After several thousand levels splashing around barefoot on the world’s most poorly decorated ship, it was enough for me that Tibetan Foothills took place overground; it didn’t have to be awesome as well.
But awesome is what it is. It’s like the level designers had an attack of conscience somewhere around the third (empty-bloody-waste-of-time) floor of The Deck and decided to make Tibetan Foothills as compensation. You name it, Tibetan Foothills has got it; vehicles, pretty locations, minimal swimming…
Having just crashed the hijacked seaplane she was flying, Lara finds herself lost and under-dressed in the ranges of Tibet.
Why do so many Tomb Raider II levels begin with sliding? Well, okay, only about three so far, but that’s three more than Tomb Raider I. Is sliding the new ‘starting in a corridor’?
Eagles have returned from their extremely long leave of absence, although to be fair, we did leave their natural habitat (apparently China and surrounding areas) after the first level.
Why did they make the giant snow boulders look like fat, cuddly snowmen? It makes me feel bad for running away from them.
Note: snowmen appear cuter in my imagination than they do here, but you get the idea.
Tomb Raider teaches many important life lessons, but the fact that Lara can smash through giant panes of ice and escape unscathed is not one of them.
Stupid though they may be, at least Bartoli’s henchmen are better dressed for the climate. It looks like this guy is mocking Lara’s outfit and she’s proving how hard she is by rubbing her face into the snow.
Oh, yes.
The Skis are not available as a alternate mode of transport, mainly due to their underwhelmingness in comparison to the kick-arse snowmobile.
See? Could you do this with skis? Well, yes, probably, but would it look as awesome? NO.
Even Lara has to look away as she offs yet another endangered species.
At one point (more specifically, a room near the frozen lake), a passageway I passed through mere moments before turned into a solid wall. Is the Seraph up to its old physics-bending tricks again?
…yes. Most definitely.
These goons are posing like they’re a boy-band on an album cover. Or maybe Marco is in the habit of putting out an annual employee calendar and they’re all gunning for Mr December. The one that’s dead laying down is poorly executing some kind of flirty, frolicking-in-the-snow position.
Considering I needed to use this snowmobile, that’s possibly the worst place this selfish bastard could have crashed and died.
This is like the polar opposite of a scary corridor. It’s full of hope. It makes me feel all is right with the world and I’m not going to be forced back down under the sea.
And that wraps up another level. See you in the monastery for some monk-based action!
I would totally buy a Bartoli Henchmen pin-up calendar. But anyway.
ReplyDeleteThis level was a little bit ruined for me by the enemies on snowmobiles - I found them frustrating, terrifying, and much screaming (and possibly crying, if my traumatised memory serves me right) occurred. There's also something about these levels I find a little too... White. You may not like how the Bartoli's roll when interior decorating, but at least it's not so blinding.
Other than that, yay sky, and your writing was wonderful as always.
(and so I don't look like a total creep, commenting on one post then another, the violent-and-explosive-dismemberment thing from the previous post had me in stitches. You really have a gift for writing!)
I genuinely had a dream the other day in which you posted that you were going to stop writing these because nobody was reading them. I was horrified.
ReplyDeleteThe photo with smiling ice boulders looks like a Chi's one:) Amazing:)
ReplyDeleteThis blog is hilarious -- it's like an MST3K version of Tomb Raider.
ReplyDeleteI still have my '98 iMac (purple) specifically for the purpose of playing TR1 - Chronicles (I actually haven't played any of the other ones), and this level is *extremely* buggy. I can't use any of the snowmobiles (save for the very last one) because if I fall off a cliff on it, the game freezes and I have to reboot. And the system doesn't recognize any of my saves. Oy. It's still a fun level, but it'd be nice to use the snowmobile.
But nothing compares to the Temple of Xian, the best level of all TR games (in my opinion).