, as opposed to strictly being connected to the character I have created. Although in this game, I don't have to specialize in any one elemental power - I can specialize in all of them: Earth, Water, Fire, Air. And I can switch between them at will, making it very easy to structure my attack strategy according to the type of enemy I am fighting.

Fighting Centaurs with fire.

Once I helped defend the land, I decided to explore, which is by far my favorite thing to do in any game I play, especially RPGs. The neat thing about Guild Wars 2 is that when you explore, you are doing so with others, where as the original Guild Wars had you in your own instance of the game, cordoned off from others except the party you brought with you. I didn't think I'd like this change at first, but it quickly grew on me. The world just feels so alive with the other players, the environments, and the NPCs. The game does have instances where it's just you and the NPCs, but those are the tailored story lines relevant to your character. Even when there wasn't any real players on screen, I still didn't feel like I was alone - I felt like I was in a living, breathing world. And when you and countless other random strangers are all banding together to destroy a large spider wreaking havoc on some poor farmer's crops - that's epic.

Killing the giant spider is a community effort!

Now I'll dive into the areas I felt Guild Wars 2 really excels in:

Battle -
The game's battle system is pretty easy to understand. You click or press a key to activate skills, fight enemies in real time, and loot the heck out of them. Your armor can be damaged in this game - unlike the original GW - but I like the addition of that because it forces you to be strategic.

The other addition I enjoyed was the fact that you get another chance to live if you end up getting slaughtered - you can either fight back, and if you kill an enemy, you come back to life with low health; or another player can come by and heal you back to life; or you can heal yourself back to life if you can do it before you're completely slaughtered by the enemies you are fighting. (This reminded me of the system used in Left 4 Dead, but that's not a bad thing.)

Fight to survive!

You also have backpacks and bags in this game - just like the original - where you can keep the goodies you loot and find throughout the world. You can obtain/craft a certain number of bags (inventory space) throughout the game, which is always something I make as a high priority in RPGs, mainly because I am a lootaholic!

The # of inventory slots you can have can be increased as you travel through the game.

Customization -
The game is brilliant when it comes to customizing your character. In the original guild wars, you couldn't find armor as drops from enemies - you had to craft/buy it. In Guild Wars 2, enemies drop armor, and the variety is very nice. It actually makes me want to keep slaughtering those enemies just to see what goodies are going to drop into my possession.

Also, in the first Guild Wars, you could only change the color of your armor after initially designing your character if you purchased/found/traded vials of dye - some of which were rare, like the black or white. In Guild Wars 2, they give you preset colors you can choose from on a constant basis to change the color of your armor. And then you can find dye seeds and turn them into random dye - some rare, some uncommon. (I wasn't able to find where to take my dye seeds in the beta, but I hope to approach that issue once again in the next beta.) What's nice about the dye too, is that it seems some of them are themed. You'll notice the screenshot of my lone character in the beginning of this post - I dyed her with a color named Autumn and it gave her outfit an orangish, yellowish, reddish tone. Very nice!

I only happened to stumble on this by accident, but apparently you are also given an outfit you can customize and wear in town. This is really nice if you just want to putt around and talk to NPCs or actual people but want to look a bit more classy.

Rockin' the hat!

Weapons are customizable just as they were in the original Guild Wars. You can attach runes and other magical artifacts to them to make them more powerful or give them special attributes. You can also carry a greater number of accessories to raise your attributes or harness certain effects.

Crafting - 
In the original Guild Wars, you could craft armor if you had the right materials, but then the variety of armor was limited and some of the armor took a ridiculously long amount of time and hassle to get the money and materials for. Guild Wars 2 fixes that by actually allowing you to salvage materials from the environment. You can mine for metal, chop wood, or harvest plants/herbs - all which can be used in the game's extensive crafting system.

Chopping me a tree!

GW2 allows you to pick two crafting professions at a time. You can choose between weaponsmith, jewelery maker, armorer, cooking, and a slew of others. When you have enough supplies to craft something - which the game keeps record of in your character's profile screen - you can go to the station relevant to your crafting profession and craft the item. You can even find recipes - at least I could with the cooking profession.

This opens up a whole new world of discovery and exploration for the Guild Wars franchise. After playing Skyrim, which is one of the few games I thought did weapon crafting well, it's nice to see GW2 incorporating it into their already massive world.

Exploration - 
I don't really have the time to get into the massive amount of exploration this game has. I'm not sure how many hours I actually played during the beta weekend, but I know I didn't even scratch the surface of this iceberg. The original GW was huge, but this game is MASSIVE.

This isn't even the whole world map. O_O

Even the town settlements are huge.

GW2 added underwater exploration, which is a very nice addition and seems to run pretty smoothly - at least more smoothly than other games which allow for underwater exploration.

And you never really know who you're going to run into.

What is that?!

Economy - 
The economy setup in GW2 is beyond brilliant. They have trading posts set up where people can post their items into the game's economy for others to purchase or they can purchase items others have put up for sale. It's all based on supply and demand, just as in the original GW. It did take me a while to figure out how to use GW2's system - I ended up ordering 23 Mystic Chests as opposed to the 2 I wanted because I kept clicking the BUY button not realizing the items I purchased could be found under the PICK UP tab.

There are three types of currency in the game: gold, karma, and gems. You gain gold as drops from enemies, from chests, from selling items, etc. The norm. You get karma by doing favors for NPCs around the world. You can trade this karma for certain items/armor/weapons. There are also gems - an item which can be purchased with real world money or traded with in-game gold. That is really nice because it means I can get gems just by putting more time into the game if I don't really care to dig into my wallet. Or, if I want convenience, I can just purchase gems. It's nice that I have the option to do one or the other.

Gems can be used to purchase items that allow for game convenience or character appearance. Nothing that can be bought with gems has anything to do with making your character more powerful - which is nice because it bars someone from taking advantage of the system.

The game also has a mail system that allows you to send in-game mail attached with items to other people in the game. It is also the system used to gain certain rewards from NPCs for helping them with certain objectives.

You've got mail...

I also found that GW2 has a greater variety of items you can purchase from merchants.

Wurm Poppers?

Achievements - 
The most impressive addition to GW2 are achievements.

There are daily achievements - which give you a reason to pick up the game every day.

There are monthly achievements, which give you something to strive for each month.

And there are overall achievements.

I think you gain rewards for achieving specific requirements - the reason for the treasure chest up on the daily and monthly page - but I didn't receive anything for accomplishing the daily achievement in the game, so I'm not sure what the reward is. (Something I reported as a bug.)

And although it was disabled during the beta, they have the Hall of Monuments achievements up which connects to the titles and trophies you earned in the Hall of Monuments in the original game and carry over as awards in GW2.

Level Up -
One of my biggest complaints of GW was that once my character hit Level 20, that was it. I couldn't really get more powerful or level up anymore. In GW2, I'm not sure what the level cap is - although I've read somewhere that it's 80 - but you can earn skill points and trait points as you level up, both of which you can spend towards unlocking new skills and traits. Although I wasn't able to unlock the traits before end of beta because I didn't realize you have to purchase a book to unlock the Traits bars.

Your weapons level up as well - the more you use certain weapon skills, the more other skills unlock. It's  nice, because you can level up the skills that you want instead of feeling like you're forced to stay with certain ones. At least this was the case with my elementalist and the four elements I was destroying everything with. (Although I always lean more toward fire.)

Artwork - 
My final category of praise for GW2 is the artwork. There were areas in the original GW that I really didn't care to traverse - most of Nightfall comes to mind. It just looked dreary to me, which I understand was the point, but it didn't make me want to play through most of the environments. But the new paint style and environments and character design in GW2 - it's all just absolutely phenomenal.

Loading screens have never looked so good!

All in all, I was extremely pleased with the beta weekend. I didn't take time out to try out Player Vs Player or World Vs World, nor did I really get around to trying out Charr or Norn races, but I'm sure I'll have plenty of time to check them out in future betas.

Yeah, there were issues, but it was a beta, and none of those issues looked to be issues that are going to stay with the game. I did feel lost at times when it came to using certain mechanics of the game, but I'm certain that came with it being a beta and with lack of game manual. ArenaNet did a great job crafting surveys that I would find along the way to give back my input on the game. And after you sift through the minor errors and whatnot, you have a game that is going to, beyond the shadow of a doubt, dominate the MMO community when it releases.

Guild Wars 2 and the Black Earth Writing Marathon

I have been waiting - as have many fans have - so incredibly long for this game to come out. I was mostly pleased with the original Guild Wars, even though I didn't have the time to master the game, so I was pretty excited last week when they announced pre-purchase. I now have a copy of Guild Wars 2 reserved, and next weekend (the 27th) is their first open beta weekend - which I get guaranteed access to since I pre-purchased.


Yeah, I'm stoked!

But I'm also on deadline. Black Earth: Bridge to Anaisha (tentative title) - the fourth and final volume in my Black Earth series - has to be finished by the end of the month, and there are only two weekends left that I can take advantage of to really plug away at the novel. Next weekend is one of them.

What to do, what to do?

I know! A Black Earth writing marathon. Starting today, I'm going to fill my IV with Mountain Dew (Code Red, Baja Blast, and Original), crank my writing meter up to RIDICULOUS, and plug away at this manuscript so I can get it finished by next Friday at noon - the time that the beta weekend starts.

Just writing this, it sounds crazy. I'm only 75,000 words into this thing, still aren't sure where some of the storylines are going, and still have the final scenes to write from scratch. Not to mention the over 250 story notes I still have to go through, all before I can pass it off to my editor.



But Guild Wars 2 is calling. And what better motivation to finish before deadline than the chance to enter the world of Tyria again after years of anticipation?

Here we go! By the way, this means I won't be blogging next week, aside from the Black Earth flash fiction piece #4, which will be posted on Wednesday. Assuming my computer handles the beta okay - I am crossing my fingers - I'll be blogging about my game experience the week after the beta weekend.

See you all on the other side! And leave me a comment if you too are going to be leaping into the world of Guild Wars 2 as well.

The Guilty Pleasure of Playing Ar Tonelico

I used to only enjoy first person shooters and some platform games, but over the years I've fallen deeply, madly in love with RPGs. Currently I am busy building my collection of old PS2 classics like Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, Final Fantasy XII, and Rogue Galaxy.

There is, however, another game (series) that I attempted to play through a while ago - Ar Tonelico - and quickly quit, due to its...strange nature. I'll admit, years ago, aside from the Final Fantasy series, I didn't dabble in many Japanese RPGs. At one point I stumbled across the Persona series and, after getting part way through the story, thought: What kind of weird stuff is this?

Funny, I know. But lately I've made it a point to start appreciating video games for their artistic expressions along with their gameplay value. When I picked up the first Ar Tonelico game, Melody of Elemia, a couple years ago and played through it a bit, I found myself somewhat embarrassed and feeling childish for entertaining myself to such a strange - and some might say perverted - game.

Well, I'm all grown up now boys and girls, and I'm taking another stab at the series...and I'm loving it.

The basic premise is the world is about to be destroyed and you have to save it. Usual RPG plot. But these games are anything but typical RPG fodder. They are a mashup of platformer, RPG, and even have some mild dating sim elements.

The most unique thing about the games is the female characters called  Reyvateils. They have the ability to sing songs that release magic to help you in battle, but in order to help them craft this song magic, you have to go to a dive shop and 'dive' into their cosmosphere, or soul space. If that sounds a little dirty...it's meant to. The games take a very tongue-in-cheek route to the male libido. Dialogue in the game is borderline perverted - if taken out of context - which it's hard not to, especially when the back of the first game's packaging states, 'You never forget your first,' and the second game's packaging states, 'Always come back for seconds.'

For those who wonder how far this game goes in bringing sexual content to the table, the games are rated T (not M) for suggestive themes and partial nudity - at least in the case of the second in the series. However, as a comparison, I played Final Fantasy XII and it states on its package that it too is rated T for partial nudity but I think it was only because of some of the character costumes, which I guess according to some prude gamers can be considered risque. Personally, I found nothing warranting the partial nudity claim in that game. And from what I can tell so far, Ar Tonelico is not a porno series.The innuendo is brought into the game in a somewhat humorous fashion alongside all the quirkiness a Japanese RPG is known to have, at least from my experience.Initially, the innuendo is what turned me off from the game, only because I had never played a game of this caliber before. But if one takes the time to move past the immature - yet most times hilarious - dialogue, there is a true gem of a game underneath.

Ar Tonelico has traditional RPG elements - you fight enemies, gain experience, level up, craft items. It all makes for a fun time. Most of the time on the playing field is done up in 2D sprites. The game then switches to beautifully illustrated cutouts during character dialogue. Overall, the presentation is nice and easy on the eyes. A welcome change to other RPGs I've played in the past, and even to some I've played recently on next-gen systems.

The real heart of the game though is the Reyvateils' cosmosphere. The objective is to dive into their subconscious and help the Reyvateils battle their inner demons. There is a deep psychological aspect to this realm - the Reyvateils will struggle with acceptance, insecurities, dark sides to the bubbly or snobbish personalities they exhibit on the surface. There isn't anything particularly challenging, gamewise, to getting through these areas, but it's fascinating to take the trip into their inner most realms and help them work out their less illustrious traits. Doing so enables the Reyvateil to craft powerful song magic you can use in battle, and helps the Reyvateils to enter a paradigm shift, which enables your character to move to a deeper level of the soul space and a deeper level of the Reyvateil's innermost being. I can't recount one other game I've played that takes such a unique approach to the psychological aspects of a video game character.

I know some of the people in my circle of friends and family would immediately shun this game for the sexual content - most of which is innuendo - alone, but I think the core of Ar Tonelico has an entertaining story and rich enough gameplay that you don't see much of in today's next-gen video games.

I managed to nab both Ar Tonelico: Melody of Elemia and Ar Tonelic II: Melody of Metafalica a little while ago and am currently playing through the first of the series, Melody of Elemia. There is also a third game that just came out in the series, Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel, but that's on the PS3 and I don't plan on getting a PS3 anytime soon. Though donations are always welcome. ;) For now, I'll enjoy these guilty pleasures in my epic game collection.