Tomb of Qualopec

Tomb of Qualopec is probably my favourite out of all the Peruvian levels. For one thing, it’s short (I get bored easily), and there’s not a lot of things to jump out on you.

Doesn’t this look familiar? The Peruvians liked their corridors.

Finally, a bit of colour! As the name suggests, Lara has finally uncovered the tomb of Qualopec where (according to Natla), the Scion is.

Like all tombs, Qualopec’s is crammed with tricks and traps designed to destroy anyone that dares trespass. This boulder run teaches every budding Tomb Raider to be wary of long, downwards-sloping corridors.

And there’s the Scion, typically behind a locked door. “You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?”

I am proud to say that it took me upwards of two minutes to find this lever switch. Which means I’m starting to forget what to do in this game! It is becoming a challenge once again!

Naturally, Qualopec stuffed a whole lot of angry velociraptors into his tomb before he died. And once again, I must marvel at the beautiful symmetry of these creatures’ deaths.

These are the three rooms the velociraptors were guarding. As far as I’m aware, each symbol correlates to a Atlantean ruler (did I mention you shouldn’t read this blog if you don’t want to have the story of Tomb Raider 1 spoiled for you? You also shouldn’t play Tomb Raider Anniversary). The left one is Tihocan (with his foofy head wear), the right one is Qualopec (with his helmet and voice box) and the middle one is Natla (with her…uh…hair).

The first glimpse of a beloved Tomb Raider institution; the spike pit. Rows of jagged pointed poles covered with the dried blood of victims past. Lara can walk through them with no ill effect, but jumping on to them is another matter.

The golden mummy is back! And this time he’s in more suitable surroundings.

Qualopec was also big on collapsible floors that drop you into mortal danger.

After finding switches in all three rooms, you manage to open an alternate route to the Scion.

And here’s Qualopec, who apparently didn’t want to let a little thing like death stop him from guarding his prized possession. Notice the two mummified attendants…the one under Tihocan’s symbol seems fairly docile, but the one under Natla’s symbol…

…that one’ll lunge at you if you get too close. Foreshadowing, perhaps?

Thankfully, the mummy is too old and dead to actually hurt you, and you can pick up the Scion without hassle.

That is, until the ceiling comes falling down on you. Time for a quick escape.

The way you came in has now opened up and you go rushing back to the pool from the previous level.

Look who it is! Larson has shown up, with some kind of pimped up water pistol. I used to be so in love with Larson when I was 13. In fact, I can still see what all the fuss was about…

After a lot of shooting, Larson will fall down and cue a cutscene. Despite it being fourteen years since this game was released, the PC version’s cutscenes STILL HAVE NO SOUND.

Finish! Goodbye Peru (for now)! See you in TR7!

Lost Valley

Rejoice, dear readers (all none of you)! I thought my plans to complete Lost Valley would be forever thwarted by corrupted save games and Vista’s inability to handle Dos games.
Then Eidos, in all their wisdom, released “Tomb Raider: The Greatest Raids”, a collection of the first four Tomb Raiders made compatible with Vista! I received the collection for my birthday (hey, I can’t afford to buy it myself) and now, can finally continue my jaunt through Peru.

We start, as usual, in a room papered with the blue-grey rock texture. Nothing here suggests that Lost Valley will be the scariest level yet; what could beat the two-bear terror of Vilcabamba?

It’s at times like this I wish they’d put a harpoon gun in Tomb Raider 1. Those wolves are a bugger to kill, and it took three attempts before they finally died.

The title of this level suggests there’s a lost valley to be found somewhere around this cave, and as a child, I was convinced it should be behind this waterfall. I mean, where else would a self-respecting Incan put it?

Oh, yeah, not behind a waterfall. Instead, hidden behind some rocks in a little alcove packed with wolves. This skeleton should be more than enough to signal danger ahead, although at least he’s got a large medi-pack up for grabs. To this day, I cannot walk past a decaying skeleton lying in a tomb without a sense of foreboding.

I thought I was in a safe place to scope out the valley, but I guess I was wrong. This cheeky velociraptor popped out the minute Lara hit the grassy ground.

I include this picture simply because it’s awesome. They look like a horizontal dance duo, or a couple with marital problems lying in bed.

And here’s T-Rex, in his first Tomb Raider appearance. T-Rex turns up in a lot of places across the Tomb Raider series, including China and the South Pacific, but his first sighting was in Peru.

Obviously, getting Lara thrown about by an angry T-Rex is not the way forward in this level, but it does make a nice montage of pictures.

The point of this level is to discover the location of three cogs, which will be slotted into a machine located near your starting point. Despite not having played TR for a good few years, I still remember where all the cogs are. To be honest, I’m looking forward to the later levels, where I don’t remember exactly what to do.

Wasn’t Lara a vision in ‘96? I seriously cannot work out how people lusted after this. She gets prettier in 2 and 3, only to be uglified in 4 and 5. The next-gen games kicked in and…no, actually, she’s still not much of a picture. Too much eye-liner. Still, it’s the unnaturally-jiggly breasts that count, eh?

This is the nicest building in the whole damn level, and reminds me a lot of Tomb Raider III’s India and South Pacific.

And what do you know, inside the building lies another cog! Along with some velociraptors, of course. But they can’t swim. I’ve never noticed this in Tomb Raider before, but Lara seems to be holding her breath underwater. That’s kind of cool.

The final cog lies across the broken bridge hanging over the valley. I noticed how all the cogs are lying on at least one square of the same texture. Like they’re infecting the very ground they stand on.

Here is the cog machine, that must be used to direct the flow of the river below. Again with those complicated security measures.

Firstly, however, I felt compelled to explore this tunnel, which I had no recollection of having ever explored before. I was genuinely excited!

All that was waiting for me at the end of the winding tunnel, however, was a hole in the ceiling and a stone face sticking his tongue out at me for wasting my time. No, there was not even a medi-pack.

Annoyed, I went back to the cog machine and got it up and running. The golden door that lied to the start of that pointless tunnel had moved, directing the flow of water away from the pool of water I encountered earlier. Which meant the pointless tunnel was now flooded!

The stone man was powerless as I swam past him and up through that coveted hole in the ceiling. Round 1 to me, stone.

Shotgun shells and a medi-pack! Having only one medi-pack (because I’d cheated my way from the first level to get here, after I had to uninstall my original Tomb Raider and lost all my save games) I was glad to see it.

On a side-note, look at this guy. What the hell did he die of? I can understand skeletons near the dinosaurs, but by a river?

That waterfall at the start did have something behind it after all! I knew those Vilcabambians wouldn’t let a good waterfall go to waste.

One secret?! I should have explored more, but having played this level through about fifty times, I was pretty bored of it.
Next up: Boulders! Spike-pits! A proper tomb! A living, breathing human being that isn’t Lara!

City of Vilcabamba

As a young girl playing Tomb Raider for the first time, it took me a while to summon up the courage to play this level. I had watched my cousin play it on his PS1, and it just looked a tad too frightening for me to try. I mean, there are two bears in this level.
This time around, I just about managed to steady my nerves to make my way through this small, plant-infested city.
(And I discovered on Wikipedia that Vilcabamba was a real Incan city, and the last to crumble to the invading Spaniards in 1572. Just in case you wanted to know.)



This is the start of the level. Nothing much to say about it, really, except that it’s apparently inherited the colour-scheme of the last level.

 

The whole four-dog-attack that occurs the minute you venture through the big stone doors is one of this things that put me off playing this level as a child. Four dogs…and no ability to flip over mid-jump! Even today, it was a nightmare. I actually had to use a health-pack. Yes. On the second level.

This is another scary moment (and occurs only seconds after the dog-attack). A bear! The most ferocious animal encountered so far, and this time he’s not stuck down a pit.

A secret in the level includes a small pool watched over by four stone snakes. I kept expecting them to turn into real snakes, but they seem content to sit there grinning.

Skulking around Vilcabamba, I stumbled across this rather foreboding corridor. Even in this playthrough, it took a while to summon up the courage to venture down it. I was right to worry, too; a angry wolf catapults itself at you the moment you reach the end.

Some random Incan artefacts scattered around Vilcabamba. I was relieved that the impaled animal skin did not become animate and start chasing me around on its makeshift stick-legs.

Is it any wonder it took me months to pluck up the courage to play this level? The ‘wall of skulls’ motif is quite common in the city and makes you wonder if the Incan’s method of construction wasn’t just a little too macabre.

Strangely enough, it was this moveable block that was my most vivid memory of watching my cousin play the game. I think it was the holes on it with what looked like dried blood underneath. I imagined some poor soul being chained to thing thing, having to push and pull it all day long, for no readily apparent reason.

The second ‘main’ area of Vilcabamba scares up some sorts of temple, with sombre-looking stone guards guarding the steps. As Tomb Raider buildings go, this one isn’t that impressive to be honest.

This trap inside the temple could only have been creepier if there had been blood on the axes and possibly a dead wolf impaled on one end. Something about sharp objects in Tomb Raider has always terrified and depressed me. I suppose the idea of Lara slowly bleeding to death deep in some tomb isn’t really a pleasant image.

Haha, the surprise switch that doesn’t do what it looks like it will do. It still works to this very day, when I was demonstrating it to my fiancé, who said “it obviously opens that door” and “that’s the trouble with this game, it’s too easy” (says the man who can’t complete Tomb Raider Legend). Well, I proved him wrong! He was so angry and ashamed that he continued to iron and watch Dragon’s Den.

Another comment made on the Tomb Raider Anniversary commentary is that the animals look cute, and the bears in particular look like teddies. Well then, there is something inherently creepy about a cute teddy bear with a row of razor-sharp teeth that he keeps bearing. This picture illustrates my point.

I took this picture to illustrate the invisible-key animation that all Tomb Raiders up to TR5 included. However, I uploaded it because it looks like Lara is giving herself an spur-of-the-moment breast examination.

And that’s the end of Vilcabamba. Only managed two secrets this time, but never mind. I’m not trying to unlock a secret level or anything.